[UPDATE: I sent it back. It had a problem. It froze twice in the first four days of owing it. Apparently this is a known issue. I imagine Garmin’ll fix it, but I didn’t want to own one while waiting for the fix.]
Despite what I said here, I bought a new watch!
And it wasn’t one of the watches I thought I’d get.
Why the Garmin Instinct Solar?
- It’s got good batter life
- It’s light and small
- It looks cool! (Eye of the beholder and all that!)
- I don’t need the metrics it hasn’t got (VO2 max, running dynamics and training effect)
- It’s got swimming heart rate
- It’s got an easy to read screen (no dark, sapphire glass a lot of high-end watched have)
An upgrade?
As I’m coming from a Forerunner 935, I thought this change might not feel like an upgrade as I’d be losing some of the metrics I had with the 935.
Granted, I never used those metrics and found some of them plain annoying. For instance, the recovery advisor and training load function. But in theory, the Instinct is a lower-spec watch.
But it does feel like an upgrade. Many of the standard functions have improved from the older 935 to the newer Instinct Solar, and there are new functions I like, e.g. the power manager. Even the body battery seems half useful, much more so at least than just sleep data.
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