Diesel Fadelite smartwatch announced: Made for everyone

Update: September 16, 2020 (3:30 a.m. ET): After a long delay, Diesel is finally making its Fadelite smartwatch available for purchase. There are four color options available – clear, black, blue, and red – but you should really only buy the all-clear model. You can find it on Diesel.com at the link below for $ 275.

Original article: Jan. 6, 2020 (8:42 p.m. ET): The smartwatch market can get a little boring from time to time. Wearable hardware doesn’t evolve as quickly as smartphone hardware, so new smartwatches can feel iterative. That’s why I’m looking forward to Diesel’s new Fadelite Smartwatch.

Look at this thing. All four colors of the Diesel Fadelite offer different levels of transparency both in the housing and in the carriers. The all-clear model (above) is my favorite. It doesn’t even look like a smartwatch that I love. I didn’t seriously want to take this thing off at my demo at CES today.

For those who do not fully rely on the completely transparent look, the Diesel Fadelite is available in three other colors: blue to clear, black to clear and red to clear.

Diesel is trying to make this smartwatch attractive to both men and women, unlike the company’s Axial smartwatch, which was actually only marketed to men. The Fadelite has a 43mm case, so it should look better on people with smaller wrists. I don’t have huge wrists and the fadelite looked fine to me.

Although the Fadelite has the updated Snapdragon Wear 3100 SoC, I’m a little concerned about its internals. It only has 512MB of RAM (half the power of other high-performance Wear OS watches) and only 4GB of onboard storage for music and apps. This is a bummer given the price of the Fadelite and the fact that Fossil and its partner brands have launched other watches with better specifications. We’ll have to wait and see if this small amount of RAM impacts performance.

The Fadelite is not expected to hit the market for a couple of months so there weren’t any fully functional models in my demo – I’ve only seen units in retail mode so I wasn’t able to test its performance.

The Diesel Fadelite has built-in GPS, a heart rate sensor, NFC for Google Pay and a redesigned globe watch face that allows you to display two additional time zones.

Interested? You can purchase the Diesel On Fadelite in diesel stores, diesel.com, and other retailers for $ 275.

I want to hear your thoughts on this translucent watch. Hot or not? Let me know in the comments.