Garmin Forerunner 165 In-Depth Review: Best Budget Running GPS?

Garmin’s newly announced Forerunner 165 marks two notable occasions. First and most importantly, a revamp of Garmin’s budget running offerings. And second, likely the end of MIP-based displays for Garmin’s Forerunner series. The new AMOLED-based Forerunner 165 is now the lowest-priced Garmin Forerunner watch with an AMOLED display, and even lower than the Garmin Vivoactive 5 launched this past spring.

When asked by Garmin whether this marks the end of MIP-based displays on a Garmin Forerunner watch, Garmin didn’t fully commit to that, but the writing is on the wall. The only watch ‘left’ in the Forerunner landscape is the $200 Forerunner 55, and I don’t see any scenario where Garmin launches a Forerunner 65 that’s MIP-based, when all their Fitbit/etc competitors in that price range have long since transitioned to AMOLED.

In any case, this new little unit essentially takes most of the most popular features of the more expensive Forerunner 265, and brings it to a lower price point, along with that AMOLED display. Of course, which exact features they bring lower, and which ones they held back I dive into below – as well as all the other new features from the Vivoactive 5 and Venu 3 that are rolled into this as well.

As usual, this watch is a media loaner, and it’ll go back to Garmin shortly. After which, I’ll go out and get my own for any future testing needs. If you found this review useful, you can use the links at the bottom, or consider becoming a DCR Supporter which makes the site ad-free, while also getting access to a mostly weekly video series behind the scenes of the DCR Cave. And of course, it makes you awesome.

With that, let’s get into it.

The Key Specs:

Usually, I’d have a ‘What’s New’ type section here, but in this case, it’s kinda hard to compare it to something existing, since the last time Garmin had a Forerunner 1xx series unit, it was 14 years ago, with the Forerunner 110. Since then, they transitioned to having a budget series line (e.g. Forerunner 55) and then above it, a medium-priced line (e.g. Forerunner 255/265), plus of course their higher-end line (Forerunner 955/965).

Here are the key hardware specs:

– AMOLED 1.2” touchscreen display (resolution 390×390 pixels)
– Glass display, plastic case
– Multi-GNSS (but not multiband) GPS
– Barometric altimeter
– Garmin ELEVATE V4 optical HR sensor
– Weight: 39g
– 20mm wrist strap (industry standard ones)
– Garmin Pay contactless payments (all editions)
– Offline music for Spotify/Deezer/Amazon Music/MP3 (music edition only)
– Pricing $249 for non-music, $299 with offline music

Looking at the battery side, here’s the battery chart for the Forerunner 165:

Smartwatch mode: Up to 11 days (4 days display always-on)
Battery Saver Smartwatch mode: Up to 20 days

GPS-Only GNSS mode: Up to 19 hours
All-Systems GNSS mode: Up to 17 hours

GPS-Only GNSS mode with music: Up to 7 hours
All-Systems GNSS mode with music: Up to 6.5 hours

When it comes to comparing against something like the $449 Forerunner 265, the key differences are:

1) The Forerunner 265 series has multiple watch sizes and display sizes
2) The Forerunner 265 has Training Readiness (the 165 doesn’t)
3) The Forerunner 265 has Training Status and Training Load features (the FR165 doesn’t)
4) The Forerunner 265 has multisport/triathlon support
5) The Forerunner 265 has power meter sensors, and smart trainer support (and other sensor types)
6) The Forerunner 265 has more sport profiles, including skiing/snowboarding related ones
7) The Forerunner 265 has multiband/dual-frequnecy GPS (the FR165 doesn’t)
8) The Forerunner 265 is $449 versus $249 for the Forerunner 265

Again, there are more differences than that, but those are really the big-ticket ones. There are of course differences in battery life, but those differences exist even within the Forerunner 265 vs 265S. But I’ll dive into more differences in an upcoming post and video, as always, there’s more than meets the eye.

The Basics:

In this section I’m going to dive into all the hardware basics, daily activity tracking (including sleep), and general usage bits like morning report, and battery life. The sports components are in a section a bit lower down, along with accuracy.

To begin, the FR165 includes a 1.2” AMOLED touchscreen display. The $249 base edition marks the lowest price point Forerunner we’ve seen with an AMOLED display, and the FR165 Music edition at $299 is priced the same as the new Garmin Vivoactive 5 (which also includes music). There is only one size of the FR165, rather than a regular/small size.

The Forerunner 165 has 5 buttons, like most Garmin sports watches. The three buttons on the left side are mostly used for navigating menus. There are two more buttons on the right side, which are mainly used for confirmation and back/escape (plus starting/stopping). You can also long-hold any of these buttons for further functions, including the ability to assign quick-access buttons.

Of course, you can always use the touchscreen as well. The Forerunner 165 maintains Garmin’s general sports-focused watch mantra around touchscreen of “Use it if you want, don’t if you don’t”. Meaning, every single function on the Forerunner 165 can be completed via buttons instead of the touchscreen. You can literally disable the touchscreen if you want – with no impact to features. Inversely, if you’re all about touch, you can do almost everything via touch (except starting/stopping a workout and hitting the lap button). By default, touch is disabled once in a sport mode, but that too can be modified.

By default, the Forerunner 165’s display is placed in so-called ‘gesture mode’. This means that the display is only turned on when you raise your wrist. In this mode, you get 11 days of smartwatch battery life. Whereas in ‘Always-on’ display mode, the display simply dims when your wrist is down, and then brightens as you raise or tilt your wrist towards you. In this mode Garmin claims 4 days of battery life, and that matches my testing where I was getting that 4 days including 1-2hrs of GPS workout time each day.

During sleep, there’s actually a lower brightness mode the watch goes into, as well as a dedicated sleep mode that ensures it doesn’t randomly blind you in the middle of the night as you move around. This mode is arguably the best executed of any of the AMOLED watches out there, with Apple a very close second.

Inversely in bright light conditions, such as outside on bright sun, the display is more than bright enough. Over the last few weeks I’ve used the watch both in direct Florida sun, as well as on a bright sunny day in the Alps at altitude surrounded by snow reflecting the light – all without any issue.

The nice part about AMOLED displays it the brightness can be used for other things, like the flashlight. There’s a flashlight mode which has three white-light settings, and one red-light setting. You can access it from the controls menu, though, at night it’d be much more handy to allow a double-tap like you can on other Garmin watches (to activate).

Point being, if you last used an AMOLED or LCD display more than 2 years ago, things have changed a ton in both the industry and Garmin watches. There’s a good reason why Garmin is effectively changing all models over to it: Because consumer’s wallets and eyes prefer it, and simply buy more of those models than their older MIP-based display counterparts.

In any case, next up, we’ve got the watch face. As with all Garmin watches, this is fully customizable – in two rough categories. First is a bunch of stock watch faces on the unit that you can choose from, and then individually customize each component (e.g., data fields/complications, coloring, styling, etc…). And then the second way is via Garmin’s Connect IQ app store, which includes boatloads of watch faces. You can also create your own watch face with pictures/photos if you want to.

Here’s the Garmin Connect IQ app store, which has a variety of watch faces you can choose from. Typically speaking, on launch day, the number of watch faces that are marked as compatible with the new watch is low, and then over the coming days and weeks it balloons, and developers mark their watch face as compatible/compliant. You can also create your own watch faces using photos from your phone album.

Below that you’ve got the widget glances area. Widget glances are tidbits of information from a slate of different categories, like steps or sleep or performance metrics. You can customize the widgets shown, both from Garmin and non-Garmin sources, as well as the order they’re in. As a minor note, while some of Garmin’s higher-end watches allow you to create folders, the Forerunner 165 doesn’t allow widget folder creation. But then again, there are far more widgets on a higher-end Forerunner 965.

You can then select a widget glance to open it up for more detailed information about that particular topic. For example, in steps, you’ll see steps over today’s time period, as well as steps over other time periods.

All of this data, be it steps or otherwise, is then concurrently synced to Garmin Connect (via Bluetooth to your phone, USB to your computer, or WiFi if you’ve got the Music edition). This is where you can dive into the data more deeply, depending on what you’re looking for. Some will say that the Garmin Connect app can be a bit overwhelming with all the data. However, Garmin has been recently overhauling their Connect smartphone app in beta, to try and address that concern. Thus far, I think they’re on the right track, though, it’s not yet available to everyone.

There are piles and piles of data, for pretty much every metric or feature you can imagine, with numerous ways to display that data.

Many of these metrics are derived from data captured by the optical heart rate sensor located on the back of the watch. This optical HR sensor is powered on 24×7, constantly logging data well beyond just your heart rate. This includes things like calculating breathing rate, HRV, or even blood oxygenation levels (if enabled). The Forerunner 165 uses Garmin’s Elevate V4 sensor (same as on the Fenix 7/Epix/FR955/FR965/FR255/Venu 2 series). The green light is for regular heart rate recordings, while the red light is for blood oxygenation levels (Garmin calls this Pulse Ox). Note that this isn’t Garmin’s newer Elevate V5 sensor, which contains ECG. Thus, if you’re looking for ECG, you’ll want to look elsewhere.

One of the metrics-driven by that sensor is sleep data, including HRV data. Starting on the sleep side, the Forerunner 165 will automatically track your sleep metrics each night. This includes the time you fell asleep and woke up, as well as sleep stages (e.g. Deep/REM/Light/Awake times), and your sleep score. That Sleep Score aims to consolidate all that data into a simplified score for your night’s sleep. I generally find it reasonably close to how I felt that night of sleep went.

In testing the Forerunner 165 over the last few weeks, I haven’t had any issues with the core sleep time data shown on the unit. Meaning, the time I fell asleep or woke up. However, I don’t typically dive into the accuracy of the sleep stage/phase data. That’s partially because of the reality that most wearables suck at sleep phases. But more importantly, the fact that there isn’t even a reliable way to validate this data. If I look at the viable home options to compare sleep stages/phases in terms of accuracy, those devices aren’t that accurate by themselves (only about 80% accurate). We’d never accept comparing other features like optical HR accuracy to an “80% accurate chest strap”, so I won’t accept doing so here.

However, one area that’s much more concrete is HRV tracking, which is measured throughout the night. Garmin takes constant readings, and then displays them in 5-minute increments within the HRV timeline graph shown. That chart also shows your max values for the night. It’s 100% normal that there’s this much fluctuation in it, as your values are often tied to different sleep phases.

However, this is just the first snippet – and is the nightly HRV values. These are interesting, but not as useful as plotting it over time. So that’s where Garmin’s HRV Status feature comes in. This requires 19 nights of data before it starts tracking, as it’ll establish your baseline. That baseline is unique to you, and will shift slowly over time on a 90-day rolling window. The general gist is that if you’re within your green zone, it’ll show ‘Balanced’, but then you can become unbalanced over time (either high or low).

But keep in mind that a single ‘bad night of data (such as after heavy drinking), won’t immediately impact your HRV Status. It’s not supposed to. Neither should a heavy training weekend. Instead, you’ll see the dip reflected on your trending charts. But sick for a week with a low HRV value? That’ll probably do the trick. But again, that’s kinda the point. As for the accuracy of the underlying data, back in my Forerunner 955 review, I compared the HRV data to a Polar H10 chest strap, and found it very similar. The Forerunner 165 uses the same exact sensor/algorithms/etc as the Forerunner 955.

Now, one of the things you’ll see each morning when you wake up is the Morning Report. This has quickly become one of the most favorite Garmin features of many, and is a simplified report that shows a small pile of data related to last night and the day ahead.  It includes HRV Status, Sleep, planned/suggested workouts, the weather, and more. You can customize this with which data you want, or disable it entirely. Here’s how it first looks:

And then here’s a couple of the screens after that:

It’ll also do things like wish you a happy birthday, good luck for a planned race, and a number of other things throughout the year. In fact, notably, if you do have a planned race, it’ll even wish you good luck that morning.

Lastly, on the sleep-related front, if you didn’t get enough sleep during the night, the Forerunner 165 will track naps during the day. You’ve got two options here: The first is to simply fall asleep and let automatic detection track it, and the second is to manually start the nap – which includes the ability set a nap timer. Either way, once you wake up, you’ll get a summary of your nap, and what Garmin thought of it:

Additionally, you’ll see this listed under the Body Battery ‘Factors’ screen, which shows how it either increased or decreased the Body Battery score (likely increased it).

Note that I’ve had really good luck with the nap tracking when I laid down in a bed/couh, or, when I manually started it. It nails it to the minute. But, if I was seated upright, such as falling asleep in a chair, it rarely would track it correctly (if at all). This is true of the Forerunner 165, as well as other Garmin watches over the last 4-6 months. So…umm…just get comfy instead?

Note that Garmin did not include the Sleep Coach feature at launch in the Forerunner 165, however, the company says that’s coming in a future firmware update. They didn’t define a specific timeframe, however.

Finally, rounding home, the Garmin Forerunner 165 uses the standard Garmin charging port, seen on the back of the unit. From a charging time, it’s about 1-hour from empty to full. As noted above, I’ve found the smartwatch battery lifetime pretty much on-point with what Garmin claims, which is always nice to see. Generally speaking Garmin’s done a good job in the last few years at meeting their battery life claims on devices in real-world usage.

Sports Usage:

Unquestionably, the main reason you’d likely buy a Garmin watch is for the sports features – and the Forerunner 165 seems to generally do a good job at straddling that line of the majority of sports profiles that people want, albeit, still lacking in some sport profiles that are found on other similar-priced Garmin watches.

To start a sport/workout, you’ll tap the upper right button, which opens up the list of sports profiles. You can add ones to your favorites (which will show up at the top of the list), as well as change the ordering.

Here’s all the sport profiles/modes that are currently listed on the Forerunner 165:

Run, Track Run,Treadmill, Virtual Run, Indoor Track, Trail Run, Ultra Run, Hike, Walk, Walk Indoor, Bike, Bike Indoor, Pool Swim, Open Water Swim, Cardio, Tennis, Pickleball, Padel, Strength, Yoga, Pilates, Breahwork, HIIT, Floor Climb, Elliptical, Stair Stepper

The most notable omission here is the lack of multisport/triathlon mode, which Garmin saves for their higher-end units. Likewise, there’s no skiing or snowboarding modes here, despite it having an altimeter.

It’s a bit hard to understand Garmin’s sport differentiation here though. The like-priced new Vivoactive 5 has the skiing modes, but the FR165 (a more sport-focused unit), doesn’t. Further, the Instinct 2 series (also $299) has the multisport/triathlon modes as well as power meter sensor support. Certainly, I understand the Forerunner 165 has a nicer display than the Instinct 2, but at some point, Garmin’s has to decide internally which sports modes are offered at which price points and stick with it.

Speaking of which, from a sensor standpoint the Forerunner 165 doesn’t support cycling power sensors or smart trainers, but, it does support other Bluetooth & ANT+ sensors, including the following (both ANT+ & Bluetooth types, when applicable):

External heart rate, Foot pod, Bluetooth Headphones, Cycling Lights, Cycling Radar, Speed/Cadence sensors, Tempe sensor

Now, back on the sport selection side, once you’ve selected a sport profile, you can tweak the settings in it, most notably data pages. It’s here you’ll see more customization of features like data pages than you would on a Vivoactive 5 or Venu 3 series device. Here with the FR165 you seem to get mostly unlimited data pages, with up to four pieces of custom information per data page. This includes data types like running power and running dynamics, and plenty more data fields.

Likewise, you can also configure alerts for Heart Rate, Run/Walk, Pace, Time, Distance, Running Power, Calorie, Elevation, Proximity, and cadence. For example if you wanted an alert above/below a given heart rate threshold, or after a given distance. The same goes for laps, which an be setup by distance.

Now in the case of Running, you’ll get daily suggested workouts, which are workouts that are automatically generated based on either a training/race goal (e.g. putting the marathon on your calendar), or, if you don’t have that, it’ll just generate workouts to have you perpetually improve. That said, if you look into the upcoming week’s worth of workouts, you’ll see it’s got a balanced diet of everything from base runs to interval runs to long runs. You can even select which days you want your long run on.

You can of course dismiss this, and then go ahead and start your run, which will show the data pages you’ve configured. You can tap the buttons to iterate through them, or, if you enable touch for that sport profile, then you can swipe between them.

In addition to the automated structured workouts, you can download structured workouts to it, such as those you create from Garmin Connect (or, load a training plan from Garmin Connect). Further, if you’ve got structured workouts from a coach on sites like TrainingPeaks, those will also push into the watch too. And you can also create interval workouts on the watch directly.

Also, so I can briefly mention it, the Forerunner 165 supports breadcrumb-style courses. There are no maps on the unit itself, but you can create routes on Garmin and other sites to push to the wash, and then you’ll see a little line to follow, and a warning when you’re off-course. You can also follow past workouts (such as a route you did previously).

Now, once your workout is completed, you’ll see all your stats on the watch first, which mirrors the structure of the higher-end Forerunner units. However, you won’t quite get all the training and recovery data (for example no training load, no training status, etc…).

You will though see your Recovery Time, as well as Training Effect. The Recovery Time is theoretically till your next ‘hard workout’, though, I seem to be getting oddly high recovery times lately on the Forerunner 165 that I haven’t seen otherwise in other Garmin watches. I haven’t quite figured out why yet.

Additionally, it’ll estimate your VO2Max from your runs, as well as predict your estimated finishing times for 5K/10K/Half Marathon and Marathon times. As usual, the longer you run with the watch and the more varied the workouts you have in your recent past (including tempo runs and long runs), will increase the accuracy of this.

Also, a couple of other quick sports notes. You can broadcast your heart rate over ANT+ & Bluetooth Smart. This is useful if you want to show your heart rate on other apps/devices, like a Peloton Bike, or the Strava app, or your Garmin bike computer. This can be enabled on a per sport-profile basis, or simply turn it on manually without a sport recording.

Additionally, as noted above, the unit supports Garmin’s Race Calendar and related widgets. Thus, if you put a race on your calendar as noted above (it has a huge database of them, or you can create your own), then it’ll show a countdown to the race on your watch, and show historical weather for that date/time/place, followed by exact weather as you get close to the event.

Finally, after your workout has synced, you’ll see far more data up on Garmin Connect (website or smartphone app), which syncs onwards to platforms like Strava and others (if you’ve configured them). Here’s a couple of screenshots from the Garmin Connect Mobile app:

So, with all the sport pieces completed, let’s take a look at how accurate that data is – both from a GPS standpoint and heart rate sensor perspective.

GPS & Heart Rate Accuracy Testing:

In this section we’ll evaluate the accuracy of both the GPS/GNSS tracks, as well as the optical heart rate sensor. Of course, this optical heart rate sensor (Garmin ELEVATE V4) on the Forerunner 165 has been around the block a number of years, so it’s pretty well understood (both good and bad). But equally, each watch can be different in terms of how it’s implemented. Meanwhile, the GNSS/GPS isn’t unique either, though as noted earlier on, it lacks multiband found in some of Garmin’s other watches at the same price point. Typically multiband (aka dual-frequency GNSS) delivers better results. Whereas Garmin has “multi-GNSS”, which is yet another GPS term to keep track of, but not at all the same as multi-band/dual-band/dual-frequency (all the same thing).

However, as I’ve said many times since dual-frequency GPS started appearing in watches: I don’t care how a company gets accurate results, as long as they do. Likely because Garmin is seemingly using the exact same chipset on both, but only seemingly has the required dual-frequency antenna pieces on some of the units. In fact, we’ll see that again here too – comparing them head to head. Heck, there’s some tests here where the Forerunner 165 is beating the Apple Watch Ultra 2 (with multiband GNSS).

For all these tests, I’ve got multiple other recording devices and sensors. As always, no two watches are on the same wrist, so as to not interfere with each other from a heart rate standpoint. Extra watches are either worn elsewhere on the body (like the hand if for GPS, but not HR), or on a bike (handlebars). Those watches not on the wrist are collecting heart rate data from connected HR sensors/straps.

First up, we’ve got an interval workout out mostly in farm fields, with some brief underpasses and tree coverage. This is merely a starting point. Here’s the data from that data set, starting with the high-level GPS track, which basically looks identical to the Apple Watch Series 9 and Garmin Forerunner 965.

Zooming in, let’s take a look at a couple of notable areas. First, this straightaway and turn. Here we can see there’s no corner-cutting, which is good. And in fact, it even stays on the correct side of the street going in/out, right at the turn. Kudos.

About the only point I can nitpick, is right after the underpass/bridge here, it briefly goes off-course by about 2-3 meters a couple at each exit. But, so does the Apple Watch, just in the opposite direction. The FR965 nails it. But, that’s some extreme nitpicking.

Meanwhile, on the heart rate side, this was a series of 10×1 minute intervals, a workout my wife was doing. You can see that It was mostly good on them, but struggled a fair bit during the warm-up phase, as well as a couple of the intervals being slightly latent on either build or recovery. Still, given the low temperatures and high-intensity aspect of these intervals, that’s actually somewhat impressive. Optical HR sensors struggle with both of those things.

Ok, so now stepping up complexity again, this time my downtown city test, with towering 30+ story buildings, and small city streets. At a high level, against the COROS PACE 3, Apple Watch Ultra 2, and Forerunner 965 (all multiband units), it looks very similar:

However, let’s zoom in section-by-section, starting with the easier of the two downtown pass chunks. Note that I split each street length in half, and run down one half on one side of the road, and the other half on the other side of the road, so no one wrist side is favored.

Here we can see on the bottom that the units are identical. Then in the middle pass, we can see the Apple Watch Ultra 2 actually struggles the most here, definitely off course. Everyone else was on-point. And then for the upper pass, we can see disagreement from all units, with everyone on either side of the street, but nobody actually on the street. When I crossed the street to the other side, you can see them all basically merge back together.

And then looking at the last pass (upper section on the below image), you can see they are very close, with only the Apple Watch Ultra 2 again cutting the corner here. Note I did not have any phones with me on this run, though Apple doesn’t leverage that anymore during a recording.

And finally, looking at the rest of the tracks here, all the units were on-point, save again for the Apple Watch Ultra 2 overshooting a corner.

So what about the heart rate? Here we had the FR165 optical sensor versus the Apple Watch Ultra 2 optical HR sensor, with the chest strap paired to another watch. I’d say those differences in the first minute or two were debatable, so setting that aside, it was very good except that first interval around the 7-minute marker, where the FR165 lost the plot briefly. Basically I did intervals every 1KM on this short test run. And for all but that one, they were very close.

For this review, I decided just to show the most difficult sets. The rest of them it aced. That saves you time reading, and me time writing. Win-win. But I do have more than a dozen sets of other runs and rides.

However, let’s look at this mountain bike adventure from the other day. A couple hour ride. Starting at the high-level on GPS, everything looks identical to the $1,500+ Garmin Tactix 7 AMOLED watch, and the high-end Garmin Edge devices. All of which are in multiband mode.

If we zoom into some switchbacks in some tall trees, you’l see it’s virtually identical – despite being at high speed:

The only difference I saw on the entire looped circuit (which was done twice) was this little section here, where both times the FR165 seemed to say ‘nah’, and just kinda went slightly offset.

However, the heart rate is super interesting. You can see it really struggles at the beginning, which kinda makes sense. I basically just started with zero warm-up, straight into a steep hill, which gave the sensor no time to prepare itself. And, it shows. It took about 8 minutes to sort itself out.

However, from that point until around the 1hr 35min marker, it was virtually identical to the chest strap – which is actually kinda astounding for an optical HR sensor, let alone one of Garmin’s older ones. Around that 1:35 marker I stopped to shoot some video for 10-12 minutes, and as such I cooled back down again, and you can see it thus lost the plot again for about 5-8 mins until it snapped back on for the rest of the ride.

Overall though, I’m super impressed with the GPS accuracy here. Again, as I keep saying – I don’t care what chipsets they put in watches, or what things are enabled (e.g. multiband). All I care about is that it’s accurate. And time and time again over the last 12-18 months, we’ve seen Garmin roll-out watches without multiband, that can rival (and beat) some of the best multiband watches, even in very tough edge cases.

Likewise, on the heart rate side, while I’d have preferred to see them use the Gen 5 sensor in here instead of an older sensor (merely to get ECG and wrist temperature), the performance here isn’t bad at all, and largely hits most of the hard scenarios without too much difficulty.

(Note: All of the charts in these accuracy sections were created using the DCR Analyzer tool. It allows you to compare power meters/trainers, heart rate, cadence, speed/pace, GPS tracks, and plenty more. You can use it as well for your own gadget comparisons, more details here.)

Wrap-Up:

The Forerunner 165 is a feature-packed running watch, though, one that attempts to straddle the line of not eating into too many of the Forerunner 265 sales, while somehow also trying to be different than the like-priced Vivoactive 5. In most ways, Garmin has managed to walk that tightrope, whereby packing in plenty of core running features, but leaving out most of the training & recovery tools found in higher watches. As usual, just about any watch out there can record a run, but Garmin’s specialty is ensuring you’ve got all the tools to create structured workouts, follow courses, and then analyze all that data after the fact.

Where Garmin struggles most in this watch, isn’t actually this watch. This watch in isolation is great. Instead, it’s the ever-increasing number of watches at the same price point (+/- $50) with similar yet not exactly the same features. It quickly becomes paralysis by analysis, with some differences obvious (e.g. full set of buttons on the Forerunner series but not Vivoactive/Venu series), and others nearly impossible to figure out (e.g. that this unit doesn’t have skiing, but other cheaper newer and older units do). I know Garmin thinks they have a strategy here, and perhaps it’s working, but I still can’t help but wonder what might happen if they create a more cohesive strategy that reduces complexity in choice, rather than increases it.

Still, this watch checks the majority of the boxes that most runners will want. It might not have all the fancy post-run training load and recovery analysis, but when it comes to the actual run itself, it’s virtually identical to Garmin’s mid-tier and higher-end offerings. You’d be hard-pressed to see any difference mid-run workout to that of a Forerunner 265 or Forerunner 965. And in that respect, it seems like Garmin may have a winner on its hands.

With that – thanks for reading!

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