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Garmin Instinct 2S Solar Rugged GPS Smartwatch, Graphite

£174.995£349.99Clearance
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About this deal

I’m from out of the country and will be visiting the US, what’s the best triathlon shop Now, if we get a bit more complicated – we’ve got this 5-hour hike. Essentially this can be divided up into going up, and going down. I’ve highlighted the going-up sections in yellow. And what we see there is that it’s basically spot on (ignore the one green blip in that last section, I was trying to take a photo off-wrist). The sections going down weren’t ‘bad’, they were just fuzzier because the HR is lower (only 100bpm or so). Thus, we tend to see more variations there – from both optical HR sensors and straps alike. But point being, any time I was exerting effort, it was spot on. I actually find the transflective display a lot easier to read with my slightly hypermetropic 53yr old eyes than the memory-in-pixel displays of the Fenix/FR series. Similarly, you can accept or decline phone calls, which simply accepts or declines them on your phone. So accepting a call means it’ll accept the call on your phone, not on the watch (it doesn’t have a microphone or proper speaker, just a beeper). Oh, speaking of which, you can control the sounds/vibrations/tones within the settings menu, in case you want the unit to do something different in that arena:

Garmin Instinct 2S Solar Rugged GPS Smartwatch, Graphite

Garmin has just revamped their Instinct series with the new Instinct 2 and smaller Instinct 2S, both offered in not just Solar, but approximately 87 other variants for things like surfing and military use. And while these units visually look near-identical from across the table, they’re entirely different inside – not just the hardware, but also far more importantly the software. As with before (and any other style thing in life), you’ll either love or hate the look of Instinct.Aside from Mtb, I also do Spinning (indoor cycling at my local gym) and the profile on my unit seems to be more of a Zwift type affaor, even judging by the icon used. There are two other ‘quirky’ moments in here. One around the 3hr marker where I had to hike the bike for a while, so the wrist that I was holding up the bike with showed wonky results. And then around the 3hr50min marker you see the line, that’s when one of the Instinct 2 units paused after it rebooted/crashed. I didn’t catch the pause right away, but it was just as I was stopping for food, hence the line. Yup, it broadcasts HR just fine, on both Bluetooth Smart and ANT+. So you can easily connect up to that. I suspect your Bosche eBike uses Bluetooth Smart, which is why it works with the HRM-PRO (which has dual as well), but not the Fenix 5 (which only broadcasts on ANT+). I like a lower priced option, although an Instinct (non-solar) may be roughly on par feature-wise with a Coros Pace 2 (comparing multi-sport needs) and is still almost 2x in price. I feel like I personally would only go Instinct if I went +Solar for the battery life enhancements. Next, there’s both altitude and heat acclimation. These are based on time spent at altitude (namely during sleep), and then also time spent in hot weather (above 70°F). You’ll acclimate bit by bit over time. Also, the temperature data isn’t from your watch, but rather from nearby weather stations during the activity. Here you can see when I took this photo I had spent one night thus far at about 915m (3,000ft), so I had acclimated thus far to about 850m. Going up to ‘just’ 3,000 feet is pretty easy to acclimate, whereas going up to 10,000ft is a different ballgame.

Garmin Instinct 2S Solar Rugged GPS Smartwatch, Mist Grey

And the effectiveness of the updated solar panel with lower battery consumption means that there’s a very strong chance that certain groups of people will indeed be able to have forever power for likely months at a time in the summer. It’s not hard if you’re spending even just a few hours outdoors in sunny summer conditions. They increased the efficiency of the panels themselves (just like we saw with the Fenix 7 Solar units) It would also be nice if Garmin added a solar model to its Camo lineup down the line, since the folks who wear camo are likely to want those two features rolled into one smartwatch. The Instinct 2S Solar, left, has a 40mm bezel and a slimmer profile compared to the first-generation Garmin Instinct Solar (right) and the standard 45mm Instinct 2 and 2 Solar series. Natalie Krebs What It Does BestSo yesterday my Instinct 2 Solar arrived and I’m glad to say it’s everything I’m looking for. I do use Garmin Pay (I chose my bank [Staling Bank in the UK] when I moved banks because they support it!) but I don’t use on-watch music so that’s fine by me. Instead, I am benefiting from choosing ‘trail run’ or ‘run’ and seeing what the watch suggests I do. So far these have been endurance runs, recovery runs, intervals and even my favourite, rest. You think it could be a good choice for training and outdoor training activity respect fenix or not? Big limitation or what you didn’t like rispect fenix other then maps, stamina, Climbpro, music ?

Garmin Instinct® 2S | Smaller-Sized Rugged GPS Smartwatch Garmin Instinct® 2S | Smaller-Sized Rugged GPS Smartwatch

Which is to say they’re largely pretty good. This is the same exact sensor as the Garmin Fenix 7 or Epix series (which is the Garmin ELEVATE V4 optical HR sensor). That sensor tends to do pretty well under higher intensity exercises, in running, cycling, and even strength training. It does tend to struggle a bit down in scenarios where significant pressure is placed on the wrist without a corresponding higher intensity heart rate (such as descending cycling). Garmin Elevate heart rate sensor, GPS, GLONASS Galileo, Barometric altimeter, Compass, Accelerometer, Thermometer, Pulse OX blood oxygen saturation monitor My original instinct battery life was almost 2 weeks, but after a few years, was down to about a week with occasional GPS activityThe Instinct series was the second set of Garmin devices to get solar, following the original Fenix 6X Solar edition. With the Instinct 1, it dramatically expanded the usefulness of solar in a Garmin watch. You see, while the Fenix 6 gained some benefit from solar, it really didn’t add a ton. It was mostly pretty minor because the solar areas were smaller/thinner. On the Instinct however, the far larger solar surface area, and that combined with the Instinct’s more power-friendly design meant a significant difference. Most notably, there were scenarios that the Instinct 1 Solar could get forever-power. I found this beneficial as I tend to wander outside and head off without much of a plan, so having a suggestion for a ride or a run was genuinely useful. Though it isn’t huge, there is a considerable difference in the battery life of both watches. The Garmin Instinct 2S can last up to 21 days in smartwatch mode, while the Instinct 2 can manage 28 hours. Whereas the solar edition of Instinct 2S can last up to 51 days, the Instinct 2 Solar has an indefinite battery life in smartwatch mode. As I’ve noted in recent posts though, one of the challenges here is you can’t trend just the Health Snapshot values alone. Meaning, the point of doing a Health Snapshot is having control over when these values are gathered (to minimize outside factor variations), such as always doing them 10 minutes after waking up. This is especially true of HRV values, which Garmin doesn’t display any other place in their app/platform. Hopefully we’ll see Garmin add this though via the GCM app, as it’d be pretty trivial for them to do it there (given the probably hundreds of other metrics they allow you to trend over time).

Review: Garmin Instinct 2S Solar - WIRED

In any case, with that, I was out and ready to navigate for my hike. You’ll see you can follow a breadcrumb trail of your route, and zoom in/out as you see fit.

Like with GPS, we’ll start easy here, and then build difficulty. This first set is a relatively steady-state effort, so in theory, it should be pretty easy. And indeed, it was – with all the units virtually identical to the reference chest straps and even the Whoop 4.0. There were two minor bobbles from one of the Instinct 2 units where it struggled for a few seconds each, but that’s it. Yup, it actually does. I did some fun tests with this in a never-got-around-to-being-published post/video from this both two summers ago and this past summer. You can see here the Instinct 2 Solar unit was trending towards 24.57hrs of GPS battery life, whereas the instinct 2 without Solar was only trending towards 19.87hrs, so roughly 23% longer – despite non-ideal solar conditions. Here’s another indoor cycling workout, this one with longer intervals. While we see some weird wobbles at the beginning as I warm-up, perhaps due to wrist movement or something, it settles out as I get into the workout, virtually perfect from that point forward, save one tiny couple-second spike.

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