Video Transcript
All right, today we're gonna be talking about the Fenix 8 and whether or not you should buy such an expensive and powerful watch. As you know, we at T.REX have been selling the Instinct watches for some time, the Instinct 2 and the slightly larger version of the Instinct, which is solar powered, indestructible, has a bunch of features and is, well, I would say relatively affordable, especially now that we have the Fenix 8, which comes in a few different versions that range from $800 to $1,100, which is a lot of money for a watch. I'm old enough that I think that's how much money you pay for a car.
So let's talk a little bit about the Fenix 8 and why it costs so much and why we at T.REX are selling it. Because, contrary to popular opinion, we don't think you should buy everything that we sell. We also think that maybe you should buy some stuff that we don't sell. And the Fenix 8 is a great example of that because there's a bunch of colors of this watch that we don't sell that maybe you want. There's even some more sizes of this watch that we don't sell that you may want. But the Fenix 8 is the most powerful Garmin watch we've had in a while. And it actually is a sort of a consolidation of some of their lines. So it is the eighth version of the Fenix watch, which is the next step up from the Instinct, but it pulls a bunch of other pieces in. It pulls the AMOLED screen from the Epix in. It pulls the speaker and mic from the Venu in. It pulls the dive computer functions and the depth sensor from the Descent in. So in many ways, they're consolidating a bunch of their fancy exclusive watch features down into this watch here, which makes it really interesting. It also makes it really expensive.
If you want maps on your watch, the next step up from the Instinct is the Fenix. And that's the main reason that we're carrying this watch. If you want maps on your watch for navigation purposes, more than just breadcrumbs, more than just GPS, this is a fantastic way to go. And one of the interesting things about this watch is as it gets more expensive and you get more features, it gets a little bit harder to make the decision on which one you actually want. So there are three versions, even as they pull them together under one line, they have three different versions. One is the bright colorful AMOLED screen like this, which gets you a couple of weeks worth of battery life. But that super bright screen does cost you something because the version with the old fashioned MIP screen gets you three weeks of battery life and it has solar. So if you go outside, it gets you almost a month worth of battery life. If you're in the sun for about three hours a day, which you probably should be. And then because $1,100 is very expensive, they have the Fenix-E, which is basically an eight, but it's the economy version. So it still has the AMOLED screen, but it's no longer a sapphire crystal and it's no longer a titanium bezel, it goes down to regular gorilla glass and it goes down to stainless steel, boring old stainless steel. And then it also, you lose the dive computer and you lose the speaker and the microphone.
And there's some health features that I forgot to mention. The Fenix 8 has an capability for testing arrhythmia and stuff like that. The Fenix8-E loses that as well. Now, not all of these things are losses. If you're like me, you don't really want a speaker and a mic inside of your watch listening to you theoretically all the time, if it's connected to your phone anyway. But I do trust Garmin a lot more than I trust my phone, so I actually think that the microphone probably isn't listening to me all the time and it's probably not that big of a deal, but the E gives you no microphone and no speaker. So you have to balance all these different features as you consider what it is that you're actually looking for and what you're actually trying to accomplish.
Now, at this point, I should point out that there's a whole bunch of people that make smart watches now. And the other smart watches are getting kind of good. So Samsung has some that are decent. And then, much as I hate to admit it, the Apple Ultra 2 is kind of awesome. It has a lot of battery life, nothing compared to this, but a lot of battery life compared to previous smart watches. And it has some pretty cool features like a depth gauge that lets you run a diving computer. But now we kind of run into something that makes the Garmin watches special. If you want to use your Apple Ultra 2 watch for diving, you can, and it's kind of amazing to me that it holds up to the pressures. But you have to subscribe to an app to get actual dive computer features. And you have to have internet access to prove that your subscription is up to date before you can dive. It would be pretty miserable if you made it all the way out to the Great Barrier Reef and you couldn't actually confirm that you had subscribed to the app and then the app on the watch wouldn't work and then you wouldn't have access to your dive computer. I mean, probably wouldn't be the end of the world because you're supposed to have two dive computers for redundancy anyway, but there's a big difference between the mentality that says you will subscribe to features and unlock them with money. And the features that are in the watch are yours and you never pay for them. And if you use the dive computer in the Garmin, you have access to Garmin's free scuba logging and the dive log system and all their fitness stuff is completely free. Their mentality is you buy the hardware, you own the hardware, and all of the software tools come along for free. It's a very different way of thinking about software as a service and I really prefer that. As all of the rest of the tech world kind of goes in this direction, I appreciate that Garmin is saying, you buy this device and it's yours. Everything that works on the device works for you and it stays yours and your data stays yours and everything kind of goes along with that. Which is good because it's expensive enough that yeah, it kind of needs to be that way. So as we go over the features of this watch, it has just the basic upgrades that you would expect. The UI is much better, the touchscreen is much better, the map display is much better, using the map with the touchscreen is much better. So it is the generational improvement that you would expect for a Fenix8 with all those extra features on top if you buy the versions that have them and then a cheaper economy version that doesn't have that price bump if you don't want those.
So hopefully that helps you figure out some of the different ways that you could make this decision. Do you need watch maps? Well, if you wanna do navigation directly on your wrist, it's kind of cool. In a lab's video a few weeks or months ago, we experimented with an ATAC plugin on a Fenix6 and it could just barely handle running that plugin. But it did let us see all of our ATAC dropped pins and markers and team members. Once you are considering that kind of capability, upgrading to a watch with a better display and more RAM and more processing power makes a lot of sense. And now you just need to consider the difference between the solar powered one with the old display or the new AMOLED screen.
You have some really cool advantages with the AMOLED screen. The fact that it does glow in the dark and it looks really nice with the official T.REX ARMS watch face available in the app store, that is really cool. But we also have this always on display mode. It sort of simulates glowing glow in the dark hands and it gets off, lets off a lot less light than the backlight on the MIP version. So there's a lot of stuff that you have to weigh, but the big one is the AMOLED screen has about three times the resolution. So if you are running the ATAC plugin, you are doing a lot of map stuff, you are looking at all sorts of map layers and map data. Those extra pixels do kind of matter. And you can download all sorts of map data to this watch. It comes with the continental United States or actually the whole North American continent. And it comes with a whole bunch of extra layers, stuff like points of interest that you can search for and topo lines, but with their maps plus service, you can also download satellite imagery. You can download all sorts of activity specific maps as well, burn areas, parcel data, if you're a hunter, all kinds of stuff like that can live inside of this watch and it talks to all the other stuff. So it is a very powerful tool and we appreciate Garmin packing all of this stuff in here, continuing to improve and continuing to let you own your own devices. But we also are really eager for you to make wise financial decisions. So right now, as the time of this video, we have not every watch in stock, but they're coming pretty soon. And I want you to not buy the watch immediately. I want you to think about it and maybe save up for it because it's, yeah, it's kind of a lot.
I could talk for a lot longer about the dive watch features because they are a little bit limited. The Descent is the dedicated pro dive watch and it lets you do a bunch of really cool stuff like Trimix and even lets you do rebreather diving. And this watch doesn't have those features, but has almost everything else. It goes down to 40 meters. The watch itself is waterproof down to 100 meters, which is pretty amazing considering that the buttons work and the speaker and the mic work when you get out of the water after being down almost 330 feet. It's kind of nuts that they managed to do this. But if you are a recreational diver and you don't go down more than like 125 feet and you don't dive complicated mixes, it's just regular nitrox and regular air, then this is gonna do like 99.9% of anything that you might unless you do weird decompression stuff because of your long shooting schedule as a videographer. But I haven't actually done that in about six months. So this would be the do anything watch. There's almost nothing, almost nothing that I would need outside of this watch, even if I took on some pretty advanced stuff, which is tempting even at the $1,100 mark. Do your research on the watch. Think very hard about what it is that you would like to accomplish. And if you have any questions, talk to our customer service team, [email protected] is how you get a hold of them. And they will be able to answer complex questions about the inner workings of this watch, possibly. And help you figure out if it is something that is useful for you, definitely.