Garmin Instinct Solar video review: More than a month of battery life. What?
The Garmin Instinct Solar is a rugged, outdoors, GPS adventure watch with connected smart features such as message notifications, calendar and music controls. It also boasts up to 50 days of battery life in smartwatch mode with solar charging.
Note: This article was first published on 21 Dec 2020.
How to successfully design a solar-powered "smart" watch
The Garmin Instinct Solar is an update to the original Instinct GPS outdoor adventure watch that was released back in 2018. However, the Instinct Solar isn't just the Instinct with a solar charging panel. It's actually so much more. In order to improve battery life and efficiency. the Instinct Solar features the newer generation Garmin Elevate heart rate monitor, which also features Pulse Ox readings and underwater/swimming heart rate monitoring. It also features a new Sony GPS chipset as well which boasts significantly improved battery performance when using GPS tracking modes.
I've used it for over a month to stress test Garmin's battery-life claims and in that period, I honestly didn't even miss not wearing a "proper" smartwatch. But it doesn't come cheap. Check out my video review below for the rest of my thoughts.
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You can buy the Garmin Instinct Solar from these Garmin official stores: Convergent, Shopee, Lazada as well as all your favourite online tech retailers: KrisShop, Harvey Norman, Gain City, Courts, Hachi.tech, Best
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