Garmin Instinct 2S Solar Rugged GPS Smartwatch, Graphite

Product Information

While each Garmin Instinct 2 series unit has a different box, the contents inside of them are all equally the same: Watch, charging cable, paper stuffs. Garmin Elevate heart rate sensor, GPS, GLONASS Galileo, Barometric altimeter, Compass, Accelerometer, Thermometer, Pulse OX blood oxygen saturation monitor

Instinct 2S Solar | road.cc Review: Garmin Instinct 2S Solar | road.cc

In terms of its solar performance, you can keep an eye on how much solar power your watch is obtaining in one of the default watch faces or you can have solar intensity set as one of your 'glances', and this will show you a timeline of the last six hours. The taller the bar line, the brighter and more intense the sunlight. On the Garmin Connect app you can also view all of your solar charging history. The Garmin Instinct 2 isn’t a single watch, but an entire series. First of all, there are now two case sizes to consider: the standard 45mm, and a new 40mm diameter model. The watch we tested here was the 40mm Garmin Instinct 2S, and although 5mm shaved off the case size might not sound like much, it makes the watch much more comfortable and practical for smaller wrists. Smartwatch mode: Up to 21 days/51 days with solar*, Smartwatch mode (w/ battery saver): Up to 50 days/unlimited with solar*, GPS: Up to 22 hours/28 hours with solar**, Max Battery GPS mode: Up to 54 hours/114 hours with solar**, Expedition GPS Activity: Up to 25 days/105 days with solar*I got my new Instinct 2 Solar 12 days ago and right out of the box after fully charged and with default settings on, said 4 days for battery life. Living in Canada and with weather in my area these days, I’ve done most all of my training these days indoors (Zwift), so my new Instinct has not really seen the sun for the past 12 days. Tips on how to get better sleep in each of the stages are also provided on the Connect app – it's really helpful having something to act on rather than just getting the raw figures. On the elevation side of this plot, things were OK, but still a bit of drift over the course of 5 hours on one of the Instinct 2 units. Note that weather had come in during this period, with a huge shift in both temps as well as weather systems (rain giving way to sun, and high winds). So you can see that green line slightly shifting over the course of the route. Note I placed my dot below at the point I touched the ocean (literally). The only unit to read the proper elevation of zero meters was the Fenix 7 which is because it’s the only unit that’s snapping its elevation to the underlying map data when appropriate. But we’ll get into all those details and plenty more throughout this review. I’ve been testing the Instinct 2 series for quite some time, and have put in countless hours to figure out what works well…and what falls short. I’ve used the Instinct 2, Instinct 2 Solar, and 2S Solar – as well as recruiting my wife to put in hours and workouts on the Instinct 2S Solar. All of this includes a wide variety of conditions from on and off-road riding and running up volcanos, runs in freezing temps, openwater swims, cities to mountain passes, and everything in between. Oceans, forests, deserts, and more.

Garmin Instinct 2S Solar Rugged GPS Smartwatch, Mist Grey

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. 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).

Well essentially, it’s got pretty good GPS performance, on par with most other watches in the market. There are virtually no major errors, and only a handful of minor errors lasting mere seconds and with minimal impact to overall GPS accuracy. In some of those situations, multi-band GPS would outperform it slightly, though, not all. There are far more cases where the differences were negligible one way or the other between them. That might change down the road with improvements on those higher-end units, whereas the GPS accuracy you see today for Instinct will likely remain the same, since I suspect Garmin will shift to the other multi-band GPS chipset for more watches in the future. The watch doesn't have a microphone, so it's not actually possible to answer calls directly, but you can accept the call on the watch and then speak on your actual phone. It's also possible to decline the call or send a pre-written suggested text message such as 'sorry, can't talk now' or 'on my way!', which is quite handy. You can have three messages ready to go on the watch, and you can edit which three on the Garmin Connect app. For the Instinct 2 series, there are no maps on the unit (of any sort), thus all navigation boils down to two categories: Following a breadcrumb trail of the planned route, or direct-to-point navigation (effectively a compass/arrow heading/direction). If one were to boil down the key navigation/routing related differences between the Instinct series and the Fenix series they’d be: As far as regular battery life beyond that, things seem to be roughly trending towards what Garmin specifies on their battery specs, though perhaps a little bit lower with my slightly higher use. I’d note that in my case, that’s assuming an average of 1hr of workouts per day this time of year (sometimes outside, sometimes inside). For the time periods where I’ve been doing crazy long adventures per day, obviously that’s going to impact battery life more than a boring day of doing nothing. But given I saw better than claimed battery life with the Fenix 7 & Epix, I’d say this is just ‘on-spec’. Which, is perfectly fine. Sports Usage: