Garmin 010-02293-10 Instinct Solar, Rugged Outdoor Smartwatch with Solar Charging Capabilities, Built-in Sports Apps and Health Monitoring, Graphite

While overall, this is a very capable watch. It has many features that a sports enthusiast would love. I have two complaints:

I wear it every day. Thought about the Solar Tactical, but outside of stealth mode being a cool feature, I wasn’t planning on jumping out of a lot of planes, so the Instinct Solar it was. Light weight, extremely durable, comfortable, synced to my iPhone with zero issues. Lots of great YouTube tutorials for all its functions. The only con is it doesn’t go well with a suit, but hey, not why I bought it. Connect App has run smoothly for me. Only addition I made was a screen protector, for the oh crap moments, and it’s practically invisible.

This is my second Garmin smart watch, first still works but is 4 years old. Just wanted something new.

This is a great watch with great battery life for a rechargeable and very useful features. Solar recharges but only when exposed to direct strong sun light. Does not charge well at all with indoor lighting my other Solar watches do.

I like the ruggedness of the watch, the long life span between charges, It has allot of features I use especially the silent timer. so I can keep time sensitive activities on point while doing my other work.

The GPS function is great. It has helped me find my way back to where I parked on a few occasions now. It also is great for workouts.

I went from a standard Instinct to the solar model. I had Casio and Citizen solar watches in the past, and was expecting similar battery performance. If Id done more research, I would have known that isnt the case. The solar does greatly extend the time between charges over the standard version, generally three to four times what I got from the standard. However, it does not last indefinitely. I usually get about three weeks out of mine with normal use plus tracking three to four bike rides or hikes a week. Great gps watch for the money.

Great watch

I got this watch mainly to send heart beat data to Zwift, which Im running on an iPad mounted to my bike (I dont want to use a chest strap, and my fitbit will not send data to other systems). Takes about 5 button presses to turn on this feature, which is a bit of a PITA. Then discovered it did not work. Googled around and found that it would only send ANT+, but that updating the firmware would add the ability to send via BLE. Upgraded from version 10 to the latest 12.2 via the Garmin Express app on Mac - for some reason the Garmin Connect app on my iPhone did not offer to upgrade the firmware. Voila, now it sends BLE to Zwift. But! Big problem, when sending heart rate the rate drops from around 80-90 to 55-65, which is obviously a bug. As soon as the iPad stops receiving the rate goes back up to what it should. Will be contacting customer support.

It’s my husband favorite “toy” we spend so much time outdoors and with this watch he never needs to worry about the battery.