Garmin Instinct review

The Garmin Instinct is a rugged outdoor sports watch that comes from the same wearable stable as Garmin's Fenix range.

Built to withstand the toughest of elements, the Instinct has all the usual skills you'd expect to see from one of Garmin's outdoor-friendly watches.

There's GPS along with GLONASS and Galileo support to offer plenty of mapping coverage. There's a barometric altimeter to measure elevation when you're climbing up mountains, a heart rate monitor, and a promise of battery life that will go the distance.

• Garmin Instinct 2 Solar review

Unsurprisingly, this hardcore outdoor aid places a big emphasis on features that should come in handy when you're trekking or hiking. I'm talking about things like course navigation, the ability to import GPX routes, and Garmin's great TrackBack feature.

Also check out our review of the new Garmin Instinct Solar, which increases battery life with solar panels on the screen.

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Design and comfort

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Let's start with the basics. The Instinct comes in three colors: flame red, tundra, and graphite (pictured). Aside from that initial choice, there’s little more design customization you can make to the watch save for the addition of Quickfit straps.

Weighing in at 52g and featuring a 45mm casing, the Instinct is fairly unnoticeable when it's on your wrist, especially against some of the chunkier options out there like the Fenix, or some of the models Suunto has to offer in the outdoor watch realms. The one (large) silicone strap that comes with it fits comfortably and makes wearing it 24/7, even while in bed, relatively painless.

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Saying that the Instinct is Casio-esque is a bit unfair to the celebrated Casio design. The sole comparison between the two is almost entirely based on the fact that they’re both dual-color digital watches – in the same way, that a Rolex and a Timex both have analog models. In reality, the screen is similar to an old-style dot matrix screen found across the majority of digital devices in the 90s. It’s clear and does the job, but it’s essentially just a very simple 128 x 128 pixel, monochrome display that gives you a no-frills, information-providing experience.

That may sound like a negative, but if you want something that’ll provide you with information to get from A to B when you’re hiking across a mountain range, then that’s exactly what you need.

The limited screen colors presumably go a long way to helping extend battery life as well as removing any unnecessary functions that you probably don’t need on a long hike in the wilderness. It’s also waterproof to 100 meters and shock resistant, which I’d take over a color screen in an emergency any day of the week.

Sat within the screen is a second smaller window that acts as a sort of navigation tool, showing you the current status of whatever you’re doing, whether that be scrolling through a menu, pausing a workout, pointing in a specific compass direction, or taking your current heart rate. It’s a simple but comforting aspect of the watch face that you can even customize to a certain degree.

Bottom line, while this isn't much of a looker, it's comfortable to wear and offers enough screen estate to soak up data when you're on the move.

Garmin Instinct: Interface

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Although the Instinct has a major chunk of functionality (more about that later), the five-button control system does require a fair bit of initial investment to get the hang of.

Some of it, like the activity selection or forward-backward/up-down logic, is relatively simple to work out after half an hour of pressing. But delving deeper into the options becomes significantly more challenging.

The Instinct loads up with a set range of screen options providing information, like heart rate over the last four hours, top-line activity stats, phone notifications, events, weather, and compass. Accessing each of these is done via simple up and down buttons and for the most part, the majority are what you’d expect from a Garmin.

The real beauty of the Instinct comes from the customization options. Firstly, you can customize your top-level screens (there are 12 standard watch faces off the bat). Each piece of visible information acts as a little modifiable block.

Once selected (using the top right customization button) you can scroll through dozens of other options to replace it with, dependent on what you want to do with it – for most hardcore outdoor people there are probably more useful pieces of information that daily step goal.

Customizable data includes the usual offenders such as heart rate, cadence, temperature, elevation, target, intervals, and stress data.

Garmin Instinct: Outdoor tracking

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The Instinct has the tech on board to track an extensive range of sports. Running, cycling and swimming are core modes, but it's also going to cater to outdoor activities like hiking, climbing, and even skiing.

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Lumping something like hiking into a standard list of activities has been a problem with most sports watches. Hikers or trail runners want largely different information. Mainly because the kind of things we’re concerned about are unknown elements like getting lost in the middle of the night or falling off a cliff in the fog.

At the top level, the Instinct is a fancy compass that accurately tells you the direction you’re going and tracks the route you’re taking. Unlike the Fenix, the monochrome display doesn’t allow for a map. Instead, the route you take is drawn via GPS markers into a very simple line drawing. At first glance, and without playing around with the zoom settings, the “map” – as it’s labeled – looks completely useless. The first time I tried to glean information from it I thought it was broken. It’s not a map though, it’s a tool to track your relative location.

You may not be able to see landmarks on the Instinct, but you can use topography and direction data to work out a hell of a lot. You just need to invest a bit of time into it.

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This may lack the obvious benefits of an Ordnance Survey map, but does make route finding significantly easier. You’re never going to be able to navigate the Dolomites with a smartwatch on its own, but the information available goes a long way to solving most of the problems you’re likely to encounter.

As well as a magnetic compass, something that isn’t always present on smartwatches, the Instinct includes elevation profiles, an ability to enter specific co-ordinates, storm alerts, Galileo supports (to utilize multiple satellites for optimized accuracy), Site and Go (which essentially lets you set a direction to follow) and courses (the ability to download a route to follow using a breadcrumb trail).

As mentioned earlier, the learning curve to using the navigational functions of the Instinct is pretty steep. But once you’ve spent a few hours on it, everything becomes fairly simple. After getting the hang of the route tracking functions I suddenly realized how useful it would have been on previous hikes I’d done where I ended up walking in circles for big chunks of the day.

Garmin Instinct: Sports tracking

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As mentioned, the Instinct is geared towards hikers and outdoor types (notably climbers or trail runners). If you want a watch for a specific sport, then there are far better alternatives. That doesn’t mean the Instinct isn’t a multi-sport watch, it just means that for the price, you’d probably be disappointed if you were primarily using it for road running.

Hikers do of course do other things though, and luckily, I had the chance to test out the Instinct during a marathon. As a general running watch, it did the job fine. I set the activity interface to show me the things I always use for a race. You won’t get the level of information and detail you can define in more advanced running watches, but it’ll cover enough for most users.

The same rule exists for the long list of other activity options available on the watch. Unless what you’re doing has a navigational aspect, like cycling or trail running, it’ll probably just tick a box for you. The one exception is the strength/gym activity option, which is a deeply pointless and fairly painful addition. The idea is that you can track reps and sets, however, the manual management of the activity means you have to keep pressing the button every time you start and stop a set, often noticing that your total is lower than it should be.

I found I was spending more time playing around with the interface than doing exercise. Still, I’ve yet to see any wearable that’s successfully tackled weight training in any sort of useful way.

Garmin Instinct: Activity tracking and smartwatch features

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Like pretty much all of Garmin's wearables, the Instinct offers 24/7 activity tracking. So we're talking counting steps, monitoring sleep, and displaying that Move bar to give you a quick indication of whether you've been active enough during the day. There are also stress tracking and adaptive step goals to push you a little further each day. Garmin's fitness tracking features are up there with Fitbit's as far as striking a good balance between features and insights is concerned.

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From an accuracy point of view, I didn't have many complaints – although sleep tracking tended to attribute more sleep time in comparison to the Fenix 5 and Fitbit Ionic. Moments of inactivity before sleep, like reading in bed or watching a film, were recorded as actual sleep.

In terms of replacing your smartwatch, the Instinct does a fair bit. It will let you see notifications on the watch display and there is the ability to respond to texts and answer/reject calls (if it's paired to an Android phone). You can also control music playback, hook it up to Garmin's Virb action camera and see calendar and weather information. What you don't get is Garmin Pay, the ability to pack on music, or Connect IQ support. That means you can't add apps, widgets, and custom fields to the watch.

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While much of the Instinct's data can be reviewed on the watch, you're most likely to explore it further once it's synced to Garmin Connect. Whether it's the phone or web app, there's plenty to explore here and you can of course push data to third-party services like Strava once the two accounts have been linked up.

As far as offering an experience that's different from what you'd get from pairing a Fenix or a Forerunner watch, there's nothing big to report here. If you've used a Garmin wearable before, then a lot of what you'll see will feel very familiar. It's jam-packed with data and it can take a bit of time to get to grips with where everything lives. But it's certainly improving as far as a place to dig deeper into your data goes.

Garmin Instinct: Heart rate accuracy

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If you're planning to put the onboard heart rate monitor to good use, I'd say it performs pretty much like Garmin's other watches that pack in the same HR tech. It's good in general, particularly for 24/7 monitoring, but not exceptional once you start putting it to the high-intensity training test.

Against a chest strap for a HIIT session, the live data seemed to be quite inconsistent, with the chest strap reacting quickly to fluctuations in activity and rest periods. The Instinct seemed to have a delay of a few seconds before catching up with the chest strap.

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HR accuracy for HIIT: Garmin Instinct (left) and Garmin HR chest strap (right)

At lower-effort training sessions, the highest heart rate in HIIT training came in within one or two bpms and the average was only three bpms off, which is pretty good. But once you start ramping things up and quickly changing the pace and intensity, more inconsistencies start to creep in.

Working at above 130bpm during HIIT sessions, the Instinct struggled to react to the sudden changes in intensity while the chest strap during the same workout was hitting above 170bpm. The comparative data (image above) subsequently looks like completely different workouts.

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HR accuracy for running: Garmin Instinct (left) and Garmin HR chest strap (right)

When testing against a more consistent bpm activity, in this case, a 10k running race, the Instinct noticeably falls in line with the chest strap but does still record a higher maximum heart rate reading. Although there’s an initial dip using the Instinct against the chest strap, the latter HR data is very close for the remainder of the activity. So, for more endurance-based activities, like hiking or trail running, it seems well-equipped to do a pretty good job.

If you're planning to use the Instinct as your main workout watch though, it'll pay off to invest in a compatible chest strap to give you the most reliable heart rate insights.

Garmin Instinct: Battery life

The battery is a major factor for outdoor watches when you're planning to spend a lot of time away from civilization and not taking that charger with you. Garmin claims that the Instinct gives you 16 hours with the GPS tracking turned on, 40 hours using the UltraTrac GPS optimizing mode (worse GPS but better battery) mode, and two weeks if you just use it as a smartwatch.

In my experience, those numbers seem pretty much on the money. It's well equipped for a long day of trekking or hiking with all of those sensors put to good use with no worrying drop-offs. If you're willing to sacrifice mapping data accuracy for longer tracking time, then you'll get even longer. But for most, the Instinct's battery life is going to do the job.