Aiming to put as much useful information in front of your eyes as possible, ActiFace shows the time and date, your activity history graph in calories and distance, plus daily goal progress, step count, and notifications. Garmin’s new Fenix 6S Pro may be the smallest model in the Fenix series, but don’t let that dissuade you. It is as rugged and almost as full-featured as its big brother, the Fenix 6X Pro. The 6S Pro has a compact design, refined interface, and useful new features that make it attractive to folks looking for a fitness watch with a strong outdoor focus. Is there a better alternative? When I called Garmin and went through all of your basics customers service, restart, login – log out – reload the app etc… After all these time, finally the customer service person admitted that they were having problems with the software. I decided to return the watch (which was supposed to be replacing my Forerunner 920xt). There’s currently surf watches in the market already, so clearly there’s demand there. From Garmin’s perspective it’s relatively trivial to take an existing piece of hardware and add a few extra metrics. Whereas the lift for a new company to create a new smartwatch in 2020 is almost impossibly hard to get enough demand to make it work.

If you're all about the weather, this is a face that does a really nice job of displaying that metrological data.

More Smartwatches

It seemed to correctly capture my sleep and wake times, but the stages seemed inaccurate — if the watch is to be believed, I only spend about 15–30 minutes in deep sleep each night. In any case, if you’ve got a Fenix 6 series watch, you can test this feature out today via the beta. Or, simply wait for it to hit production probably any day now. Solar & Battery Details: Garmin's more niche watches, like ones from the Approach, Marq, Enduro and Descent lines, are almost always supported by developers, too.

B) While outdoors on longer hikes in significant sun, solar will definitely extend your battery life, potentially a lot. Or potentially not at all.

Design

Also of note above is that I went through the Rijksmuseum, and most of the watches were pretty good at that. It’s probably 100-125m long of no GPS signal under a massive building. The Instinct Solar slightly cut the corner towards the end, but otherwise it was reasonably clean. In any event, zooming into the park portion first (which is mostly under tree cover this time of year), you’ll see that the Instinct Solar and Grit X were probably closest to the path on the southern side (but was a bit more wobbly on the northern side straightaway). The Fenix 6 Pro Solar was pretty darn smooth on both sides. The Casio seemed a bit drunk on the turns, but was mostly fine for the straightaways. It's a good face to show how you can get that traditional watch face look and still find room for complications to live on it too. When it comes to the Solar aspects added to the Fenix 6 & 6S, they’re basically identical to that of the Fenix 6X Solar that was launched last summer. Whereas if you looked at the new Garmin Instinct Solar units, those have a different panel arrangement than the Fenix series. It's worth noting that the Fenix 6 Pro and Fenix 7 Solar Sapphire models have 32GB storage, with the standard Fenix 7 and 7 Solar offering 16GB. For the more basic standard Fenix 6, there's only 64MB of storage.

Suunto 9 Baro: The Suunto 9 Baro is less expensive than the Fenix 6s Pro. It comes standard with a Sapphire lens, and it includes a touch screen. It’s larger and heavier than the Fenix 6s Pro. It’s a solid choice if you’re looking for a less expensive watch and don’t mind the large size. If you've seen the Nike watch face you can find on the Nike+ edition of the Apple Watch, then DigiSport will feel familiar. The goal of the solar here isn’t to fully power the watch, under GPS or otherwise. Instead, it’s to provide incremental battery life (more on my testing on this in a second). Garmin notes this in their super-detailed battery life chart. Note specifically the assumption of 3 hours per day of solar light at a pretty high intensity (full sun basically). That goes both ways though. If you’re mid-summer and spending the day at the beach (or work outside), then you’ll way overachieve here. Versus if it’s mid-winter and you’re indoors…then not so much. Movement is an official watch face made by Garmin that's all about bringing a splash of color to your sports watch.

Garmin Fenix 6S Pro

It's available in four cosmic-themed colors that, along with swapping numbers for watch hands, will also elegantly display the date and battery life status. It keeps things simple, but that's quite alright with us.