Garmin wants charging your watch to be almost a thing of the past. The fitness watchmaker on Tuesday announced the Instinct Crossover, a hybrid watch that promises to provide up to 70 days of battery life if you purchase the solar-powered edition. That’s significantly longer than the one-to-two-day battery life found on most traditional smartwatches and the roughly one-month battery life on other watches. hybrids.
The Garmin Instinct Crossover starts at $500 and launches Tuesday, while the solar-powered model is $550. International pricing wasn’t immediately available, but the base model’s US price converts to roughly £435 and AU$770, while the Solar model’s price is around £477 and AU$848.
The Instinct Crossover is a hybrid smartwatch, meaning it includes some of the goodness of regular smartwatches and analog watches. Hybrid watches generally offer longer battery life than regular smartwatches like the Apple Watch because they compromise certain features. The Instinct Crossover, for example, doesn’t have a color screen, but it can show notifications and media Garmin Pay for digital payments. Like Garmin’s other Instinct watches, the new Crossover was designed primarily for outdoor enthusiasts looking for a rugged fitness tracker. This comes at a time when Garmin is facing increased competition from traditional smartwatch makers like Apple and Samsung, which capture 29% and 9% of the overall smartwatch market, respectively, according to Counterpoint Research.
The Instinct Crossover has many of the health tracking features you’d expect from a Garmin watch, like sleep tracking with a sleep score, blood oxygen measurements, heart rate variability tracking and VO2 Max stats, among other readings. It is also impact and heat resistant, while meeting the MIL-STD-810 durability standard. Water resistance is rated at 10 ATM, which means it can withstand pressures up to a depth of 100 meters, similar to the Apple Watch Ultra.
But the Instinct Crossover’s battery life seems to be one of its most distinguished features. The Solar Edition should last 70 days in smartwatch mode, thanks to its solar charging, according to Garmin. In battery saver mode, which preserves analog features such as time, date and stopwatch, Garmin claims the solar-powered Instinct Crossover has “infinite” battery life. But you’ll need to make sure you meet the recommended solar charging requirements to get that level of battery life, which Garmin says is three hours a day in 50,000 lux conditions.
The non-solar base model also lasts nearly a month in smartwatch mode, according to Garmin, which seems to be about on par with Instinct 2 Autonomy of 28 days. Activating the GPS brings that down to 110 hours, but that’s still plenty of time for it to be active. That could make the Garmin Instinct Crossover appealing to those who want a watch they can wear for daily training and sleep tracking without having to charge it in between.
In addition to long battery life and wellness features, the Garmin Instinct Crossover has navigation features such as GPS, TracBack to find your way back to a starting point and the reference point, which allows wearers to monitor a given location relative to their position. There’s also a Tactical Edition of the watch that adds night vision compatibility, a stealth mode, dual-format GPS, and kill switch.
The Garmin Instinct Crossover is another sign that smartwatch makers are paying more attention to battery life, especially in more expensive models designed for sports training. Garmin has been a long-time household name in the world of fitness and running watches, but Apple and Samsung have only recently focused more on this market. Apple launched the Apple Watch Ultra in September, its biggest competitor yet for performance watches like those made by Garmin. Along with its larger screen, titanium construction, dual-frequency GPS and depth gauge, the Ultra’s estimated 36-hour battery life is one of the key features that make it stand out. distinguish from Series 8. The case is similar for the Samsung Galaxy Watch 5 Prowhich differs from the standard Galaxy Watch 5 with a titanium design and an estimated battery life of 80 hours.
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