Garmin Instinct Solar - Review (Română - With English Subtitles)

Hello, my name is Alex and today we’re going to talk about the new Garmin Instinct Solar In a moment Firstly I want to mention this is not a sponsored review This is my personal watch from my smartwatch collection I bought it for myself because I love how the white and teal combo looks From the surf model The original Instinct was launched in 2018 by Garmin This is it’s child, the Instinct Solar It brings 3 big improvements over the original and a doubling in price which is really subjective to you if it’s worth it. First and foremost, on the exterior you can see from certain angles the solar panel which circles around the same 23x23mm display monochrome with a resolution of 128x128px. So let’s say a pretty small and outdated display for a 2020 smartwatch. As I was saying, besides the solar panel around the display and the special colors for the solar model, there are no major changes. Inside there’s the new Sony positioning chipset for support for GPS, the US system, Galileo, the European system, and Glonass, the Russian system.

01:43 - The other major change is the new Garmin Elevate, the modern sensor for heart rate monitoring and measuring of the blood oxygen levels which has a much improved battery consumption, compared to the original Instinct. These are the 3 major changes you need to know about if you are thinking between the solar and the OG model. They’re purpose is clearly to improve the battery of original model as the Instinct is a watch is a watch geared less towards people trying to track sports but more geared towards people interested in spending time outdoors. That’s the target audience for this device. This is why we are talking about a watch with an increased resistance to damage to scratches, water, as it can be submerged to 10atm pressure, and dust resistance.

02:46 - That’s probably why Garmin chose to build it from a hard plastic, with high resistance, which doesn’t scratch as easily as other metal models or models with casings from the lesser plastic tipe. The display is also better tucked in in the case so it won’t scratch as easy. The idea of an outdoors watch is also based on the way they increased battery life with the new chipsets and the solar panel, in a way that this watch should in theory never need to be charged if you’re using it in watch mode (none smart), with 3 hours of sun exposure every day. Now, If someone wants to pay about 500 euros on a smart watch and use it as a dumb one just to know that they won’t ever need to recharge, is their personal choice but I don’t think this is the best investment someone can make. Especially when there are so many rugged looking dumb watches on the market, for outdoor people.

04:13 - But this is Garmin’s marketing, we’re not here to judge as this is my own personal opinion. From my experience, yes, the battery life is very good. I took it off it’s charger on a Thursday and used it until the next Thursday, meaning 8 days. In these 8 days sadly I didn’t have any outdoor activities with location tracking but I had some indoor workouts with heart rate tracking. Each night I had the SpO2 tracking on, and in these 8 days it used about 80% battery.

04:47 - The remaining 20%, the watch estimated would last me around 3 days. Which is great, 10 days for a smartwatch. Of course, these 10 days would decrease if you’re outdoor and using location tracking, like cycling or running or hiking , but still that’s some great battery usage. The are where it’s lacking from my point of view, is software. Firstly, it doesn’t support Connect IQ, the Garmin platform for apps, watch faces and widgets. I can understand Garmin’s train of taught as they don’t want to burden developers with creating apps which need to support both the large main display, and the secondary smaller one.

05:35 - They probably don’t want to complicate the developers’ life, which develop apps for their platflorm by having to add support for two displays on a single device but I still think it’s a big problem in 2020 to have a smart watch that doesn’t support 3rd party apps. As I previously said, it doesn’t support 3rd party widgets either, or watch faces. The existing watch faces can be configured from the device. It’s not complicated, but they don’t give you an immense number of customization options either. So it’s not likely you’ll have an extra different watch from other Instinct owners as you’re limited by the max number of changes you can make to a watch face. It’s the same thing for widgets.

The watch comes with a collection of built-in widgets. For most people they should be enough. The difference with the Surf model I have here, and the regular Solar, is that the Surf has special apps for Surfing and for Tides. when you live nearby the ocean or the sea. This translates into a 50 euro price increase over the regular Solar. Which I find pretty expensive Basically you’re paying 50 euros for an app and an extra widget. An app which doesn’t require any extra hardware in the Surf edition. So it would be possible to have them on any Solar model, so basically we’re talking about an artificial division of watch functionality to increase the device price. As I said, it has a number of built in apps which should be enough for most people that use the watch for sports tracking. You have apps for running, indoor running, trail running, cycling, indoor cycling, snowboarding, skiing, swimming, kayaking, etc (including surfing on the Surf variant) So you should have enough, with the possibility of creating more by yourself with tracking support, cardio support, etc. But it’s a pretty huge bummer that you can’t download other apps, widgets, datascreens, etc.

08:16 - What’s most annoying for me is the artificial limitations imposed on the watch’s software Ok, I understand the Connect IQ part, that they do this for the devs but I don’t understand the lack of features which were artificially ignored on this watch because the hardware is there, but they just wanted to cripple the device to have it for another niche, but at the same time the price is really high. For instance, Running Dynamics, Vo2Max, Race Predictor, PacePro, features that are available on cheaper watches on the Forerunner family, or on the more expensive watches from the Fenix family, features for which the hardware is there but they aren’t there. Another weird and artificially missing feature is the dumbed down Smart Notification feature, which on the Instinct is just for calls during an activity while on other Garmin watches includes both calls and messages. Again, this nothing hardware related and even if it was, this is mostly the Fenix 6 on the inside, so it shouldn’t be missing. Regarding sports it’s exactly what you’re expecting it’s accurate for outdoor tracking using GPS, Galileo, etc it’s accurate when compared to a treadmill or stair master calorie estimation It’s not super accurate when compared to the treadmill distance this needs to be calibrated after each treadmill run This is to be expected for hand worn devices that don’t connect and sync directly to the treadmill.

10:31 - From my point it’s a nice watch, a beautiful watch and a watch that it’s worth it for people who spend a lot of time outdoors either for their job or for being active. People that aren’t near electricity for a long time and they need a long battery life where solar comes in to help them. For people that do a lot of sports like running and cycling it’s not worth it because you can find cheaper and better options like the Fenix 5 or even the higher end Forerunners. It’s a beautiful watch which Garmin overprices for it’s offering. I think I would rate it a ³⁄₅. I understand that Solar comes with a price, but they wanted to also keep the old instinct at the same 200 euro price point and at the same time introduce this one as a higher end model.

11:41 - Which doesn’t seem fair because this isn’t twice as better as the original Instinct. This one does the same things a little better while focusing more on battery life. But that’s it. The fact that they doubled the price and market it as an outdoor watch and a lite Fenix model, a younger sibling of the Fenix but at a price point near the Fenix 6 and above the Fenix 5, doesn’t seem really fair. Especially considering the artificial crippling of the software and the display, which I understand it’s used with battery life in mind, but even so, for 2020 is really underwhelming when you consider that you have low resolution color displays or e-ink color displays a watch having a better display would have fit better in this price range. In my opinion, the Instinct Solar is a watch with a lot of potential, and hopefully in the next year, as it’s at the beginning of it’s life Garmin will add more features and erase some of those artificial software differences between it and it’s siblings.

13:05 - Maybe even have a price decrease where it would make it a best buy in it’s category. If you liked this video, please like and subscribe, it helps me a lot. If you agree or disagree with what I said here today, let me know in the comment section below and also remember to tell me what you liked or didn’t like. Thank you and see you outside! .