B) While outdoors on longer hikes in significant sun, solar will definitely extend your battery life, potentially a lot. Or potentially not at all. In total there’s YDS, UIAA, French, British Adj., British Tech, Ewbank, Brazilian, and Saxon. You can change this mid-activity as well within the Climbing Profile settings. Compare this with something like the Casio GBD-H1000 GPS, which can easily power up from dead to not dead using just solar panel in a relatively short amount of time (couple hours at most), and actually get sustainable solar power from the panels. Not enough to last forever doing GPS activities, but certainly plenty to meaningfully help when hanging outside on a sunny day not recording. The buttons also sit nearly flush with the casing, and I didn’t have issues with them digging into my wrist. It’s a nice change from previous Fenix models, where the oversized buttons were quite literally painful. Despite having smaller buttons, they are still easy to locate them without needing to look at the watch. Pacing Like a Pro If you are a runner, hiker, or rider looking to go out on multi-day adventure, battery life matters. The battery life on the Garmin Fenix 7 is far superior to that on the Fenix 6, which was already pretty impressive.

There is a widget version, too, but, if your Garmin doesn't support widgets and does let you add watch faces, this is a useful one to have for your morning weekend runouts.

Battery Life

All watches in the Fenix 6 and Fenix 7 lines have color memory-in-pixel (MIP) displays. These aren't as bright as the AMOLED screens used by devices like the Garmin Venu 2 and Garmin Epix, but they use significantly less power. This results in longer battery life, which is a big advantage for watches built with extensive GPS use in mind. On all of the solar-enabled Fenix 6 units you’ll notice a very thin 1mm wide strip just on the inside of the bezel. This is the first of two solar pieces.

Whereas Garmin seems to aim to make it such that you’d never notice the panels if you didn’t explicitly know they were there, and where they were. Different strokes for different folks. But, at the same time, I’m hoping we’ll see more gains from Garmin in the future. Winner of the best new watch face at Garmin's 2019 Connect IQ Developer awards, Crystal is a really great example of a watch face that piles on the data without making it feel like a crowded mess. Along with the time, it'll let you view metrics like elevation (if your watch supports it) battery status and there's a little graphic equalizer that lets you know the music is playing.

Recently Viewed

By the way, those battery charts are with the DCR Analyzer. We plot battery life for devices that support writing it to the files, including Garmin, Wahoo, and Stages. One of our faves on the Fenix, Infocal puts the watch time front and center and moves your glanceable data around the edges. It pushes the time to the right, leaving room for three circular icons (large, medium, and small), which can be assigned information such as steps, Bluetooth connection status, and notifications.

Both watches are brilliant on the run, but if you’re an ultramarathon runner the Fenix 7’s mapping capabilities and Up Ahead feature make it the obvious choice.

More Smartwatches

The 6S Pro features the same screen that you will find in most Garmin watches. Weighing 61 g, it is lighter and smaller than other Fenix 6 series watches, but extremely power-efficient. The watch doesn’t come with a touchscreen, but instead, features 5 buttons that allow a range of options and customisation. Smart Features 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. If you love a Parkrun (and we're sure a lot of you do), then you need this watch face in your life. If you've seen the Nike watch face you can find on the Nike+ edition of the Apple Watch, then DigiSport will feel familiar.

On the left, you'll get the time and date. All in all, it's a nice alternative to the way other faces on the Connect IQ Store deal with all of those metrics.Note however, that there’s a slight difference to the Garmin Edge units – notably that they don’t include jump counting in the Fenix metrics. I suspect that’s because with your hands potentially flapping around that’d dork up the accelerometer/gyro data (whereas an Edge is mounted to your bike – and ideally not flapping its wings mid-flight). Then, go out and ride. I haven’t had any good mountain bike chances as of late. But, here’s what the data will look like after the fact: Not Enduro reminds us a lot of the kind of colorful watch faces you'll find available to Fitbit smartwatch users. It nicely breaks down your preferred stats into a colored bar and drops the time and other watch features below. 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. When it comes to much older watches, they use GPS chipsets which are far more power hungry. Sometimes that results in better GPS accuracy (though, not as much as people think they do, as I’ve also recently shown). But it mostly just means battery life is really poor.