Fossil Q Commuter
Subtle and stylish, but lacking killer smarts
The hands tell more than the time; each of the 12 hours can represent a type of notification
From £159 FROM Fossil, fossil.com features Activity tracking, notifications, target setting, water resistance to 50m
The Commuter Q is a hybrid smartwatch: it has traditional, physical hands on a regular watch face, while a second dial displays the percentage of your daily step goal
completed so far. Vibrations alert you to incoming calls, messages and more, and there are three buttons for controlling various aspects of your iPhone.
Once you’ve entered your height and weight into the app, each day of activity is split into intense, moderate and light exercise, and the app calculates how many calories you’ve burned and how many miles you’ve walked each day, plus your exact step count. Unfortunately, the data is not tracked against time. The Q Commuter doesn’t log cycling, swimming or any other kind of exercise. It also doesn’t have a heart rate monitor.
We found sleep monitoring was pretty vague. You set a target number of hours and the app tells you how much of this you achieve. Sleep tracking is split into ‘light sleep’, ‘restful sleep’ and ‘awake’. The app says how many hours of each you achieved, but again the data is not plotted against time.
Three buttons on the right of the case let you control your iPhone directly from the watch. Each button can be configured to perform one of 12 actions. These include showing the date by pointing at it with the hour and minute hands, playing or pausing music on your phone, and taking a photo.
The hands tell more than the time. Each of the 12 hours can be configured via the app to represent a type of notification. Calls and texts from everyone, or from specific contacts, can be assigned and so too can notifications from any app you have on your phone. Yet for each app the Q Communicator can only offer alerts for all or nothing – in practice, that means you get a vibration for every single notification from an app, or nothing at all.
Time will tell
The second dial performs a few different functions: Time 2, Alarm, Date and Alert. Once configured through the app, a press of one of the Q Commuter’s three buttons will see the small dial swing to one of these functions; for Time 2, the main dial will point to a second time zone for several seconds. Alarm briefly displays the time you’ve set for the watch’s vibrating alarm, while Date sees both hands point to the date.
The second dial’s hand points at Alert when you have a notification. We found that we sometimes missed notifications, despite setting the vibration strength to the highest available, or we simply didn’t get a chance to see which number the hands were pointing to before they returned to the time.
We also found that assigning too many apps made it tricky to remember what was what – is three o’clock a Facebook message or a Twitter notification? Or is it an email?
If you don’t mind the lack of activity-tracking functions and you want a goodlooking and affordable timepiece with a few smart tricks up its sleeve, the Fossil Q Commuter is a great choice. Just be sure you are aware of its limitations before buying it.