Video Transcript
This is the Garmin Instinct to Solar Tactical Watch, full sized edition. There's a whole bunch of different versions of this watch, so I had to just double check. So this is an incredibly full featured GPS device. It has GPS receiver, Galileo receiver. It also has blown OS receiver. So multiple satellite networks can be used as well as of course, a three dimensional electronic compass, barometric altimeter, and then a whole host of fitness centers in the back. For things like pulse oximeter, heart rate accelerometer, there is a shocking amount of technology that is squeezed into this teeny tiny watch battery. So in the past, one of the great advantages that the Forex series of wrist GPS devices had over the instinct was battery life, But the instinct too has way better battery life and the instinct to solar allows you to actually recharge the battery. Um, pretty much whenever you're doing anything that isn't GPS related.
So the battery life, looks like this. If you're in watch mode, you get about 65 days of straight battery. That's not counting solar. Then if you turn on a whole bunch of the Bluetooth features and things like that, that drops to a mere 28 days. With all of your tracking and connected to your phone with Bluetooth all the time. Then if you turn on GPS, you have about 30 hours of continuous GPS activity. Like all these devices, you don't need GPS all the time. You can turn it on and off and save a lot more battery. The amazing thing is with the solar panel, you actually have essentially, unlimited battery power when you are doing anything outside in the sun except gps. GPS is the only thing that drains the battery faster than the solar panel actually recharges it, which is a game changer.
It's a reason that we're carrying the solar version of this watch. There were previous versions of garment watches that had solar. The solar panel just really wasn't worth the extra cost. This is different, so like the Foretrex, 601 and all the Foretrex devices, this thing is a GPS receiver, but it doesn't have any map data on it. So you can save points, you can save roots, you can see those on the screen, the tiny, tiny screen here. But, uh, you can't actually see roads, topo lines, stuff like that. And with the size of the screen, I really don't feel like you're missing a whole lot. This is something that works really well in addition to maps or works really well in addition to another device or possibly even with your phone. This is something that is a really handy way to get a specific GPS fix in a whole bunch of different types of coordinates.
You can select lot long grids. You can display two different things at the same time if you're interacting with different groups at the same time. It's uh, it's a pretty full feature device, especially considering the size. It's really easy to drop a pin someplace and then come back to it later. But if you really wanna set up this device with roots and with way points, you're gonna wanna use software, the same types of software that you would use for the Foretrex or other devices, um, Garmin, Basecamp, possibly explore or even some of the stuff that you can do on their website, let's you save those things as a GPS file. Then you plug into the charging port on the back with a proprietary cable. Although with the solar, it's not really a charging port anymore, it's now a data transfer port and you just copy those GPS files over, they come into the watch.
The watch is able to read all of that data out and you can use it for navigation and, getting bearings for stuff. Now there's a ton of, uh, fitness capability built into this watch. It is, it is really incredibly impressive. Everything from sleep tracking to step tracking to your recovery rate, to heat and altitude acclimation, all this stuff can be used for really high level fitness training. And I'm not gonna talk about that partly because obviously not in my area of expertise, but also there's a ton of people who have YouTube videos and descriptions of how they use the fitness features. I'm more interested in talking about some of the navigation side of things because that is usually glossed over in the watch reviews. The cool thing though about it being a more consumer level device is the interface is way better than the four tricks.
There's five buttons on the side, no touchscreen, which I actually love for a watch. And it's really easy to scroll through a whole bunch of different things like in two button clicks I can get to my compass and I can see exactly what our altitude is. It's gonna wanna connect to GPS satellites, which I can't do inside of the Shielded Armory. I can see when Sunset is, I can see what our moon phases are. I can keep an eye on the weather and the barometers, and then any tracking stuff that I do have in here, how far we've walked or anything like that is, is all recorded. And its just really easy to actually get to features quickly that you know that you're gonna be using and a lot of customizability. So again, kind of amazing what is packed here into this little teeny tiny watch.
I mean, compared to other watches, it's not small, but compared to everything else on the table, this is amazing. In fact, the only reason that I would say that you shouldn't have one of these is the price. This is a relatively expensive model with the solar. The solar makes it totally worth it. In fact, I would say there's really no point in buying the non-solar version of this watch. But if money is tight and you're not sure if this is actually something that you would get a lot of use out of. My recommendation is since so far I've discovered that all of the garment devices appear to be indestructible. Indestructible devices are worth buying used. So what I would do is go to eBay by the version one Instinct, watch for about a hundred bucks used and experiment with that. Get some use out of it. See if this is actually something that benefits you, either as a fitness watch, as a tracker, watch, as a smart watch, as uh, all of the different things that it can do.
Then if you really want the extra features of the Instinct to Solar Tactical, pass that watch on to a friend and you know where to get the newer model. And if you have any questions about this watch or some of the other GPS stuff that we are selling, you can contact our customer support guys [email protected] and they'll be able to help you out.