Garmin fēnix 7S Solar Multisport GPS Watch, Slate Grey with Black Band

Product Information

It must have been hard for Garmin’s development team to dream up enough new features, but somehow it has and there’s a host of new and improved capabilities to mull over here. The box for the Fenix 7 series mirrors that of not just the Fenix 6 series, but basically every other Garmin watch in the last half a decade or so. It’s grey and simplistic. While all the box contents for all four units I tested were identical (Fenix 7S/7/7X/Epix), keep in mind that some higher-end fancy-strap editions do have secondary straps in them. I didn’t have any fancy-strap editions. Thus, rather than repeat a series of unboxings, here’s just one sampling: Hopefully, we’ll see this feature expand to the rest of the Fenix series in the Fenix 8. Or, to other Garmin watches. As with every Fenix series, the ‘X’ variant (e.g. Fenix 7X) always gets some new experimental feature first, and in the case of the Fenix 7 series, that’s the flashlight. Sports Usage: This next section is specific to only the Solar editions of the Fenix 7, as only those editions have solar panels in them. Solar capabilities was first introduced on the Fenix 6 series, and then later added to the Garmin Instinct and Enduro series. In the case of the Fenix 6, it added almost negligible battery life for most users. Whereas in the Instinct series in particular, the impact could be quite significant. Keep in mind that while many watches, like Casio, have had solar for years, those watches tend to be super basic in their functionality, and thus in turn, require less power to operate.

Now, there’s a lot to take in, both in features, but also in decoding Garmin’s wide array of SKUs here. Basically, before even considering color/material combinations there are 8 different Fenix 7 units, plus two Epix units. Including color/material combinations, there are 22 Fenix 7 SKUs. But in short, everything gets boiled down to this: Per-Sport/Activity Profile: This allows you to increase (or decrease) GPS accuracy on a given sport, likely in exchange for battery life. And here’s the red light, which is obviously less bright than white, but also useful when you don’t want the full intensity of white. I’ve actually found the red light more useful at night around the house, than the white light. Merely because it’s much more subdued. Note that even on the lowest white-light settings, it’s still fairly bright, and uses both white LEDs.There's a new forged metal guard around the start button on the Garmin Fenix 7, which is designed to protect it from damage and help prevent accidental presses. One caveat is that Garmin Connect’s Training Status routinely records whether your workout for the day was productive, unproductive, maintaining, and so on. I do many different types of workouts on different days for different reasons, not all of which align with Garmin’s evaluation. It can be weirdly dispiriting to go on a two-hour trail run just because it’s a nice day and see that your watch has logged your workout as “unproductive.” It was productive mentally and emotionally, OK, Garmin? A good example of where Garmin seems half-way on this is the Sensors & Accessories section. You can see here that you can tweak all the onboard sensors (like whether or not your heart rate broadcasts), but you can’t pair any external sensors from the phone, you’ve gotta go to the watch. I’d imagine over time these will converge. To access it, you’ll go into the sports menu (I know, it’s technically the apps menu, but honesty, this doesn’t make much sense for it – it should probably be in the widgets area). Once opened it will load up some recommended apps. Five at the moment, plus showing the two music apps I already have installed (allowing me to uninstall those): Note that the usual smart-recording or 1-second recording option is still in the settings (and still annoying defaulted to ‘Smart Recording’), but that has no bearing on the GPS reception timing/display, it’s purely what it writes to the recorded file.

This is one of those things that at first glance didn’t make a ton of sense to me. I mean, yes, it was spot-on accurate, but why bother to spend the time on this was quirky to me. In asking Garmin, they said the intention was that for certain racing/training, such as steeper incline training, it allowed folks to start to analyze whether or not the pace/HR tradeoffs were worth it on walking versus running. Since you can overlay all those stats atop it, I can see the logic there.

Garmin's top-tier sports watch smashes its personal best

Now, I’m going to add a few waypoints here. Waypoints in files of course aren’t new. They’ve been around for a decade or two. In this case, Garmin calls them Course Points, but it’s effectively the same. You can tap on your route and add these points from a list of about 50 different standardized icons. Speaking of structured workouts, each day the watch will offer up structured running or cycling workouts, as a suggested workout, based on your current training and recovery. It looks at your recent load and training focus areas, and figures out what the next logical workout should be to slightly increase your fitness. Then, it suggests that daily workout: All watches in the Fenix 6 and Fenix 7 lines have color memory-in-pixel (MIP) displays. These aren't as bright as the AMOLED screens used by devices like the Garmin Venu 2 and Garmin Epix, but they use significantly less power. This results in longer battery life, which is a big advantage for watches built with extensive GPS use in mind. Keep in mind that this chart is really a starting point. Using the Power Manager feature, you can get crazy detailed on which features you care about (for example, toggling off optical HR sensor and connecting to a chest strap saves a boatload of battery), and thus can easily extend these. Or, inversely, turning on the flashlight while playing music will decrease them. Use your powers wisely.

And that’s the exact same way the FDA certifies blood oxygen medical-grade devices: Sitting still. If you swagger around, you’ll either not get good devices, or, Garmin these days won’t even give a reading. They (and others) have gotten smarter with just giving you a warning that there’s too much movement for a valid result. You seem angry. Which, is fine. But frankly, I’ve gotten beyond the point of bothering to meaningfully respond to angry people. As for positional accuracy, that’s just as impressive. I was initially sent a Fenix 7s Solar to test, which didn’t have multiband GPS support – one of the watch’s much-touted new features at the launch – but even without multiband GNSS, positional accuracy was phenomenal. With single-band, all-systems GNSS enabled, I found the distances matched those reported by my Stryd pod to within 1.1%. That’s a stunning result, and examination of the GPS traces show very little wandering or corner-cutting. All of this is spot on. However, it’s not as if they’re on the correct side of the road (or consistently on any given side of the road). So that’s where we need to park the Holy Grail GPS Bus, and remember that hasn’t arrived yet:

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The Fenix 7 series significantly increases the solar capabilities over the Fenix 6. It accomplishes this in three basic ways: Before we dive into sport usage, we’re going to briefly cover the flashlight. This is one of those features that’ll probably seem Inspector Gadget-ish at first, but in practice is actually surprisingly useful. I just wish it wasn’t limited to the Fenix 7X. Meanwhile, for HR accuracy testing I’m typically wearing a chest strap (either the Polar H10 or the Garmin HRM-PRO), as well as another optical HR sensor watch on the bicep (mostly the Polar Verity Sense, as well as the Whoop 4.0 band). Note that the numbers you see in the upper right corner of the charts below are *not* the averages, but rather just the exact point my mouse is sitting over. Note all this data is analyzed using the DCR Analyzer, details here.