I have been banging on about how Google’s smartwatch platform, Wear OS, needs work for well over a year now — and I’m far from alone. Which is why I am so pleasantly surprised by how much I have enjoyed using the Fossil Carlyle smartwatch. It’s one of two so-called “Gen 5” Wear OS watches Fossil recently began selling for $295.

Pleasantly surprised, but not at all convinced that this watch is worth investing in, to say nothing of this platform. I give Fossil credit for resolving two of my biggest complaints with Wear OS. The first fix involves a relatively simple internal change to give the watch more memory, while the other is unfortunately a very complicated series of battery options.

Android users who want a smartwatch have to choose between several mediocre options. Fossil’s Gen 5 smartwatches don’t really change that equation, but they do make at least one of those options a little better.

Our review of Fossil Carlyle Gen 5 Smartwatch Verge Score 6 out of 10 Good Stuff Sharp looks

Faster performance

Speaker Bad Stuff Complicated battery settings

Hard to see in direct sunlight

Wear OS Buy for $295.00 from Fossil Buy for $295.00 from Amazon

The Fossil Carlyle looks like a typical Wear OS smartwatch, which means that it has a round OLED screen with a fairly large bezel. Although it comes in a small variety of styles, all of them have 44mm cases with three chunky buttons sticking out of the right-hand side of the watch. I’m using the all-black model and I think it looks really smart — but I also wear watches that are about this size quite often. If you have a smaller wrist, this will likely dominate it.

I have no complaints about the 1.3-inch AMOLED screen when I look at it indoors — it’s perfectly round without any chin and responsive when I tap it. Outdoors, however, it can be difficult to see — especially in direct sunlight. Fossil added a “Sunlight boost” option, but I think it takes a second to realize it’s necessary. I spent that second staring at a nearly black screen, wondering if something was busted.

The watch uses 22mm straps that are fairly simple to change out and should give you a wide variety of replacement options. Underneath, there’s a heart rate sensor — it doesn’t do any of the irregular heartbeat detection stuff the Apple Watch does and that Samsung promises is coming to its Tizen watches, nor does it have an EKG function.

I especially like that the contacts for charging the watch are two complete rings — so you don’t have to line up the charger. It’s not as nice as a straight inductive charger like the Apple Watch, but it’s functionally the same thing.

None of the above is especially new or notable for Wear OS watches. What’s different this time — and what probably makes these watches $50 more than the Fossil Sport — are the internal specs. Fossil doubled the usual RAM of Wear OS watches, from 512MB to 1GB.

In theory, Wear OS should operate just fine with the usual memory — that’s what it was supposedly designed for, after all. In practice, double the memory appears to be exactly what Wear OS was missing. What was sluggish before is now responsive. Apps don’t exactly load quickly now, but they load in a reasonable amount of time — fast enough to meet my three-second rule for smartwatch interactions.

This watch also has the newer Snapdragon 3100 processor, which turns out to not be all that much faster, but is supposed to help with battery life. Previous testing on other watches with the 3100 hasn’t really supported those claims, so on the Gen 5 watches Fossil achieves better battery life in a different way: with ridiculous settings.

Tap the battery saver icon in Wear OS on the Gen 5 watches and you are made to read through several screens of information detailing what each different option means. There’s “Daily,” “Extended,” “Custom,” and “Time Only.” Inside the first three of those are a dozen (literally) options you can tweak to extend how long the watch will last.

You can adjust NFC, location, whether it should listen for a wake word, whether the screen will light up when you lift your wrist, whether you want an always-on screen, and so on.

Most users will just pick “Daily” or “Extended” and be done — but the “Extended” mode turns off way too much, while the Daily mode leaves too much on. The result is that everyone will end up constantly trying to toggle those check boxes.

In a sense, this doesn’t matter because the “Daily” mode with nearly everything on still netted me about 20 hours of battery life — at which point it offered to switch to “Extended” and made it most of the way through the next morning. So battery life is passable, but not as good as the last couple of generations of the Apple Watch and (of course) nowhere near what you can get with a hybrid smartwatch.

In reality, though, if you are offering a dozen different toggles to adjust battery life, you’ve definitely blown it. I don’t fully blame Fossil here, either, it is just making the best of a bad situation created by Qualcomm and Google.

Fossil has held up its end of the smartwatch bargain, at least

Fossil has also done a nice job of offering a wide array of watchfaces — which is good because finding the right ones in the Play Store is a trial. The two side buttons that flank the rotating crown can be mapped to whatever you like. By default they go to Fossil’s completely unnecessary watchface repository app, so definitely remap them.

I also was pleased to see a speaker. You can use it in a pinch for a call (so long as it’s connected to your phone), but it’s not a good speaker and you won’t want to listen to music on it. You can get vocal responses to queries you ask the Google Assistant, which is way more convenient than speaking and then staring at your watch and waiting for it to respond.

Wear OS’s user interface has progressed some in the past year. My favorite new feature is called “Tiles,” though that word does nothing to explain what it does. Now, when you swipe left from the watchface, you can swipe through a series of informational screens: weather, Google Fit, or your next calendar appointment. It’s a nice thing, but it’s also seemingly limited to Google’s own features.

These are the watches that Fossil wants you to believe will work well with iPhones — including for making calls. I’m just going to tell you right now that I didn’t really test any of that. If you have an iPhone and want a smartwatch, you should get an Apple Watch.

The Fossil Gen 5 watches can last through a day, look good, and run much better than previous generations. I would have no major qualms about making the Fossil Carlyle my daily watch. However, I do have qualms suggesting that anybody purchase one — not at $295.

It’s a good watch at a bad price

Although Wear OS runs well on this hardware, I do not have a ton of faith it will continue to do so in a year or two. Past experience has tended to show that this software grows to fill up the memory that’s available to it, eventually slowing down.

More importantly, I still think Wear OS is in need of some kind of major revamp, at least from a hardware perspective. The software has progressed nicely to the point that it’s coherent and usable, but the basic shape and battery life of the current watches hasn’t significantly improved in at least two or three years.

If none of that bothers you and you don’t mind spending nearly $300 to get a touchscreen smartwatch that works with your Android phone: godspeed. If all of it does, take a look at Samsung’s Tizen-based Galaxy watches.