Garmin fenix 6S Pro, Ultimate Multisport GPS Watch, Smaller-Sized, Features Mapping, Music, Grade-Adjusted Pace Monitoring and Pulse Ox Sensors, Black with Black Band

Product Information

One of the reasoning behind adding a touchscreen to the Fenix 7 was to make it a better watch to use off the run, and it works — it is easier to navigate around the watch, and read Whatsapp messages from your wrist. Garmin has also added an on-watch app store to the Fenix 7, which means you can install Connect IQ apps from the watch, rather than having to sync from your phone. One of our faves on the Fenix, Infocal puts the watch time front and center and moves your glanceable data around the edges. So, with the Fenix integration that’s all supposed to work in the same manner. However, there’s no Surfline cameras anywhere near me (or even remotely near me). The nearest appears to be on the other side of the English channel. But…at least it looks pretty there:

There’s currently surf watches in the market already, so clearly there’s demand there. From Garmin’s perspective it’s relatively trivial to take an existing piece of hardware and add a few extra metrics. Whereas the lift for a new company to create a new smartwatch in 2020 is almost impossibly hard to get enough demand to make it work. GPS accuracy can be looked at in a number of different ways, but I prefer to look at it using a number of devices in real-world scenarios across a vast number of activities. I use 2-6 other devices at once, trying to get a clear picture of how a given set of devices handles conditions on a certain day. Conditions include everything from tree/building cover to weather. When it comes to much older watches, they use GPS chipsets which are far more power hungry. Sometimes that results in better GPS accuracy (though, not as much as people think they do, as I’ve also recently shown). But it mostly just means battery life is really poor. Some of the best Garmin watch faces are the ones that manage to present your stats and data in a really nice, clean manner. Otron definitely fits that bill. One thing I love is having easy access to widgets so you can see tons of data — like race time predictions, training status, heart rate, and more — without ever having to open the Garmin Connect app. Battery life

The goal of the solar here isn’t to fully power the watch, under GPS or otherwise. Instead, it’s to provide incremental battery life (more on my testing on this in a second). Garmin notes this in their super-detailed battery life chart. Note specifically the assumption of 3 hours per day of solar light at a pretty high intensity (full sun basically). That goes both ways though. If you’re mid-summer and spending the day at the beach (or work outside), then you’ll way overachieve here. Versus if it’s mid-winter and you’re indoors…then not so much. This thin strip has 100% photovoltaic levels, meaning, it’s receiving 100% of the sun’s goodness and turning that into solar power. It’s also clearly visible in bright light, though you’d just assume it was a bezel design element. Inside without bright light, this strip almost disappears and blends into the bezel. Rather than a percentage, the display shows the approximate battery left as a number of days — convenient, since it removes some of the guesswork from knowing when you need to charge. Changing your Garmin watch face means you can add specific metrics and widgets to the home screen, just as you would when customizing the data fields for your workouts. These are watch faces made by third-party developers and the in-house Garmin folks, too, with the collection growing all the time.

Also of note above is that I went through the Rijksmuseum, and most of the watches were pretty good at that. It’s probably 100-125m long of no GPS signal under a massive building. The Instinct Solar slightly cut the corner towards the end, but otherwise it was reasonably clean. Finally, there’s the new surfing profile data metrics with Surfline integration. You may have seen the surfing metrics added as part of the more recent Garmin Fenix 6 betas, in fact, they were actually looking for people to beta test it (which, by the looks of it was pretty limited in finding people). Before the COVID-19 pandemic, I used to walk a lot each day as part of my commute. But since I’ve been working from home over the past year and a half, my daily steps have decreased dramatically. By the way, those battery charts are with the DCR Analyzer. We plot battery life for devices that support writing it to the files, including Garmin, Wahoo, and Stages. It’s pretty intuitive, though I did have to do some Googling when I couldn’t figure out how to access certain features and settings.

Smart Features

Then, I got to the beach area. Along the waterfront there are actually tall apartment/hotel buildings that I came relatively close too. But there was no meaningful impact to GPS accuracy on any of the units: Watches in the Garmin Fenix 6 range have received hefty price cuts in recent months (Image credit: Garmin) Design, display and battery life Design If you love a Parkrun (and we're sure a lot of you do), then you need this watch face in your life. As for your treadmill – actually, that’s easily explained. When you ran around your garden, you’re basically telling your Fenix to use that (bad) GPS data to calibrate the accelerometer for running on a treadmill. As such, it’s going to be pretty horrific. According to Garmin, the stress level is calculated based on your heart rate variability in a given day. I was a little skeptical at first, but looking through the data changed my mind. I found that on days that had felt particularly harried, my stress score was higher. And on days that felt pretty low-key, I ended up with a low stress score.