When you look at the fitness tracker or smartwatch market, you’ll mostly find a gadget that looks like a standard watch, but with a single colour screen taking up all of the front space. There aren’t many that appear and feel like a digital watch but have all the functionality of a smartwatch. That is the small market share that the Garmin Instinct Solar has carved out for itself.
The Instinct Solar’s body is bulky, with design characteristics reminiscent of the true digital watches we used to time our runs back in the 1990s. It adopts a similar approach to Casio’s G-Shock Move, but because it’s a Garmin, it benefits from the company’s experience in fitness monitoring and data – which is currently miles ahead of Casio’s offering. Garmin has created a watch that is dependable, resilient, and long-lasting – and one that will track your workouts, hiking sessions, runs, and bike rides just like any other. If you like, you can even track your sleep.
Garmin Instinct Solar review: Design
The Instinct Solar has a tactical, monochromatic appearance that many of our reviewers prefer since it is simple. While some think the style is attractive, we weren’t very impressed with the overall design. The screen is smaller than most, and the buttons are easy to press while use. It only comes in one size and weighs 1.9 oz.
Power glass, which also serves as the photovoltaic panel, is used to make the screen. It has the feel of plastic and, while resistant to scratches, can be destroyed. This causes us all want to wear a screen protector, but doing so will have a detrimental impact on solar charging. The raised bezel provides some protection, and the polymer from which it is made is rather durable and tough.
Garmin Instinct Solar review: Controls
The Garmin Instinct Solar is controlled through buttons. In this regard, it differs from the majority of smartwatches on the market today. They are all equipped with touchscreens. With the Instinct, we never make touchscreen mistakes or have the annoyance of things not working because of damp fingers.
Garmin’s buttons are fantastic. They are large enough to accommodate cold hands and fingers. It’s also not an issue to use medium-thick ‘tactical’ gloves. Winter gloves are not usually compatible with buttons. The buttons have an excellent structure that keeps them from sliding off.
Garmin Instinct Solar review: Fitness Tracking
The Garmin Instinct Solar is more than just an Instinct with a Power Glass; it also has various enhancements on the interior of the case. These include a SpO2 sensor to measure variations in your blood oxygen saturation over night, as well as programmable battery-saving settings that let you to prioritise the features you use the most.
The current solar intensity level is presented as a little graph on the main face of the watch, and it’s impressive to see the battery indicator scarcely move for more than a week. The fact that battery life is indicated in days rather than percentages says a lot.
Garmin Instinct Solar review: Interface
The interface is also fairly similar to that of certain other Garmin devices. By pressing and holding the centre button on the right, you may access the settings and customise the watchface and other characteristics, such as which information you want displayed in the tiny complication window.
Garmin Instinct Solar review: Features
The Instinct Solar includes numerous functions that are similar to those of a mid-level GPS watch, but without all of the bells and whistles. It can track fitness, provide a GPS track, and collect any data you wish. It has fantastic profile options, such as tactical and navigation, but no preloaded layered maps. In contrast to most other Garmin products, you cannot create extra activity profiles or upload layered maps. This watch is designed for simplicity and increased battery life.
The Instinct works well with the Google Connect app to provide you with all of your activity statistics. It supports modularization and has multiple activity profiles that can be employed or switched off. You also gain access to the extensive Garmin ecosystem. Create courses using it with the Garmin Explore app.
Garmin Instinct Solar review: Setup
The Garmin Instinct Solar is simple to set up, but even if you live in a sun-drenched paradise, you’ll need to charge it for the first time with the included connection. The Instinct Solar, like most recent Garmin fitness trackers, charges using a short USB connection that connects into the back of the device. We prefer it to the older-style clips (which Fitbit still uses) since it holds more firmly and is less prone to become dislodged during charging.
Install the Garmin Connect app (available for Android and iOS and log in with your Garmin account or create a new one once it’s charged. Making a new account takes some time because you’ll need to provide some basic physiological data (height, weight, age, exercise levels, and so on), but it’s an investment worth making. This account will serve as a one-stop shop for all of your fitness statistics, displaying data from all of your Garmin devices in a single dashboard. Sign in to the Garmin Connect desktop website as well, and explore; this is where you’ll manage more advanced tools like route creation.
Garmin Instinct Solar review: Battery Life
In smartwatch mode, the battery on this watch appears to last forever, and we’ve been really impressed with its performance thus far. It catches light and adds battery life by embedding a photovoltaic panel into the Power glass of the watch face. It works fantastically in smartwatch mode (we only had to charge it once in three months, and that was after we had run the GPS all the way down), making it a wonderful alternative for use on an expedition where GPS isn’t required to be running the entire time. This device receives high points not for its battery life in GPS mode, but for its performance in smartwatch mode, which has numerous battery-saving and recharging options. In our experiments, battery charging (without solar) took roughly 140 minutes.
Garmin promises up to 24 days in smartwatch mode and 54 days of sun exposure. This is really longer if the watch is constantly exposed to sunlight, as it can recharge itself. During our tests, we never felt the need to charge the watch unless it had been left in the dark for more than a month. We think this watch is a wonderful alternative for hiking and long excursions where you might use the GPS occasionally.
Garmin Instinct Solar review: Price and Availability
The Garmin Instinct Solar will be available in July 2020 for $399.99/£340/AU$549. Later in the year, many special editions were produced, including the Tactical Edition, Surf Edition, and Camo Edition, all of which cost $449.99 / £399 / AU$799. On the Garmin store, the item now costs $319.99 / £239.99 / AU$399.99
Conclusion
The Garmin Instinct Solar is notable for its seemingly limitless battery life, thanks to solar panels that charge while you’re on the move. It offers all of the fundamental GPS watch capabilities, as well as connection into the Garmin ecosystem. We received roughly 29 hours of battery life while running in GPS mode, and we didn’t need to charge it for three months while it was routinely exposed to sunlight.