Review: Garmin Instinct 2X Solar Tactical Smartwatch
Is this the ultimate watch for preppers and outdoorsmen? Or just another flop?
I’ve tried smartwatches before and always been disappointed in them. The Apple Watch has a laughably short 1-day battery life. Although it boasts sleep tracking features, you’d have to carefully manage how you use it during the day and when you charge it before night to even use that feature.
Plus, the last time I tried out the Apple Watch a year ago the sleep tracking was pretty inaccurate too. It couldn’t properly figure out when I was actually asleep or awake.
But the worst thing about the Apple Watch, to me, was not even the bad battery life or inaccurate sleep tracking. It’s the fact that this was an always-connected tracker that eroded my privacy even more than my smartphone already did.
And, unlike my smartphone, the airplane mode didn’t even work. I keep my smartphone in airplane mode for privacy and health reasons about 95% of the day, and it works properly.
I have an RF meter and even with Airplane mode on and Wi-Fi and bluetooth both off, the Apple Watch was still radiating and transmitting data. Not good for privacy, and certainly not good for health if you care about the effects of EMF.
But, this isn’t a review of the Apple Watch, this is just me setting the scene for the watch that I thought would be the change I wanted to see in the smartwatch market: the Garmin Instinct 2X Solar (tactical).
I gotta admit, I was pretty excited to get this watch. The day I got it I felt like a kid on Christmas, diligently tracking where the package was. It helped that I got it on sale, too.
Privacy and EMF
Let’s start with the good.
Unlike other smart watches, Garmin’s airplane mode (which is really just the Phone mode “disconnected”) actually works. I used an RF meter and confirmed that. It also has a Stealth mode, in case you want to be extra private and not store any of your location data either.
Unlike other smartwatches, the Garmin (supposedly) doesn’t have a microphone, so your conversations are private.
Battery life
And… onto the bad.
The 2X solar edition advertises a 30 day battery life with normal use, or infinite battery life if you spend at least 3 hours in bright sunlight every day (what they call 50k Lux hours).
Well, it’s a lie. It’s all a lie.
First of all, with minimal use of the GPS (five or so 20-30 minute activities, usually walks, tracked per week), heart-rate monitoring always on, and Pulse Ox only on at night when you sleep, you get 20 days at best. That’s with a moderate amount of time (1-2 hours) spent outside every day. And unfortunately the watch misleads you the whole time about it, telling you that you have more days than you really do. It doesn’t seem to adapt to actual usage. Every 1 day I’d lose 1.5 days of battery life.
Secondly, even if you get way above the recommended 3 hours of sunlight a day, there’s no way to keep the battery charging. I remember there was one day where I got almost 80k lux hours, spending half the day outside in bright sunlight and even getting a mild sunburn. Yet even on that day my watch battery still went down by 2%.
My trusty old Casio (non-smartwatch) solar watch will happily charge in a few hours in the sun and then not need another charge for 9 months of darkness. This is not the case here.
The only way to get the solar charging to keep the Garmin’s battery topped off forever is to:
Disable all smartwatch functionality. No GPS use at all, turn off heart-rate monitoring, turn off sleep tracking.
Spend a minimum of 4-5 hours in direct sunlight every day.
Live in a hot place where it’s always summer. It’s winter? You’re screwed.
So if you make your fancy $400 watch not a smartwatch and just use it to tell the time, and you live in Texas and spend all day outside, yeah, you can make the battery last all day.
I think that’s probably not what people are expecting, and with all the glowing reviews for this watch on YouTube and elsewhere claiming this model finally solves the problem of having to charge your watch, you’d think there were a few more honest voices out there who actually tested it extensively.
Tracking accuracy
I’ve previously used both Apple Watches (various generations) and the Oura ring, and the Garmin outperforms them in sleep tracking by far. I’ll wake up one morning having had a bunch of dreams, and sure enough, the watch knows I spent the last hour in REM sleep. It’s uncanny.
It isn’t perfect, but it’s probably 90% of the way there, which is saying a lot considering my Oura ring couldn’t even figure out when I fell asleep, thinking I was still up at 4am.
Heart rate tracking however was a lot more unreliable. I would put my watch on and it would tell me my heart rate was 35. Now, I’m no athlete, and I’m not dying either, so I knew this wasn’t right, but the only way to fix it was to take the watch off and put it back on my wrist. Sometimes I had to do it more than once.
One time I decided to leave it on for the duration of an entire activity, hoping it would fix itself, and it never did. Here you can see the average heart rate of 37 bpm right next to the usual heart rate when I do this activity above it: 139 bpm.
So… yeah. Fitness tracking is hit or miss.
The last walk I went on the heart rate kept jumping up from 70 to 120, then back down again, and no amount of taking it off and putting it on again was helping.
Most of the time it does an okay job, I’d say it’s 80% accurate. But that 20% that it’s wrong - it’s very wrong, and sometimes hard to fix.
GPS features
One feature that really sold me on this watch was the GPS tracking. While it doesn’t have topo maps like some of the more expensive color-display models, it does have a “TracBack” feature. You can start an activity or save your current location, and then get the watch to tell you how to get back to your start point. Pretty nifty, right? If I’m in a new city, or on a trail, I can tag the location of my car, and always make it back, even if my phone was lost or its battery died.
Unfortunately, it’s a buggy mess and doesn’t work properly.
When you save your current location, sometimes you get duplicate locations saved, and other times it overwrites and deletes your previously saved locations!
I fairly diligently entered the location of my house, my bug out location, etc. only to lose all the data when I put in another location a few hours later. I contacted Garmin tech support, and they claimed to not be able to reproduce the issue, so I made a video and sent it to them and they opened a bug report ticket.
Two months later and I’m still waiting for them to fix what I think is a pretty critical flaw. It’s a large company with thousands of employees, so bugs take time to fix. As is though, this feature is not usable. Imagine being on the trail and losing the location of your car so you’re not able to get back. Seems like a pretty big safety problem.
The Flashlight
I loved the flashlight. Especially since I had my watch on at night for sleep tracking, being able to double click a button on my wrist and see at night was invaluable. I used this watch on a 2-week trip abroad and being able to navigate strange hotel rooms in the dark was a blessing.
Alarms
The alarms work about as you’d expect. You can set it to use a tone, or vibrate, or both. Handy if you don’t want to wake up your wife or kids with your alarm - just set it to vibrate only.
The one annoyance I had with alarms is there’s no way to give them custom names, you’re stuck with a small handful of presets.
Watch faces and display
The watch faces are fantastic. There’s one to suit every style, from data-rich digital displays all the way to simple analog watch hands.
Moreover, the screen is nice and easy to read in the sun or indoors. Some AMOLED screens you find on other smartwatches (including some of the other Garmin models) are supposedly hard to read outdoors, and my Casio watch is a pain to read indoors, so this was definitely an improvement.
Compass and other ABC features
The compass works pretty well. It’s fast and responsive, unlike my Casio which seems to refresh about every second. But, it’s not quite as accurate as I’d like. Even after a very confusing calibration procedure that looked like you had to do a magic trick with your wrist, it was still about 5 degrees off. Not a huge deal but I wouldn’t want to rely on it unless it was a last resort.
The altimeter seemed pretty accurate.
The barometer? I’m not sure. I had bad weather alerts on and the only time I got a warning was when I was in an airplane and sudden cabin pressure changes caused it to go off. Other than that, nothing. I even had it on the night of a tornado in town that blew over a bunch of trees and it still didn’t tell me anything was going on. My Casio was definitely more accurate with bad weather alerts here.
Calendar bugs
The calendar is another feature where I ran into some issues. The watch incorrectly thought I still had an all-day calendar event that had actually completed a week earlier, and every morning it would tell me about it. No matter how many times I synced the watch with my phone, that event wouldn’t go away. I ended up disabling the calendar and hiding it from my watch face entirely just to stop seeing that event.
Weather
If you sync the watch with your phone every morning like I did, you’ll get a few hours of weather forecast. Why a few? For some reason the weather forecast doesn’t go past 8pm. Moreover, if you don’t sync it the next morning, you don’t get any weather details at all. So even though my phone has the next 10 days of weather available to it, Garmin only preloads that same day. It’s a missed opportunity to make this device more useful offline when going on camping trips or expeditions where the internet is not available.
TL;DR
Well… I’m selling the watch. As much as I liked the sleep tracking, after a month or so the novelty wore off and I lost interest in wearing it at night. I am going to miss that flashlight though!
As a survival watch I think it’s pretty lame - the battery doesn’t really last forever (and with a proprietary charging cable could be an issue if you were separated from your backpack), the compass is a few degrees off, the barometer doesn’t properly warn you of bad weather, and the GPS function is so buggy as to be useless for my purposes (marking locations to get back to).
The heart rate monitoring was mostly accurate but occasionally wildly wrong. And the other random bugs also got annoying after a while.
I give it a 3/5.
My recommendation? Get a Casio ProTrek. They’re cheaper, far more reliable, and the solar feature actually works as advertised. Yeah, you lose some of the fitness tracking, but I think that’s largely a novelty anyway.