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

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If you tap the up button you can add a course (or other routing, more on that later), structured training, or change the power profiles. I mean, frankly, you can change anything from this point. For example, you can see how many hours of GPS life you’ll get with your current settings, and then there’s some pre-canned options which show higher GPS levels if you realize you’ll need them. Or, you can go rogue and create your own battery profile: Weather – after a ridiculously short period with sync, it refuses to provide a weather forecast (even if previously, the outlook for several days had been loaded). But an outdated weather forecast is still better than none! 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:

Anyways, enough of that, let’s look at a long ride with extended very tall pine tree sections, plus some cliffs and such. This ride was 118KM long: Of the two new premium adventure watches, I decided the Fenix is the best candidate for anyone looking for a top-of-the-line Garmin. We've been fans of watches from this series over the years— multiple reviewers have loved them—and importantly for people with little wrists, the case size comes as small as 42 mm. The most noticeable difference between the Fenix and the Epix is the screen. The Epix has a 47-mm case size with a big, bright AMOLED touchscreen versus the Fenix's memory-in-pixel (MIP) display. Yes, the Epix's screen is gorgeous, but it has significant downsides. Now as I mentioned, there’s the new Health Snapshot feature. Well, new to the Fenix 7 series that is. This was introduced on the Venu 2 last year, and it takes five core metrics and distills them down into a single 2-minute measurement period. All you need to do is sit down and relax. GPS accuracy can be looked at in a number of different ways, but I prefer to look at it using a number of devices in real-world scenarios across a vast number of activities. I use 2-6 other devices at once, trying to get a clear picture of how a given set of devices handles conditions on a certain day. Conditions include everything from tree/building cover to weather.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. READ NEXT: Our guide to the best running watches you can buy Garmin Fenix 7 review: What you need to know By default, virtually all sport profiles have touch disabled, and then you enable it on a per-profile basis. You can also tweak whether or not touch is enabled/disabled during your sleeping time periods, through a new Sleep Mode manager interface: In the case of the microphone/speaker, Garmin says that the higher waterproofing standard of the Fenix series (100 meters) versus the Venu 2 series (50 meters), makes this challenging at this time. On the LTE front, I asked Garmin why there was no LTE option given it’s been a while since they launched the theoretically inferior FR945. It was the singular item they provided a ‘no comment’ on, out of the arguably 50-70 questions/details I’ve asked over the past two months.

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: Watches in the Garmin Fenix 6 range have received hefty price cuts in recent months (Image credit: Garmin) Design, display and battery life DesignIt's also worth bearing in mind that many retailers are now offering Fenix 6 watches at a substantial discount, so if price is your biggest concern then this might be your best option. 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.