Google and watchmaker Fossil group
announced an agreement for the search giant to acquire some of Fossil Smartwatch
technology and members of the research and development division responsible for
creating it. The deal is worth roughly $40 million, and under the current terms
Fossil will transfer a “portion” of its R&D team, the portion directly
responsible for the intellectual property being sold, over to Google.
As a result, Google will now have a
dedicated team with hardware experience working internally on its WearOS
software platform and potentially on new smartwatch designs as well. It’s
unclear what exactly that innovation is, or why exactly Google is so eager to
buy it, although $40 million is a drop in the bucket for Google when it comes
to acquisition costs.
Fossil has been Google’s most
consistent and long-term hardware partner on WearOS, since back when it was
named Android Wear and Google was looking for watchmakers to help it rival
Apple in the wearable space. Fossil has specialized in what are known as hybrid
smartwatches: devices that do some minor smart features like step-tracking and
notifications, but otherwise look and feel like your standard, semi-expensive
wristwatch.
The
company makes smartwatches with touchscreens that resemble other
WearOS devices and the Apple Watch, but its strong suit has always been the
hybrid watch, given Fossil’s design and manufacturing experience in the
traditional accessories market. The issue there, however, is that Fossil, while
making some of the nicest-looking smartwatches, has been slow to
adopt technologies like GPS and heart-rate tracking that have existed on
other wearables for years. So in this case, Fossil may have cracked something
having to do with hybrid watches, but we just don’t know yet.
No comments:
Post a Comment