Garmin Instinct Solar GPS Watch – just launched

The Garmin Instinct Solar GPS watch is the latest upgrade on the Garmin Instinct range of GPS watches.

The key differences are –

1. Solar charging
2. Updated heart rate sensors
3. Increased battery life
4. Power management
5. New profiles including expedition mode
6. New colours

Solar Charging

Garmin has added solar panels to the gorilla glass display on the Garmin Instinct Solar GPS watch.

Heart Rate Sensor

The heart rate sensor has been updated to the latest version which also includes the pulse ox into it, this measures your blood oxygen levels. This is similar to the one you find on the Garmin Fenix 6 range of GPS watches.

Increased Battery Life

On the Garmin Instinct solar, you now get with the GPS off –

– 24 days of battery life when in the smartwatch mode, not using with the GPS on (14 days on the original Instinct GPS watch).
– If you expose the watch to 3 hours of sunshine per day this increases the battery life to 54 days, which is impressive.

And with the GPS on –

– 30 hours. This was 16 hours on the previous version (i.e. non-solar version)
– If you again add some direct sunlight this can be extended to 38 hours on the Garmin Instinct solar.

Power Management

The Power management technology that you find on the Fenix 6 range of GPS watches is now found on the Garmin Instinct solar range.

It enables you to conserve battery life enabling or disabling features you may or may not want to use.

In battery save mode the battery life is extended to 56 days and if you have access to sunlight it can make the battery life indefinite.

If you want to extend the battery life with the GPS on there are a couple of modes already built-in.

The ultra trac mode (Garmin forum discussing its accuracy) increases the battery life up to 60 hours, in this mode the trac is measured less frequently.

Profiles

The Garmin Instinct Solar has three addition activity profiles –

– Hunt
– Fish
– Expedition profile. Using this profile it records many things, but a little less frequent (i.e track points every hour), but it has a battery life of up to 28 days with no sunlight in this profile and up to 68 days in ideal solar conditions.