EXCLUSIVE: Up Close With Fossil’s New Gen 4 Smartwatches With NFCFossil's new crop of Wear OS smartwatches will come packing mobile payment features, letting shoppers tap to purchase.

[Collection]The next chapter of Fossil’s foray into wearable tech has just been written. And the watchmaker’s latest offering of full-fledged Wear OS smartwatches includes a much-anticipated new feature: Tap-to-pay capability for shoppers. Unlike Fossil’s previous Android Wear devices, its new Generation 4 touch-screen smartwatches — which feature the men’s Fossil Q Explorist HR and the women’s Fossil Q Venture HR — will come packing Near Field Communication capabilities. That entails hardware and software that transmit data when supporting devices come in close proximity of each other. It enables the tapping action in tap-to-pay payments, with users bumping a phone or smartwatch to an NFC-equipped terminal. “What we’re most excited about with this launch is being able to just pack all this tech, pack all this function, into these beautiful designs,” a Fossil technology executive told WWD. “So the designs really fall in line with what we know our consumers love and what they want when and kind of give them something unexpected as it relates to a smartwatch.” With NFC technology supported in the Fossil Q line, so comes support for Google Pay. With that one move, Fossil has joined the mobile payments bandwagon, which is growing in speed and intensity. According to

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