Garmin Instinct 3 (AMOLED & SOLAR) In-Depth Review

The Garmin Instinct series has enjoyed enormous popularity since its launch over 6 years ago. The rugged-looking watches have always aimed to deliver some of the longest battery life in the wearable-GPS world, while still maintaining much of the Garmin outdoor features and functionality. The company has largely balanced on that fence by using monochrome MIP-based displays and components that barely sip power, even adding in solar power for a bit more juice. The pricing of these models has always been affordable, and usually undercut their competitors (the Instinct 2 is currently selling for ~$200USD).

But the Instinct 3, and Garmin’s competitors, are turning parts of the Instinct story on its head. Garmin has split the lineup, to now offer both a stunning (but power-hungry) AMOLED version, as well as the traditional MIP-based SOLAR display with certain modes enabling unlimited GPS battery life. The pricing reaches $499 for the AMOLED edition, despite lacking offline mapping or Garmin’s more recent optical heart rate sensors. Meanwhile, Garmin’s legacy (Polar/Suunto/COROS), big tech (Apple/Samsung), and newfound competitors (AmazFit/etc.) are now offering full-color mapping watches from the $200’s. It’s a tricky time to be an Instinct 3.

Nonetheless, both myself and my wife have been putting the Instinct 3 through its paces over the last while. From 60KM 12-hour mountain treks, to four-hour rides, to openwater swims, trail runs, and more. Even stand-up paddle boarding (someone had to test it…). Both the AMOLED & SOLAR editions, and often compared side-by-side with Garmin’s higher-end Fenix lineup. I’ve got more than enough data to dive into what exceeded expectations and works well, and what’s been a disappointment.

Finally, note that these units are media loaners, and once this review is complete, they will go back to Garmin. I’ve already ordered my own units through normal retail channels. As always, I don’t accept advertising from any company I review – so, if you found this review useful, consider becoming a DCR Supporter, which gets you an ad-free site, plus the behind-the-scenes video series between both myself (and my wife) on everything that happens in the DCR Sports Tech Cave/universe.

What’s New:

Below is a list of all of the differences between the Instinct 3 and the Instinct 2 series. Keeping in mind the Instinct 2X was launched a year after the Instinct 2, and kinda served as an Instinct 2.5, adding in some features that the Instinct 2 didn’t have.

– Added AMOLED display option
– Increased solar charging power by 5x compared to Instinct 2 Solar
– Added flashlight to both sizes (45mm and 50mm)
– Increased display sizes for AMOLED units (Solar is same)
– Ditched secondary display window on AMOLED, but kept it on Solar
– Increased contrast by 2x on Solar editions (versus Instinct 2)
– AMOLED Display Sizes: 45mm is 1.2” display, 50mm is 1.3” display
– Solar Display Sizes: 45mm is 0.9” display, 50m is 1.1” display
– Added metal ring into bezel as “reinforcement”
– Added multiband/dual-frequency GNSS/GPS to all units (Instinct 2X had it)
– Added Garmin’s SatIQ feature to all units (a big deal for battery)
– Added Training Load Focus
– Added Training Load Ratio
– Added Multisport/Triathlon Auto Transition
– Added Nap Detection
– Added Sleep Coach
– Added Muscle Map for Strength Workouts (AMOLED only)
– Added Strength Workout Animations (AMOLED only)
– Added Garmin Share
– Added Garmin Messenger compatibility
– Added Garmin Pay as standard on all units
– Added large font mode, AMOLED only (introduced on other Garmin units recently)
– Added new color options (see below)

From a pricing standpoint, the models are as follows:

– AMOLED: $449 for the 45mm and $499 for the 50mm
– SOLAR: $399 for the 45mm and $449 for the 50mm
– Instinct E: $299 for the 40mm and $299 for the 45mm

And here’s the colors for each, do note however that the Instinct E is very much *NOT* an Instinct 3, albeit announced at the same time. Think of it more like an Instinct 1.5 instead. I’ll have a separate review of that soonish.

For battery life, it’s claimed as per this chart (see my real-world testing though later in the review):

With that, let’s dive into it.

In the Box:

First up, we’ll do a quick dual-unboxing of one AMOLED and one SOLAR edition. It does not matter which size you get, both are the same in terms of box contents. Opening the box, you’ll find the watch with a display sticker on it:

Inside the box there will be:

1) The watch
2) Garmin USB-C charging cable
3) Some paper manual stuffs (Quickstart guide + bigger legal booklet)

That’s it:

You’ll have a gazillion shots of the watch later, so here’s a closer look at the USB cable, and the…umm..stack of paper.

See, I told you this would be quick.

The Basics:

This section will focus on basic usage of the Garmin Instinct 3 series, including bits like 24×7 activity tracking, smartwatch features, and overall usability. Whereas in later sections in the review I’ll get into sports/workout modes, including navigation and a Solar-specific section. Otherwise, unless noted, everything in this section applies to both models.

Of course, right out of the gate, there are two different screens: AMOLED & MIP (all SOLAR editions are MIP). In short, AMOLED is colorful and brilliant (in terms of brightness levels and colors), whereas MIP is monochrome. Of course, the MIP-based devices have longer battery life, due to less power being required. Still, both watches get exceptionally long battery life, as I’ll dive into later in this review. You can see the two side-by-side throughout this review, with the AMOLED always on the left (well, hopefully always on the left).

I’ve been testing both AMOLED & SOLAR editions, though, spending more time in the 24×7 aspects on the AMOLED edition, simply because I prefer the display type. However, for all of my workouts I’ve worn one of each display type (one per wrist), typically the 50mm models. Additionally, my wife has been testing the 45mm AMOLED model, generally opposite the Fenix 8 (43mm) model on her other wrist.

Now interesting, neither Instinct 3 model has a touchscreen. That’s a huge surprise for Garmin, and frankly, I’m not aware of any other AMOLED watch (ever?) that hasn’t had a touchscreen. Garmin offers touchscreens on all their current-gen AMOLED & MIP-based devices. That said, while it took a few days to get used to the lack of touchscreen on the Instinct 3, I’ve mostly gotten used to it.

The funny part is that I don’t even use touch all that much on my AMOLED watches. Rather, it tends to be just for swiping through widgets. That’s it. The main usefulness on most Garmin watches for touch tends to be for mapping (moving around the map screen), which, of course, the Instinct 3 lacks. In any case, the Garmin Instinct 3 has the standard 5-button Garmin layout that is well-loved by Garmin users (including myself).

There are three buttons on the left, and two on the right. Undoubtedly, if you’re coming from any other platform, it might take a few days to get used to it, but for an outdoor-focused watch – having buttons is just critical to all-weather usability.

Now from a user interface standpoint, the first thing you’ll see is the watch face. As with other Garmin watches, you can customize this with either the stock watch faces (choosing data fields/etc…), or Connect IQ watch faces (a gazillion options, including making your own with photos/etc…). Obviously, the AMOLED display gives you a bit more flexibility in terms of colors/pixels/etc…

Tapping down from there you’ve got the various widgets, or more specifically, the widget glances. These are smaller tidbits of information, that you can then open up the full widget to see the larger picture (including usually multiple data pages).

There are both built-in widgets for common things like steps, sleep, training load, etc… As well as also Connect IQ widgets/apps that can cover a wide range of 3rd party apps, including even offline mapping with Komoot (though, it’s got lots of limitations). There’s plenty of practical widgets, like ABC (Altimeter, Barometer, Compass), or one of my favorites with tide information for any number of saved locations, as well as moon phases, etc…

 

The unit will track your daily activity just like any other Garmin watch. In fact, that’s probably one of the most notable things about Garmin’s lineup, is that they all track almost all the same metrics, whether you have a $3,000 MARQ or a $150 Vivo-something. The exceptions to that being the ECG capability, and skin-temperature capability, which are only found in the Gen5 optical HR sensor watches (this has a Gen4 optical HR sensor).

As I noted in my earlier preview, the fact that Garmin didn’t put a Gen5 optical HR sensor in here is mind-boggling. After all, their Venu 3 watch that came out 18 months ago has it, and that’s priced less than the Instinct 3. Still, for everything outside of ECG/skin-temp, it’s frankly all identical (with some differences in workout accuracy, as I’ll cover later).

All of your stats are also synced to the Garmin Connect app automatically in the background via Bluetooth (no WiFi on the Instinct 3 series), and then onwards to the Garmin Connect platform, where you can also access it via web browser. Here’s a few random stats pages from Garmin Connect Mobile:

One of those metrics is, of course, sleep. The Instinct 3 series will automatically track your sleep stats, as well as track naps. Here you can see what that looks like within the widget gallery:

And then again in the app:

In my testing, the time I woke up/fell asleep was correctly recorded without issue. As I noted in other reviews, I don’t do sleep stage/phase comparisons, because frankly the comparative technologies (even so-called ‘Gold standard’ ones, just aren’t all that accurate). Those technologies top-out in the mid-80% range, which we’d never use to compare accuracy of the heart rate sensor, or cycling power meters. Thus, I won’t here. Instead, I don’t really worry too much about sleep phase/stage data. For the most part, if you’re getting a sufficient number of sleep hours in, without interruptions (which it is pretty good at tracking), you’ll be just fine.

Oh, and that reminds me. Each morning, you’ll wake up and see the Morning Report. It’s one of the features that Garmin users talk about the most, and I agree – it’s awesome as a quick recap of not just your sleep stats, but also Training Readiness, upcoming scheduled workouts (or calendar appointments), and more.

Meanwhile, at night, the flashlight is your friend. The Instinct 3 series has a built-in LED flashlight on the front of it. That flashlight contains both a white LED (4 levels of brightness), and a red LED.

You can double-tap the upper left button to turn it on, and adjust the brightness level:

It’s one of those features that people think sounds very Inspector Gadget, and then you use it, and realize you can’t live without it. After all, countless numbers of us use our phone’s flashlight constantly. This is just as bright, except it lets us keep our hands free. I use it for both day-to-day stuff, like getting around a hotel room in the middle of the night, to checking on the kids (or previously, changing diapers), to looking under the bed or behind a cabinet. And then equally, out in the wilderness, it’s great in a tent at night, or if you’re running behind on a run and didn’t bring a light/etc…

You can even configure it to blink a certain pattern while running, even configured to your cadence. Lots of options there.

Last but not least, there are smartphone notifications and Garmin Pay. For smartphone notifications, you’ll see messages/app notifications based on how your phone is configured. In the case of iOS, you can see and dismiss them, but you cannot respond to texts (due to Apple restrictions), whereas in Android, you can respond to texts.

And then on Garmin Pay, all Instinct 3 watches have Garmin Pay, which is NFC contactless payments. You can load up your bank/credit card onto it, and then make payments for ice cream after a run.

As always with Garmin Pay, you’ll want to check their site to see if your bank is supported (as of this moment, it appears there are 1,681 banks supported). In the US, most of the major credit cards are supported. In Europe, it’s hit or miss. And the rest of the world also depends. And again, this is tied to the bank of your credit card, not the retailer. Once my credit card is loaded, I’ve never had an issue with any retailer globally with this (and I travel a ton).

Oh wait, one more thing! Garmin added ‘Large Font Mode’ to the Instinct 3 (AMOLED only), which basically slightly increases the font sizes in many of the menus and watch data fields. It doesn’t impact the watch faces, likely because there are already a gazillion large-font options within that (both within Garmin and 3rd party watch faces). Here’s a quick side-by-side of what that looks like when you enable that toggle:

One could argue that maybe a bigger large-font mode might be useful for some, though given Garmin introduced this 18 months ago on the Venu 3, I presume they’ve incorporated whatever feedback people have had about the feature, and this probably finds that balance.

Sports & Workout Modes:

Of course, while many people buy the Garmin Instinct series for its looks or battery life, the majority tend to end up using it for sports at some point. Thus, we’ll cover all the sporting bits here – be it hardcore training workouts, or more relaxing tracking like the SUP meander seen above. This watch has gained quite a few features over the last two iterations – so if you’re coming from an Instinct 1 series watch, you’ll be pleasantly surprised (tons more sport modes, including multisport mode, as well as triathlon support, Training Readiness, and much more). Whereas from an Instinct 2 series watch, the sports features are much more minor. Specifically, from an Instinct 2 series watch, they’ve added:

– Added multiband/dual-frequency GNSS/GPS to all units (Instinct 2X had it)
– Added Garmin’s SatIQ feature to all units (a big deal for battery)
– Added Training Load Focus
– Added Training Load Ratio
– Added Multisport/Triathlon Automatic Transitions
– Added Muscle Map for Strength Workouts (AMOLED only)
– Added Strength Workout Animations (AMOLED only)

So, let’s start with opening up the sports/workout mode listing. To do this, as is the case on almost all Garmin watches, you’ll simply tap the upper right button at any time. This will open up the sport listing menu, where you can save/pin favorites, or just meander through to find the sport you need.

Here’s all the sports on the Instinct 3 as of January 28th, 2025:

Multisport, Walk, Golf, Climb, Bouldering, Fish, Hunt, Disc Golf, Horseback, Archery, Inline Skating, Walk, Run, Treadmill, Trail Run, Hike, Virtual Run, Track Run, Indoor Track, Obstacle Racing, Triathlon, Swimrun, Bike, Bike Indoor, MTB, eBike, eMTB, CycloCross, Gravel Bike, Bike Commute, Bike Tour, Road Bike, BMX, Pool Swim, Openwater Swim, Swimrun, Strength, Cardio, HIIT, Yoga, Pilates, Elliptical, Stair Stepper, Walk Indoor, Row Indoor, Climb Indoor, Floor Climb, Boxing, Mixed Marital Arts, Ski, Snowboard, Backcountry Ski, Backcountry Snowboard, XC Classic Ski, XC Skate Ski, Snowshoe, Ice Skating, Kayak, Row, SUP, Surf, Kiteboarding, Windsurf, Whitewater, Boat, Wakeboard, Wakesurf, Water Ski, Tube, Snorkel, Soccer/Football, American Football, Basketball, Baseball, Softball, Volleyball, Cricket, Lacrosse, Rugby, Field Hockey, Ice Hockey, Ultimate Disc, Gaming, Tennis, Pickleball, Padel, Racquetball, Squash, Badminton, Table Tennis, Platform Tennis, ATV, Snowmobile, Overland, Motocross, Motorcycle, Horseback, Breathwork, Tactical, Gaming, Expedition, Other

We do tend to see Garmin add sports over time (especially in the last year or two), so I’d expect this list will grow.

Once you tap a sport mode (using running here as an example), it’ll start searching for heart rate lock and GPS (if outdoors). Likewise, it’ll connect to any sensors you may have paired which are active.

You can tap into the settings to change data pages, data fields, or customize anything about the sport profile. Since the Instinct 2 series, you can also customize virtually everything in here on your phone as well. Garmin lets you tweak these settings from either location, both before and during an activity (handy if you change your mind mid-activity).

You can have up to 6 data fields per custom data page (in a variety of layouts), and approximately a gazillion custom data pages. That’s atop stock pages you can enable/disable, like the HR Gauge page, Run Dynamics, Virtual Partner, Compass, Elevation, Music Control, Clock, and more. World’s your oyster here.

Going back for just one moment, when you first opened the sport type, if it was running or cycling, you may have received a Daily Suggested Workout (DSW). This is based on either simply getting you more fit, or, a scheduled event on your calendar. These will also automatically adjust based on training load, as well as recovery. Said differently: If you have horrific sleep, or do a big workout and are showing signs of needing recovery, it’ll tweak these (and even remove them), on the fly.

I find these workouts to be fairly legit, especially once you get some training history into the watch for it to start cranking the screws down on you.

Of course, you can always do manually created structured workouts, or ones from coaches. You can create structured workouts in Garmin Connect (or on the watch directly), or you can choose from a variety of free training plans from Garmin Connect. Practically speaking though, I’d probably just stick an event on my calendar, and let DSW take care of things, rather than doing a specific pre-canned plan. But that’s just me.

Likewise, it supports workouts from 3rd party training providers like TrainingPeaks, Final Surge, and plenty more. Here’s one I pushed in from TrainingPeaks, for a recent run:

In any event, with all that behind us (I’ll save navigating for the next section), we’ll tap to get started. From here, you’ll see the data pages as you’ve configured them. You can simply use the up/down buttons to iterate through them.

I’ve had no problems from a pace stability standpoint during running, or really any other mid-workout issues (aside from the ones listed in the bugs section). Everything here pretty much works exactly as expected.

Once your workout is completed, you’ll see a summary screen of all your stats:

You can further dive into these on Garmin Connect (smartphone app or desktop web), such as the below examples:

And of course, if you’ve set up integration to 3rd party apps like Strava or TrainingPeaks (and hundreds of others), it’ll sync to those as well within a few seconds.

Meanwhile, back on the watch, you’ve got all your Training Load/Recovery stats. These are enumerated in a few places. At a high level, you’ve got Training Load (Acute Load) which is tracking your recent training load and how it compares to your historical load (7 day vs 28 day). This is the basis for whether you’ll see the famed ‘Productive’/‘Unproductive’/etc… messages.

Garmin changed much of that logic about two years ago, so it’s now incredibly hard to get unproductive unless you’re legit doing something pretty stupid (from a training/coaching standpoint). I’ve yet to see a case in the last 18-24 months that puts me in unproductive, that I would disagree with. Most times, it’s right. And most people seem to agree as well. About the only scenario that can pop people, rarely, is high-volume training camps – but only if your HRV & VO2Max scores plummet as well (in which case, from a pure coaching standpoint, yeah, Garmin is correct, it’s unlikely to be productive).

The Acute Load then forms one of the pillars for Training Readiness. In fact, this is one of many different training metrics the Instinct 3 has, which include:

Training Readiness: This metric aims to be your one-stop shop to decide whether or not to train that day. It blends Sleep (vs both short and long-term history), Recovery Time, HRV Status, Acute Load, and Stress. In short, you can spike one category (badly) without necessarily killing your next training day. But all categories aren’t created equal.

Training Status: This is looking at your acute load, HRV status, load focus, and VO2Max trends. This one is less about should you train, and more about how you’re training. Meaning, are you doing too much high intensity, or too much low intensity? That’s what’ll give you an unproductive status. In other words, how would a coach look at your training log, ignoring most other life/feeling type metrics.

HRV Status: This is measuring your HRV values constantly while you sleep, and then comparing it against your 3-week baseline, up to a 90-day rolling window baseline. A single night of drinking doesn’t tank this score, but three nights of partying won’t keep you in the green.

Acute Load: This is looking at your last 7 days of load, except the load now burns off dynamically. Meaning, a hard training day 7 days ago is far less impactful to the score than a hard training day yesterday. Previously this was called 7-Day Load, now it’s Acute Load.

Load Focus: This shows which categories your training efforts have fallen into, over the last 4 weeks. These include Anaerobic, High Aerobic, and Low Aerobic. Basically, you need to have a varied training diet to get faster. Simply running hard/all-out every day won’t make you faster. It’ll just get you injured and slower.

Recovery Time: This calculates how much time you need till your next hard-intensity workout. As is often misconstrued, this isn’t till your next workout, just your next hard one. This is largely the same as before. Exceptionally good sleep can speed this up, and inversely, a high-stress day can slow this down.

Load Ratio: Training Load Ratio is a comparison of this week’s Training Load versus that 28-day average. In other words: How does this week’s load compare to the last 28 days load?

But let’s focus on Training Readiness for now. The idea with Training Readiness is to take a bunch of components under one umbrella, and figure out how ‘ready’ you are to ‘train’ at that very second in the day. The value will shift throughout the day (higher if you do nothing, lower if you do a workout). Each of the components are weighted in varying ways, and against varying timeframes. Here’s the run-down:

Sleep: This one is specifically looking at last night’s sleep

Recovery time: This looks at your Recovery time in hours (based on workouts, but can be sped-up with good recovery)

HRV Status: This is comparing your 7-day trend versus historical trend

Acute Load: This is looking at your 7-day trend, weighted towards newness

Sleep History: This is looking at last night versus your prior 2 nights of sleep history

Stress History: This is looking at the recent daytime data (excluding overnight readings)

Again, the entire purpose of Training Readiness is a live score of whether or not you’re ready to train at that moment in the day. The score will generally rise throughout the day (if just relaxing), and then following a big training effort, will plummet down (to reflect that recovery time). An easier training effort, and it’ll shift down less.

The two biggest factors in your Training Readiness score are Sleep and Recovery time (workout recovery time). In fact, you can have low recovery time, but if you’ve got poor sleep – it’ll slaughter the score. Whereas HRV Status is meant to be a checks and balances type component to mitigate some of the others (both positively or negatively).

Outside of those two, the biggest component I tend to look at training-wise is my Acute Load. At first glance, you might think this is just 7-day Load renamed, but that doesn’t really cover what it actually does. Yes, it shows your 7-day load, but load burns off dynamically. In years past, if you had a big ride 6 days ago, that load would be factored into your total 7-day load duration as if it just happened yesterday. Versus with Acute Load, it’s weighted to burn-off within a few days, as logical. That’s because a week later it’s unlikely that big ride is still impacting you. The point of this is to reduce the massive swings that used to occur in the Training Status panel when a big workout from a week ago disappears, making you go instantly from Productive to Unproductive in a matter of seconds.

You’ll see the new Load Ratio screen in here as well, which is looking at your 30-day exercise load versus your acute load. In this case, looking at my wife’s watch (the green one) illustrates it pretty well, as she’s just begun her taper for a race in about 10 days.

Keep in mind that Training Readiness changes throughout the day, as you have a workout it’ll decrease (logical, since your ‘readiness to train’ is now lower), and if you have good sleep, it’ll be higher than the night before.

Ultimately, I find it to be a pretty good indicator of how I feel – though, like most companies, it’ll take a fair bit of historical data (about 30 days or so, of good steady/representative data) to find its stride.

Navigation:

The Instinct 3 contains the ability to navigate on routes, using so-called ‘Breadcrumb’ style navigation. This means there are no offline maps on the watch itself, but rather, you simply follow a little line on a blank page. The watch will notify you of upcoming turns (based on the platform that created the route), and then let you know when you’ve gone off-course.

Unquestionably, this is the biggest disappointment for the Instinct 3. At a time when all of their competitors have offline mapping from the mid-$200 range (Apple, AmazFit), to the $300’s (Suunto, COROS, Polar), and even Garmin itself in the $399-$449 range (Epix, Fenix 7, Forerunner 955). For Garmin to launch a $500 outdoors-focused hiking watch without offline maps in 2025 is pretty hard to swallow.

Nonetheless, some of you won’t care about maps, so…yeah, I’ll tell you how it works anyway.

I’ve been using it on many trail runs and hikes this month, including a 60KM 12-hour trek deep into the mountains in both daylight and dark. However, that same hike illustrated numerous times where having maps would speed up messy navigation moments, that the Instinct would require more trial and error on (such as complex trail junctions).

In any case, you can create your route on Garmin Connect (desktop or mobile app), or import it in from numerous other platforms such as Strava, Komoot, and many others. You can also import in GPS files like .GPX/.TCX/.FIT/etc… Using the 60KM hike as an example, I created the route initially on Strava, which synced to Garmin Connect. From there, I added in waypoints for various items (water stops, milestones, etc…).

After that, it synced to my watch automatically. Here, I could select it within the navigation section of the sport profile. In this case it’ll show me a quick overview of the map, as well as the elevation profile:

Note that while past Garmin watches, including the Instinct, used to have various limits on the number of points in a course, that limit was removed about 15 months ago. I was able to load (and navigate) this course just fine, as well as loading my 200KM Tour de Mont Blanc route without issue. This was true on both the AMOLED and SOLAR versions. To sidestep any limits, simply import the original file into Garmin Connect, and it’ll automatically convert it to a .FIT file when it sends it to your watch (which has no limits). Here’s the same series as above, but on the Instinct 3 Solar:

Though, the Instinct 3 SOLAR is noticeably slower to load the route (you can see this in real-time in the video), as well as saving anything over an hour or so in duration takes upwards of 30+ seconds (compared to instantly on the AMOLED edition).

In any event, once I was ready to start my hike, I started the route and headed out. You’ll see the track up ahead, and your location on the map. Here’s how it looks on both AMOLED and SOLAR:

You’ll get turn notifications as well. Exactly when you get these will vary based on the platform that created them. In general though, Garmin Connect does a pretty good job of specifying these (note the arrow in the Solar little mini-window with 40m to the left of it, and then the arrow at the bottom of the AMOLED with 39m left to the turn):

Once you go roughly 50m off-course, you’ll get an alert to figure out your way back to the course.

The watch will give you a variety of distance/time estimates till completion, based on your current pacing. However, there is no ClimbPro for climbs (one of my favorite features on all other Garmin watches with maps). Though, you will see a complete elevation profile of the full course, and your location on it:

And, Garmin does have their ‘Up head’ waypoints feature, which shows you distance until the next waypoints as defined in the course I created (I created all of these waypoints). I love using waypoints as a helpful way to break up my day, and keep track of key points along the way.

Note that Garmin heavily truncates the route line on an Instinct, compared to their other devices. Check out this same section compared to a Fenix:

Still, the lack of maps becomes super apparent when you’re left with either overgrown trails, or unclear trail junctions. Think of a scenario with a 3-4 way fork in the trail, where the three pieces of the fork all go off at slightly different angles. On a map, you can clearly see the three junctions. But in the case of the Instinct, there is no map, thus, you just see a single line (not three lines), so it ends up being trial and error until you get it right. While that’s nothing new to breadcrumb navigation (for the past 10-15 years), the whole point of wearables moving to maps is to make our lives easier. And again, all their competitors have this, and even Garmin’s own other watches have this.

This was also true on a different day, during a trail run, where I couldn’t quite figure out if the route wanted me down along the beach, or up above the cliffs (less than 50m away, but separated by significant drops). On the Instinct, it was impossible to tell, since you can’t even see water vs land. Whereas on the Fenix, it was easy to see I was in the correct spot.

Of course, Garmin did make one half-hearted effort here, by adding a new city points listing on the Instinct 3. This will show a dot and the name of a city/town. But really, it’s more cities than towns. And thus, I fail to see the value in knowing that a city is 50KM away, when there are countless small towns much closer (but not showing up) in the case of emergencies.

I could be totally onboard this if almost any town with an intersection or store or something of note, showed up, since that would likely indicate some humans to help. Perhaps we’ll see Garmin expand that database definition.

Ultimately, navigation works on the Instinct 3, and yes, you’ll likely get where you want to go, but this is the first time in many years where I think Garmin is forgetting that their beginnings as a company were in navigation and mapping. Trying to withhold this feature reminds me of the days when Garmin kept trying to charge people for maps on bike computers (and handhelds), when every other company was doing it for free. As a result, companies like Wahoo and others quickly won substantial market share. I suppose history will repeat itself.

Solar & Battery Testing:

This section only applies to the Garmin Instinct 3 SOLAR editions (which have a MIP display), as the AMOLED edition doesn’t have any solar functionality. Solar of course has long been a mainstay of Instinct editions, after Garmin acquired the assets from a French company, SunPartner Technologies, back in 2019.

The Instinct 3 features a new solar layer though, the first notable change since that acquisition. This new solar layer was introduced back on the Fenix 8 Solar this past fall. The defining feature is that it gets rid of the reddish tint of the solar layer, and also removes the transparent solar layer that used to be atop the display, instead keeping it purely on the non-screen portions of the watch. Despite the reduced surface area, it has significantly increased solar capturing capability. Below, you can see the differences between an Instinct 2X and Instinct 3, in terms of the solar layer coloring and placement.

(Left: Instinct 2X SOLAR, right, Instinct 3 SOALR 50mm)

Note that the Instinct 3 has a new MIP display, which significantly increases the contrast and clarity seen on the Instinct 3, here it is compared to the Instinct 2 (black case), Instant 2X (red case), and Instinct 3 (orange band):

When it comes to monitoring those solar gains, you can see it in a few ways. First, the watch face has a few data complications that can show it, including both the current sun level (a little sun icon with dashed lines around it), as well as a chart tracking solar intake. Each of the dashed lines indicates how much of a full charge is coming in. When it goes entirely black, that’s 100% inbound solar power:

You can also tap down to get to the solar widget, which will show the same information with a bit more detail, over the past 6 hours. It’ll also show the solar gains for the day:

Now, the only problem here is that, as of publishing, the little sun icon isn’t working in the production firmware version. Seriously. At all. It’s supposed to show how sunny it is (in terms of 0 to 100%), such as seen on the Instinct 2X. But there’s a bug that prevents it from doing anything. How nobody at Garmin noticed this is beyond me. (Above/below, when you see it working, it’s in an advance beta copy of an upcoming firmware that hopefully will be released certainly). Otherwise, despite full sun, it’ll look like this:

Next, atop that, you should be able to place an Instinct 3 in the sun, and it’ll gain (considerable) battery charge. That too, isn’t working in the production firmware. Apparently some sort of UI bug is preventing those gains from being shown (they work just fine on the Instinct 2 and 2X in my side-by-side testing). I don’t really understand how that bug prevents the gains from showing, yet the total power shown is correct? Or not. Not sure. Again, over the weekend I got an updated beta firmware to fix that issue, which allowed me to do the ‘sitting in sun’ tests.

Either way, that gets us to their battery claims. All of Garmin’s battery claims have two columns, one for no-sun, and one for sun. The sun claim is based on 50,000 lux conditions for 3 hours per day, which is a pretty minimal amount of sun to be honest. That’s more or less a slightly (thin/light clouds) hazy sun, even in the winter. Full blue-sky is much stronger.

I’ve been doing a bunch of testing on this, and the results are incredibly impressive during workouts. In particular, I was really interested in the claims related to ‘GPS-Only’, since that has upwards of 260 hours of claimed. Battery. I didn’t use the ‘Maximum Battery GPS mode’, which has unlimited GPS time, though you’ll see that GPS-Only is pretty darn impressive.

Now I’ve been taking it out on all sorts of adventures, but part of the ‘challenge’ of the Instinct 3 Solar, is that the battery life is *SO* good, that in order to get useful data, you basically need to do something no less than about 90 minutes and really closer to about 3 hours to start to see battery impacts. Below that threshold, you might not even see the battery lose even 1%. Compounding my testing has been the numerous crashes I’ve had on the Instinct 3 Solar, causing some loss of entire data files (see Bugs section later).

Example 1:

Duration: 12hr long hike
Conditions: Blue sky sunny, except blockages due to mountains, trees/etc.. from time to time, darkness last 3hrs
GNSS Type: GPS Only
Optical Heart Rate: Yes/enabled
Navigation: Enabled/following route/course
Estimated battery duration: 75 hours for Solar edition, and 41 hours for AMOLED edition.

Example 2:
Duration: 3hr road ride (triangle loops)
Conditions: Sunny, but only about 30-40% of the time due to body position relative to sun and wrist on handlebars
GNSS Type: GPS Only
Cycling Sensors: None
Optical Heart Rate: Yes/enabled
Navigation: None
Estimated battery duration: 300hours+ for Solar edition, 58hrs for AMOLED

Note: This is actually a great example of why you need really long activities for these estimations to work. Essentially every time the battery % changes, it updates the file. So you see that happen about 25 minutes in for the Solar (going from 100% to 99%. And then it just stays there the rest of the time. We don’t know if it was at 99.4% or 99.01%. So, for all we know, it could have gone another hour or more before it dropped to 98%. Either way, it’s incredibly impressive, given the GPS accuracy you see below for this ride (in accuracy section) is perfect.

General Battery Observations:

AMOLED with multiband/SatIQ: In general, I’m seeing most of my runs/rides end up with battery estimations of roughly 35-45 hours in a SatIQ mode with optical HR. Navigation is seemingly playing almost no impact in this.

Solar with multiband/SatIQ: I have less data on Solar with multiband, because frankly I lost so many solar data sets due to crashes. But for those that do have it, it seems to be in the 50-80hr range. But my multiband data sets aren’t super awesome, given all the issues I was having at the time. I’ll likely re-test some of these back in multiband now that other bug fixes have resolved the crash issues.

Solar with GPS-only: Consistently, in all of my workouts, I’m seeing well under 1%/hour with this configuration, even with navigation enabled. In fact, I can’t even show you charts (like above), because in some of these 75-90min trail runs, the battery never changes (and thus, there’s nothing on the chart to plot).

So then, what about battery gains from solar by itself without a workout involved? Well, that too is interesting. First up, I’ll note that until you get on a firmware version of 7.XX or higher, you won’t actually see any of these gains. There’s all assortment of bugs on the production releases that won’t properly show solar gains on the UI (it wouldn’t show the solar sun icon status blocks, nor the actual gains from the panels in the battery percentage). More on that later. In any case, over the weekend I received a firmware update from Garmin that enables those two features again (they were in previous Instinct 1/2/2X solar watches). Thus, I was able to do some testing, and the results were fascinating.

However, first, a technical notable: I had been doing some other solar wattage tests earlier in the week, and was noticing that the solar gains were cutting in half at various points during the day, and cutting out altogether. But, only on one watch, not both Instinct 3 watches (or the Instinct 2X). You can see this below:

Confused, I raised this to Garmin. In my eyes, this looked like some sort of bug. Or at least, the solar panel overheating or something (the weather isn’t that warm, but is very sunny). However, after some digging, they came back and confirmed neither. Instead, the solar panel was doing exactly as designed.

You see, the ‘problem child’ watch was actually up to 98-99% battery level, whereas the other was in the 60% range. Garmin has implemented a number of battery protections on their solar watches that rate-limit inbound charging the higher the battery percentage (to mitigate battery longevity issues). These sorts of limits are in place on all kinda of tech devices, from phones to laptops, and more. However, how the Garmin UI was manifesting these slow-downs leaves a bit to be desired.

They noted that essentially the fuller the battery, the more strict Garmin was in terms of solar charging speed and allowances. They said the ideal battery % to see just how fast it’d be charging in the sun, was around 20-30%. So, I reduced the battery on these watches by turning on the flashlight at full blast for a few hours, while turning on multiband GNSS indoors (so it has to work harder to find signal it won’t get).

Soon, I was back outside testing. This first test I had put all units down to 20% battery. Obviously, we don’t know if one was at 20.1% and another at 20.9%, I just now they said 20%. I stuck it on the roof in mostly sunny conditions, that would eventually become cloudy later on. All faced the sun, with nothing blocking any of them at any point in time. Given the low position of the sun in the winter arcing across horizon, I didn’t have to move the watches at all.

Here’s the results:

Start: 1:47PM
End: 5:27PM
Duration: ~3hrs 45mins
Instinct 2X: From 20% to 25% (211k lux hours)
Instinct 3 Solar Orange (50mm): From 20% to 40% (328k lux hours)
Instinct 3 Solar Black (50mm): From 20% to 38% (287k lux hours)

The next day, I stuck them out longer. This time it was again very sunny at the beginning, but also slowly got cloudy in the late afternoon.

Still, I managed some serious solar gains, check out these numbers:

Start: 11:38AM
End: 5:10PM
Duration: ~5hrs 30mins
Instinct 2X: From 23% to 33% (340k lux hours)
Instinct 3 Solar Orange (50mm): From 36% to 51% (517k lux hours)
Instinct 3 Solar Black (50mm): From 34% to 50% (458k lux hours)

I have no question that had these been out there at sunrise, and left till sunset, without clouds, I’d easily have doubled these gains. But it was the weekend, I slept in, and the clouds were what they were. However, it’s not clear to me why the two different (yet theoretically identical) Instinct 3 50mm units had such differences in solar intake. I cleaned the screen of each prior to each start (with my t-shirt).

Point here is, the changed solar tech on the Instinct 3 is very real, and significantly improved over the Instinct 2X. But more important than just the solar gains, is the burn side of that (redemption side, if you will). Extra gains doesn’t mean anything if you’ve got crappy high-burning processing. And in this case, they’ve substantially increased burn rates on GPS-only modes especially, without any real-world impact to GPS accuracy in most situations. Thus, let’s talk about that.

Accuracy (GPS & Heart Rate):

When it comes to heart rate accuracy, the Instinct 3 takes Garmin’s tried and true Elevate V4 optical HR sensor (but not the Elevate V5, introduced more than 18 months ago). Meanwhile, it appears to use the same GPS chipset as other recent Garmin watches, which is among the best in the industry (if not the best) in terms of GPS accuracy in a multiband/dual-frequency configuration.

Nonetheless, I always test these components, as things can change. For example, a key part of GPS accuracy is antenna design, which is often integrated or heavily dependent on bezel design. And the Instinct 3 has a unique bezel design with the new metal band around the outside edge.

Now, in this review, I also wanted to dig into the ‘GPS-Only’ configuration a bit more. On the Instinct 3 in particular (especially Solar), the GPS-only configuration has absolutely crazy-bonkers battery life. The question is, is the GPS accuracy in that configuration still usable? So, I spent probably half my test time digging into that across a lot of scenarios.

In any event, let’s begin indoors with some heart rate tests. First up, an indoor trainer ride to suffer a bit.

As you can see above, I have the Instinct 3 AMOLED on the left wrist, and Instinct 3 SOLAR on the right wrist. For whatever reason, in the first few minutes there was some slight variability from the left-wrist unit. I don’t believe this is any difference between AMOLED vs SOLAR, but rather, just a case of left vs right here. Having something offset for the first few seconds isn’t super unusual (for any type of HR sensors), though having some variances in the 10-12 minute range is a bit unexpected.

Next up, another indoor trainer ride for heart rate pain purposes. This one was a much more structured workout (versus the sustained build of the above one). Here you can see this structure (which was essentially 4-5 minute intervals followed by shorter intervals). Note the colors changed, sorry.

Overall the values are very close, though I do see a tiny bit of wobble on the Instinct 3 AMOLED here that I wouldn’t entirely expect. It’s barely noticeable though.

So, let’s start moving outside for some heart rate testing, starting off with an interval run.

As you can see, the Instinct 3 is essentially identical to the Polar & Apple sensors. Very solid given some of these were pretty short intervals in the second half of the 75-minute long workout.

Next, heading out into the forest for a trail run, with lots of variability in terrain (up and down), which can cause challenges for optical HR sensors (especially downhill). And you can see the Instinct 3 on one wrist, and then the Fenix 8 optical on the other wrist. The Instinct 3 makes a few more errors than the Fenix 8 does (more on that in a sec).

Whereas if we look at this interval run on a cold/cool night, where you really see the difference, side-by-side between the Gen4 sensor of the Instinct 3 on one wrist, and the Gen5 sensor of the Fenix 8 on the other wrist (being near-perfect).

Next, switching to an outdoor ride, here’s a 3 hour ride from Friday. You can see a bit of wonk around the 15-minute marker, that’s when I had to address a mechanical issue, so, I wouldn’t overthink that part. As always, outdoor cycling continues to be one of the most challenging things for optical HR sensors, still, this is actually pretty darn good.

There’s one other brief moment around the 90-minute marker, where the Solar unit has a blip, and then briefly at the end, oddly enough. But by and large, this is actually a pretty solid performance for a Garmin Gen4 optical HR sensor.

Whereas on this evening ride I did have some slightly rougher road conditions in cooler weather, you can see the differences between Instinct 3 with its Gen4 on one wrist, and Fenix 8 with its Gen5 on the other:

In any case, the above is a pretty good overall sample of my results.

So, let’s look at some of the GPS activities. First, let’s look at multiband performance, via SatIQ. SatIQ is Garmin’s GPS setting where it’ll automatically use multiband/dual-frequency GPS when it needs it (e.g., trees/buildings), but then reduce the power demands when it doesn’t need it. Starting off with some road cycling, at a high level (with SatIQ enabled), you can see things are perfect:

As we zoom in to some twisty sections, you see the Garmin units easily nail this, though, on the high-speed descent back down, the Wahoo ACE cuts some of the corners:

Switching into a trail run in the woods and along some cliffs with SatIQ enabled, and again, at a high level, we can see no issues:

As we zoom in along some cliff edges with overhangs, we can see the differences between the Instinct 2 (with the different/older non-multi-band GPS chipset), and the newer Instinct 3 chipset:

This is what that section looked like in real-life (I would go up against that cliff, and then was in that cave thingy where the arrow was pointing).

And then in the woods, no problems either:

Now, what about the GPS-only configuration (which trades a ton of battery life for slightly lesser accuracy), how does that handle? Well, let’s dig into it a bit. Starting off with some street running, you’ll see no real issues. Yes, I did run on both sides of the street, construction forced us over there.

The only bits I could quibble with was one of the corners it cut slightly. I suspect most people would be more than happy with that massive increase in battery life, for a few meters of corner-cutting every once in a while. But of course, that’s the choice you can make.

Of course, as seen above, it’s not every corner. We did boatloads of loops around this section, and no problems on this corner.

The same goes for this trail run, where it’s near impossible to tell, even in the same sections as earlier up against/on cliff edges:

If we look at my 60KM hike into the mountains:

We’ll notice the vast majority of the time, the difference is non-existent, even in tricky conditions up against mountain sides (and mountain slides), in the forest:

Or here:

Still, there are moments where there’s definitely a difference, at least on one wrist. You can see here where basically two units for a brief period were like ‘Nah, I’m not gonna do the switch-back thing’.

But that is far and above the exception rather than the rule.

Oh, and here’s the elevation plot from that hike:

Meanwhile, no issues in road cycling either, where in GPS-only it is 100% identical to the multiband/dual-frequency GPS units I had with me.

Oh, and finally, what about openwater swimming? For this, I was back in AutoSelect mode (SatIQ). And here, things look pretty solid. Some slight differences between left and right wrists, but no real complaints:

Wrapping things up, starting with the optical HR sensor side, it acts and behaves just like past Gen4 optical HR sensors. Which is to say that on the whole it’s pretty good, but it falls short of some of the trickier edge cases seen in Garmin’s Gen5 optical HR sensors. As noted earlier, I don’t really get why Garmin is trying to differentiate on optical HR sensors here, when none of their competitors do (Apple puts the same optical HR sensor in a $400 watch as a $800 watch). Reminds me of the day when Garmin would skip on stair tracking in $300 watches, yet a $70 Fitbit had it. The good news though is if you have a use case where the optical HR sensor isn’t working for you, you can still pair an external HR sensor just fine (e.g., chest strap or arm band).

In any case, on the GPS side, things continue to be impressive. Whatever magic Garmin’s GPS team has done on their devices in the last few years continues to outshine their competition – even when you put it into the most power-saving modes, it still often matches or beats their multi-band competitors. While my preference is to use Garmin’s SatIQ (AutoSelect setting), I’ve had no issues the past few weeks using GPS-Only. It just doesn’t bother me to be in that mode, mainly because Garmin’s improved so much there compared to just a few years ago. It’s rather astonishing, especially when you consider that in my 3-hour ride on Friday, I was at a battery burn rate of 0.3%/hour (with perfect GPS tracks). Mind-boggling.

(Note: All of the charts in these accuracy sections were created using the DCR Analyzer tool. It allows you to compare power meters/trainers, heart rate, cadence, speed/pace, GPS tracks, and plenty more. You can use it as well for your own gadget comparisons, more details here.)

Bugs & Bumps:

The Instinct 3 has hardly been flawless, especially the Solar model. That said, over the past week in particular, it’s gotten quite a bit better, though I don’t believe that firmware has been released publicly yet, but should be. Still, this watch has been publicly available for about 3 weeks now, and thus, I’m going to call out the issues I’ve had during that timeframe (and the current status of them). Most of the time I include the issues within the main body of the review, especially if they’re relatively minor. But this time, things have been quite a bit bumpier – with countless crashes and some loss of data/workouts.

Frequent Fall/Incident Detection Alerts While Running: I can’t remember the last time (if ever), I’ve had a fall/incident detection alert while running/hiking. Yet in many of my hikes with navigation, the AMOLED unit would trigger constant alerts. You have just a few seconds to cancel it, else it’ll end your activity file. This happened no less than 10 times alone on my recent 60KM hike. Garmin can’t reproduce it, is looking into it, and has me running with a ton of extra logging enabled now to try and figure out what’s causing it. [Current Status: I have not had this occur in the last 10 days on recent firmware, previously, it occurred on every run with navigation.]

Solar Watches Don’t Show Solar Status: There are so many little UI things that are broken or otherwise missing on the Instinct 3 Solar models. For example, the little sun icon indicating how much solar power it’s currently receiving is broken, so it won’t actually tell you the current solar intake level. Next, if you simply place the watch in the sun, it won’t show solar time being accumulating (whereas the Instinct 1/2/2X do just fine). Garmin says that’s also a bug, in the UI rather than the underlying power system, that should be fixed soon too. Likewise, the option to turn on the backlight via gesture (but only after sunset) is currently missing. It was there in previous Instinct Solar watches, but isn’t there today. Seriously, how did nobody notice this? [Current status: This has been resolved in private beta firmware I’ve used for the past 5 days, though is not yet available in public firmware. However, the lack of backlight via gesture has not been resolved.]

Garmin Explore fills up Solar Storage Spaces, Causes Crashes: In a quirky twist, the secondary Garmin Explore app has been automatically adding itself as an authorized connection point to my Instinct 3 models, and then subsequently completely filling them up with all my Garmin Connect courses. That in turn causes the models to have so little space, they crash at various points during my workouts. The fix is manually disconnecting these models, and then manually deleting out all the courses. And then manually deleting all the crash logs to ensure there is sufficient space. Garmin says they’re working on solving this space-filling issue. [Current Status: I suppose this is resolved by virtue of whacking the thing that caused it. But I’d argue this still needs some work. I have had no crashes in the past 7 days.]

Other Solar space issues: Finally, I’ll note that while not a direct bug, I believe Garmin’s decision to put a silly small amount of storage space on the Instinct 3 (120MB, of which ~90-100MB is used) is going to cause some very real-world issues. Even on units I’ve factory reset, the space available makes it impossible to update the firmware (~15MB) without first manually clearing out all my courses and activities (everything!). I don’t see how this is sustainable for real-world users, especially after even just a couple of courses. The AMOLED edition has 3GB of space, so this isn’t an issue.

Ultimately, as of January 28th, both my Instinct 3 AMOLED and SOLAR units are in a pretty stable place with the most recent private beta firmware updates (setting aside trying to update the firmware). Still, that firmware isn’t yet available publicly, and I’m frankly pretty confused on how the entire Solar status fiasco ever made it this far. I mean, Solar literally has one job: Collect solar power. It wasn’t demonstrating it could actually do that.

Garmin Instinct vs Fenix:

While there are obvious differences between the Garmin Instinct 3 and Fenix 8 series (like offline mapping), there are far more not-so-obvious differences. Thus, I went down the rabbit hole of identifying all of those differences by hand, for both big-ticket items and tiny little items. Roughly 100 differences between the two.

I’ve got a dedicated post (and video above), on all of those things that make the Fenix 8 cost twice as much as the Instinct 3. No reason to re-hash them in this post, go check it out!

Wrap-Up:

In many ways, like some of Garmin’s other recent products, you have to separate the technical side from the pricing side. As a general rule, I don’t like doing that, because almost everything in technology is an interwoven price/features burrito (with a sprinkle of brand/marketing value). In Garmin’s case specifically, their overwhelming number of units on the market today undercuts their own pricing strategy. But first, let’s start with the technical side.

Assuming the mostly minor bugs I had to get worked out (and history says these sorts tend to), the Instinct 3 AMOLED is a big jump up for Instinct owners who want the blend of a durable smartwatch with a screen to match this decade. It delivers on that, and gets more features than the previous generation. Likewise, on the Instinct 3 SOLAR side, that too delivers on incredibly strong solar performance, substantially higher than previous Instinct 2 or Instinct 2X units in my testing. Not to mention the far better screen clarity of the Instinct 3 SOLAR compared to prior-gen Instinct units. All of this is great.

Just as in my first look posts though, where this all falls apart is Garmin’s multi-pronged device strategy, and in particular, their strong affinity to keep prior-gen devices on the market at lower prices. For example, the MIP-based Garmin Fenix 7 (47mm) is currently on sale for $429USD. That has every single feature the Instinct 3 does, but also has full offline mapping, WiFi, offline music, and countless more things. It’s just as rugged, and is frankly cheaper than many of the Instinct 3 units. Meanwhile, if you want AMOLED, Garmin’s Epix (Gen 2) has floated on sale for $399-$409, the last few months, including right now. That too has far more features, including offline mapping, ClimbPro, and more, than the Instinct 3 AMOLED, save the flashlight. There’s no consumer-facing part of the Instinct 3 series that’s more “technologically advanced” than the Fenix 7 or Epix. All of which totally ignores the fact that the Suunto Race S ($349), COROS Pace Pro ($349), and Polar Vantage M3 ($399), and AmazFit T-Rex 3 ($234-$279) have offline mapping. The lack of offline mapping in Instinct 3 is a major miss, hard stop.

Of course, I’m also aware that a portion of the population doesn’t care about maps. Perhaps you use a phone for that, maybe you pretend to carry paper maps with you, or, you just don’t use maps at all. In which case, yes, the Instinct 3 is a great little unit with great battery life. Especially if you like orange accents. And in particular, if you’re a solar fan, where screen clarity and battery life on the Instinct 3 is a big boost over previous Instinct units. As always, just depends on what you want, and who you want it from.

With that, thanks for reading!