Garmin Fenix 7 Pro Solar

I went through a phase where I felt very irritated with the Apple walled garden. Apple Watches, in particular, were bothering me, because of their dependency on having an iPhone. I was also unhappy with battery life, even with an Apple Watch Ultra.

After using a Garmin Instinct 2 for a camping/hiking season, I ended up landing on the Garmin Fenix 7 Pro Solar.

The Instinct was interesting because it's super rugged and sips battery: You can go weeks and weeks on a charge using it as a fitness tracker. If you forego the need for always-on features you can get over three months from a single charge. It sits a little south of the "full smartwatch" tier, though, and something I really missed from my Apple Watch was a connection to my continuous glucose monitor (CGM).

So I read some more reviews and now have the Fenix 7 Pro Solar, which still has very good battery life (advertised 18 days on a charge, before you add GPS usage into it) and with a color display that is a little easier to read than an Instinct and looks a little bit less like a chunky G-Shock.  Price-wise, you are into Apple Watch Ultra territory.

Pros

• No dependency on an iPhone. It is the most useful when paired to an app, but Garmin packs a lot of functionality right onto the watch. 
• Great battery life. I can use it all day long for weeks, use it as my sleep tracker, and use the GPS for runs and walks most days of the week. Once the battery reports it's down to three or four days of life, I plug it in after a run and it's fully charged by lunch. 
• Smart-watchy enough. It has Wi-Fi and Bluetooth for downloads and syncing. I can keep an eye on my CGM, play Spotify playlists over Bluetooth headphones on a run, get notifications, play with different watch faces, etc. I found a barebones C25K app for it that works fine. 
• Solar charging. It'll be nice to have during hiking season. 
• I like how Garmin tracks fitness levels and training readiness. You can have goals, gamify everything, etc. but it feels a bit less like your watch is possessed by BF Skinner's id,  and less interpretive: You're closer to lots of raw metrics if you want them. 
• Physical buttons for everything.  You can use swipes and taps to get around, but you can do everything with five physical buttons.  I don't like the way Apple insists, even with an Action Button,  that you interact with a touch screen at some point in a workout, instead of enabling enough of the button interface to start, stop, and save an activity. It has "glances" you can get at with a button press, to scroll through things like the forecast, assorted health metrics, my CGM reading, etc. The button UI design is thoughtful and reflects an understanding that when you're running down the trail you don't want to be swiping and poking through endless screens and menus. 
• There's a daily start screen that tells you about your sleep quality, training readiness, weather, etc. It's helpful without being cloying or acting like some sort of attentional ant lion funnel into screwing around with the device for 10 minutes. 

Cons

• It's a simpler device. Still definitely in smartphone territory, but not as versatile as an Apple Watch. That could be fine—it is for me. 
• The color display on the Fenix is good enough, but low resolution and not so bright. But that's where the great battery life comes from. On a run or walk, it's easy to read. I tend to just show a timer and my heart rate for now, but if I add fields for pace, etc. it'll still be readable. 
• There are "apps" for a lot of things, and also custom data faces, but if you're used to how an Apple Watch works  you need to be ready for a little more fussing and a less polished UX sometimes. 

Cons compared to an Apple Watch

• Less app-y, even though it can have apps. You're just not going to get the tight integration with mobile apps you're used to on an Apple Watch. 
• Less sleek. Apple Watches definitely look a little less athletic. 
• You lose other nice integrations, like the way an Apple Watch has haptics to go with turn-by-turn on an iPhone or the way you can use an Apple Watch to unlock your computer. 
• Apple Watch has a brighter, prettier display. Again, battery life. 
• Garmin battery life is so much better. I can't use an Apple Watch Ultra for a long camping/hiking weekend without charging without fiddling with the power saver mode. If you want to use an Apple Watch as a sleep tracker, you have to pay closer attention to the battery each day. 

What I make of the differences

I'm fine with 'em.

I have been thinking for a few years now that Apple excels at coming up with little useful things you become attached to in a way that makes it hard to prioritize,  or to remember that life went on when you didn't have that stuff. You sort of get overwhelmed by the long list of little conveniences and they make it hard to "downgrade."

But it's more important to me to not have to think about bringing a charger for my watch to get get full functionality when I'm going to be away from home for more than two days than it is to have all those little things. I don't even like to think about charging during the week, or even the fortnight.

I was a little concerned that Garmin watches'  relative simplicity would make some things not so great. I was particularly anxious about being able to play music on runs without something going wrong, but the Spotify integration works well. I just picked a few playlists to sync, watched the progress meter, and that has worked every time. Bluetooth pairing also works reliably.

You're still living in an ecosystem. I'm okay with that. Over the years Garmin has done a nice job of turning the smartphone into a connective layer for its watches and other devices (I've got one of their handheld GPS units, and an InReach tracker/communicator) that let you coordinate: When my GPS unit or InReach is on and tracking, they're communicating with the fitness features of my watch and bundling all that data into one event.

Would I recommend it?

Sure. If I weren't interested in a fitness-oriented watch for running and hiking I would probably stop owning a smart watch at all. I have a simple Bertucci analog field watch that's sort of the titanium descendent of the Timex Campers I wore for years and I like it a lot.

But I do like having a wrist-sized GPS device, CGM display, and fitness tracker, so I'm very happy with the Fenix. I suspect I will be much less interested in upgrading it very often: I'm happy with it as it is and don't need it to do more or have profoundly more battery life. 

Its simple, utilitarian approach and aesthetic doesn't invite a ton of playing around from me, either. I've figured out how to get it to deliver what I want it to do, and there's not much more frontier to explore. I like having a piece of technology that doesn't goad me into screwing around with it a lot. It's something I can forget I have when I don't want to think about it, and use with little fussing when I do want to think about it.