Garmin - Instinct 2X Solar - Tactical Edition

Instinct 2x tactical is your answer. You can’t beat the battery life. Truly, it’s the most impressive feature

Still sucks compared to the 22 days I’m averaging on my Solar Tactical Instinct 2x that I use daily for running

I switched to a garmin instinct 2x tactical mostly for exercise and partially for work. 44 ish day battery life (usually about half that or less if you use really precise gps tracking to long exercise). Only caveat is no 4G/LTE support and no offline music as it pulls both those from your phones. I would look at the other models tho that have better screens and UI and are actually smart watches, unsure if they make any with cellular support tho

So it does have a pretty readable screen and you can play around with your backlight for different lighting conditions (top left button turns on backlight for a couple seconds). I keep mine at 5% and it does enough for me but you can set it higher. Also the newer instincts do have amoled screens but I have no experience with them. I’ve heard pretty good things about the forerunner it just didn’t make sense for me personally. My brother also has a fenix that he swears by but is gonna be way out of that $300 price range. My personal take on wearing it to the office is to just get a black watch and strap and it’ll just go with anything, but I also wear this 24/7 unless I’m going to a wedding or formal event

Instinct 2x tactical checks all these boxes for the cheapest budget. There are other models that's do more that are significantly more expensive

The 3 is slightly better all around, but the 2 has better battery life(due to some more modern features on the 3). You can't load music on either but you can control it if you're listening from your phone(but it is NOT very intuitive). Neither has maps per se but they have "breadcrumb navigation" which essentially points you in the right direction and gives you a path to follow to a predetermined point. If money isn't an issue you should look at the tactix 7

I had a Garmin Instinct 2x Solar Tactical Coyote tan, I was in love with that watch, and I didn't need detailed maps and a color screen. But...that watch is not for longer trips with routes loaded, say over 130km with GPS on. My watch froze twice. That day the watch and the navigation were unusable. Then I bought a Garmin Tactix 7 Standard Edition, for me it is the best Garmin watch I have ever had.

I am having garmin instinct tactical 2x later moved to Ultra 2 for last 8 months . I still love to use Garmin but the ease of notifications and operating system forced me to stay with ultra 2 ..

I hope you like your Garmin, I felt like the heart rate monitor was absolutely terrible on x2 tactical, no where near any of my Apple Watch’s or whoops. I’m excited To have ecg on a whoop.

You think so? I went from an apple watch to the instinct 2x tactical and now the fenix 7x pro SS. I find it an improvement in almost every way compared to the apple watch. I mean sure you can‘t unlock your iphone with face id while wearing a mask with the garmin but other than that… It does everything i want my smartwatch to do while having at least 15x the battery life of an apple watch. But enlighten me why you find it lacking maybe i am overlooking something

You should check out the newly released Instinct 3 series too. I think they have more mapping features maybe? Not sure. But maybe you NEED to spend more, so go for the Enduro. I don't have experience with that. I have an Instinct 2X Tactical.

What Garmin claims and real world texts are not the same. Real world texts are showing the 3 to have worse battery than the 2x