Q Marshal Smart Watch: Rugged, stylish Android smart watch from Fossil

The Q Marshal is a new rugged and stylish touch screen Android smart watch by Fossil that adds a sturdier look to your personality. The Fossil Q Marshal touch screen smart watch comes with three different straps: stainless steel, black silicon, and brown leather. The interface and features of all the three are the same.

Design and Display

The watch has a sturdy look like a ring around the watch that gives a rugged feeling to the watch. The big crown is placed at the right side of the watch which cannot be rotated. It can just be switched on. On the left side, you will find some small grills that consist a speaker. The Fossil Q Marshal unit which we got for review had a black silicon strap. The silicon model is especially for those who want a sporty and rugged look.

The Fossil Q Marshal comes in grey, silver, gold and navy colors. The length of the strap is 22 mm which is easily adjustable. The watch has a 45 mm case and 14 mm thickness, which gives it an aggressive look.

Display

The Q Marshal has 1.5 inch 360 p resolution display, which is not too bad. The brightness level of display is enough to read and operate the watch under the direct sunlight. We noticed in the watch that its dial suffers from a flat tyre. This flat tyre is a place for the sensors it uses.  We didn’t get any difficulty in operating this watch because of this feature, though it would be great if it had a complete circle.

Performance 

Fossil Q Marshal runs on Google’s wearable OS and possesses the same abilities of any smart watch running on Google Android wear. You can pick or drop the incoming calls directly from the watch. The inbuilt speaker is not so efficient and we are not able to get clear audio due to small speakers.  Fossil has given you a selection of its own watch faces as well as a range from Google. You can download different faces from Google play store.

It has Bluetooth as well as Wifi connectivity that allows the watch to connect directly to the internet or to Smartphone via Bluetooth  that links up the smart watch to get all notifications of your Smartphone apps directly on your watch such as Whatsapp, calling, SMS, Facebook etc.

The UI interface is pretty straight forward with different gesture controls. The Fossil Q Marshal packs up with a basic step counter and sleeps counter to feed apps like Google Fit, Jawbone etc. There is an inbuilt Fossil Q app that is just a hub of watch faces which help you to organize the custom watch faces for the Q Marshal and Q Wander. A downside of this watch is that there is no heart rate monitor, but you will get it with water resistant IP67, so you don’t need to take it off when you get in the shower. There is a Fossil Q app on the watch itself, but this is just a hub for your watch faces. There are a number of great custom watch faces for the Marshal and Wander, and the Q app simply provides a way to organize them.

Performance

The few main functions of this watch include personalized dial, music control, voice activated Google, LED flashlight, Google Maps enabled and interchangeable watch band. It runs on a Snapdragon 2100 processor with 4GB flash storage. There were no performance lag or glitches while we were using it. The navigation and apps functioning are faster and smoother. In the pre-installed apps is included the torch app that uses watch's full brightness to use it as the torch.

Fossil claims that the watch can work for 24 hours on one charge which was almost true in our test. We managed to get one and half day on one charge without any performance reduction. Charging Fossil Q Marshal is really easy. It comes with a magnetic charging cable that clings on the rear panel of the watch.  The wireless charging allows you to charge the watch effortlessly by placing it on the inductive charging magnet. No plugging or unplugging of cables is required.