Fossil Q Control
Fossil moves with the times to include a heart-rate monitor, but it lacks other essential fitness features
“This is a great-looking smartwatch and – no, that’s where the praise ends. This sports-focused watch is of little use to the sporty”
LEFT Compared to its rivals, this is a bulky and uncomfortable sports watch
SCORE ★★☆☆☆ PRICE £233 (£279 inc VAT) from fossil.com
The Q Control is Fossil’s first watch to include a heart-rate monitor, which is enough for the company to label this Android Wear device a Sport Smartwatch on its website. And it looks a winner. Its chunky steel metal casing exudes style and sophistication, just as you’d expect from a brand associated with fashion accessories.
Once on my wrist, however, I was less enthusiastic: it feels both weighty and uncomfortable. More worryingly, every time I checked the watch on a brisk bike ride across London, I was surprised to see my pulse at around 90bpm; the Garmin Vivosport on my other wrist showed much more believable figures of around 110bpm. At the end of the workout, I was even more astonished to see the watch claim my heart rate peaked at 200bpm. Really?
Checking your resting heart rate is also a chore compared to rivals, because there’s no dedicated heartrate widget – in fact, in Android Wear there are no widgets at all. Instead, each time you want to check your heart-rate stats, you need to scroll down to open the Google Fit app.
The watch also lacks a barometric altimeter, so you won’t know how many steps you climb throughout the day. NFC? Nope. And then we come to the weirdest omission: no GPS chip. One of the main perks of a fitnessorientated watch is that you can accurately track runs and bike rides without needing to bring your phone.
A forgivable omission, perhaps, if battery life had been amazing, but instead the Q Control can only last a waking day. Fossil claims the watch uses wireless charging, but in reality what you get is a small four-pin magnetic charging pad that you perch the watch on top of. Not having to connect a cable might sound like a perk, but it isn’t. I thought I’d left the device charging on three different occasions, only to come back and find its battery empty. One thing the Q Control does have going for it is Android Wear. Agenda, Contacts, Fit, Keep Reminders and Weather are useful preinstalled apps that help you keep on top of daily tasks without having to always reach for your phone. The Android Wear Play Store is also much better stocked with third-party apps than Samsung’s Galaxy Apps store, so you can install Telegram, Messenger, Strava and Runtastic among many others. That’s not to say that Android Wear is flawless. The music controls worked well when playing Spotify from my phone, and I could even start browsing my library with the right combination of taps and swipes, but whenever I tried opening it from the app drawer the Spotify app wouldn’t play ball. The Q Control’s 4GB of built-in storage will let you store music offline, but only from Google Play Music.
Google Assistant is an undoubted boon. Long-press the watch’s button and you can use the virtual assistant to send a text or WhatsApp message, get directions with Google Maps, or check your agenda. You can even start tracking your run, or check your step count and heart rate with simple voice commands. You can also set specific fitness goals in Google Fit.
Another thing in this watch’s favour is that it’s waterproof to 5ATM – approximately 50m – which, along with its switchable 20mm silicone strap, means you can wear it in the pool. There’s no swimming mode in the Fit app, but you can keep track of your pool workouts with the thirdparty app MySwimPro.
When you want to log a workout manually, you just open the aptly named Fit Workout, which lets you choose from an enormous list of activities, from cycling and running to strength training and downhill skiing.
To control the smartwatch, there’s a vibrant 1.4in colour OLED touchscreen and a button on the right side, which lets you hop between the app drawer and the homescreen. The screen’s 450 x 450-pixel resolution looks good, but an air gap between the front glass panel and the display means it falls short of greatness.
Another method of navigation comes via the watch’s “virtual touch bezel”, which lets you scroll through apps, notifications or emails without swiping up and down on the touchscreen. In practice, I rarely used it, not least because my hand sometimes obscured the screen. Garmin solved this with the Vivoactive 3 by placing a touch panel on the side of the casing.
The Q Control is a great-looking watch and - no, that’s where the praise ends. It lacks GPS and an altimeter, while its heart-rate sensor is highly inaccurate. In other words, this sports-focused smartwatch is of little use to the sporty. Android Wear offers plenty of great smart features and a strong range of third-party apps, but to compete with sports smartwatches in 2018, the Fossil Q Control needs some serious upgrades. SPECIFICATIONS 1.4in 450 x 450 AMOLED display quad-core 1.1GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon Wear 2100 processor 4GB memory 768MB RAM Bluetooth 4.1 optical heart rate sensor ambient light sensor IP67 (water resistant to 5ATM) Android Wear 2 45 x 14 x 45mm (WDH) 40g 2yr RTB warranty