Straightforward smartwatch with big battery life

A common critique of the best smartwatches today is that they’re just phones on your wrist, adding more distractions and tossing simplicity to the side. The new Galaxy Watch Ultra, which takes inspiration from the giant Apple Watch Ultra, is a great example. If you’re looking for the polar opposite of this trend, look no further than the Garmin Instinct 2 Solar. It’s a basic GPS watch with a few smartwatch features, putting a rugged design and a familiar navigation experience above all else.

I’ve been using the Instinct 2 Solar for nearly a month, and there’s a lot to like. The smartwatch costs $400, and for the price, it produces accurate health and fitness data that can beat Apple or Google. I love Garmin’s software features, like Body Battery and Training Readiness, and they’re all available on the Instinct 2 Solar. But it’s a good fitness watch and not a good smartwatch. The lack of a touchscreen and poor button-based menu navigation will disappoint people who want a modern smartwatch.

Pricing and availability

The Instinct 2 Solar was released in April 2023, but it’s still one of Garmin’s best mid-tier GPS watches today. The smartwatch retails for $400 and can be purchased directly from Garmin, or you can pick it up from third-party retailers like Best Buy and Amazon. It’s only available in one size, though the Instinct 2 Solar variants — like the Instinct 2X Solar and Instinct 2S Solar — provide different sizes and designs. We tested the Graphite version, and some more eccentric colors are limited to the other versions of the Instinct.

What’s good about the Garmin Instinct 2 Solar?

There’s excellent battery life and plenty of fitness and health features

The Garmin Instinct 2 Solar is a beefy, tactical watch designed for outdoor use. It has the looks, with a fiber-reinforced polymer chassis and significantly raised edges to protect the screen. There are also five hardware buttons with a tactile feel that make them easy to press — even when you’re not looking. At its core, this is a GPS watch, and you get support for standard GPS, GLONASS, and Galileo positioning systems.

My favorite part of daily driving the Instinct 2 Solar was seeing the health and fitness insights, which come from hardware sensors and Garmin’s software features. You get six sensors: an accelerometer, altimeter, barometer, compass, temperature sensor, and optical heart rate (PPG) sensor. You’ll notice that some sensors, like blood oxygen or blood pressure, are missing, but most users will probably not miss them.

Due to the small screen on the Instinct 2 Solar, I found myself using the Garmin Connect app on my Android phone to check fitness and health data more than the watch itself. In the screenshots above, you’ll see what the Connect app shows during everyday use. Core metrics like average heart rate and Body Battery are front-and-center, and I particularly like the latter as a way to keep tabs on your strain and readiness.

The experience gets even better when you start tracking workouts and activities with the Instinct 2 Solar. Garmin provides some of the most accurate smartwatch data I’ve ever seen, and I think the Instinct 2 Solar is more accurate than my Apple Watch Ultra and OnePlus 2R. For reference, I’m a runner with over 2,000 miles tracked with various smartwatches dating back to 2016, so I have a pretty good feel for accuracy. The charts, graphs, and statistical breakdowns for each workout are quite comprehensive, too.

Battery life is excellent, but your results will vary based on a few factors. Garmin rates this watch at 28 days of battery life in smartwatch mode; however, that assumes you’re going to be out in the sun for three hours per day to use solar charging. Starting at around 75% battery life, my Instinct 2 Solar stayed charged for 17 days.

That equates to about 22 days of life for a full charge in real-world usage, but I know the reason for the discrepancy. I live in Phoenix, Arizona, where it is routinely 110°F and can be up to 120°F. That means I am certainly not spending much time outside in the summer months, so my battery life testing included virtually zero solar charging. It does show that regularly solar charging can add about a week of battery life, although the Instinct 2 Solar has good battery life either way.

What’s bad about the Garmin Instinct 2 Solar?

The lack of a touchscreen makes navigation tricky and convoluted at times

The Instinct 2 Solar has a monochrome display with a low resolution, and it isn’t a touchscreen, either. It’s important to note that I love the inclusion of physical buttons, as they’re great for marking laps in the middle of an interval workout.

However, using physical buttons for all functions isn’t as fun. All the buttons are mapped to serve multiple buttons, and you have to remember them all. A press might do one thing, a press-and-hold would do another, and a double-press would do something else.

It’s hard to keep track of all the functions, and I struggled to get the hang of everything — even throughout my lengthy review period. For example, I wanted to test Garmin Pay — an NFC mobile payment solution — at a New York City subway stop, but I ended up just using my phone because I didn’t want to miss my train.

The last Garmin smartwatch I used was the Vivoactive 3 (we’re on the Vivoactive 5 now), which was released in 2017. However, I still prefer the Vivoactive 3 controls to the Instinct 2 Solar controls because it has a touchscreen. If you’re like me, you should look for a Garmin watch with a touchscreen instead.

Should you buy the Garmin Instinct 2 Solar?

I’m sure that the Garmin Instinct 2 Solar isn’t for me, but that doesn’t mean it’s a bad watch. It will be great for people who need a versatile and rugged GPS watch with a few smartwatch features without going overboard. Plus, the long battery life and solar charging capabilities make this watch ideal for situations where you’re going to be in the sun a lot. Paired with a rugged design, it’s easy to see how the Instinct 2 Solar would be a fantastic adventure watch for long hikes, trail running, and plenty of other activities.

Still, I suspect many users will want a smartwatch with a touchscreen, better navigation, and deeper integration with their Android phone. If that’s the case, you might want to look at Garmin’s other great outdoor smartwatches instead. However, there’s something to be said about providing the essentials and nothing more, and that’s exactly what the Instinct 2 Solar does.