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Misfit's Vapor will run Android Wear instead of its own OS

The $199 watch just became more desirable.

AOL

Android Wear smartwatches are saddled with the problem that the tech companies making them suck at fashion design. So it's good news that one of the better-looking smartwatches out there, the Misfit Vapor, will run Android Wear 2.0 instead of the custom software we saw at CES 2017.

Water resistant to 50 meters, the Vapor (a bold name choice for a tech product) is equipped with a unique round touch bezel in rose gold or black, and has solid tech specs, too. That includes a 1.39-inch AMOLED display, Snapdragon Wear 2100 chip, 4GB of memory, an accelerometer, gyroscope, heart-rate sensor and GPS.

Android Wear 2.0 obviously gives the Vapor a lot more flexibility, letting users pick from a wide range of apps, watch faces and fitness tracking programs. The touch-sensitive bezel has Android Wear 2.0 support, letting you scroll through apps and watchfaces and respond to notifications "without obscuring content on your display," Misfit writes. The company will also include its own custom watchfaces and apps.

Misfit's parent Fossil today unveiled hundreds of hybrid and touchscreen watches, including Android Wear 2.0 models from Diesel, Emporio Armani and Michael Kors. That's good news for fashion-conscious connected watch buyers, and also nice for Google -- the new watch models arriving with the launch of Android Wear 2.0 were underwhelming, style-wise. Thanks to Fossil (and Tag Heuer, if you've got the cash) there are now some options you won't need to hide under your sleeve.

The best part of the Vapor is perhaps the aggressive $199 price. It'll ship some time this summer and work with any smartphones running Android 4.3 or iOS 9 and higher.