Apple Watch Ultra Compared to Garmin Fenix for Hiking

medium.com

2 points·jojule··3 comments

Is the battery life enough? How to solve offline maps? Would it work for training? Would a dumb watch be better than a smart one?

The Fenix isn't a "dumb" watch. As far as battery life, Garmin has recently been making some digs at Apple about Garmin watches battery life being in days instead of hours. The Fenix has something around a month of battery life, depending on features you use. The Fenix Solar can, again depending on features enabled, have "unlimited" battery life if it is sunny.

Not sure what maps it has, it does have some mapping ability, I know it advertises having golf course maps. I'm unsure what other map features it has. I've been looking at the Garmin watches (Instinct 2 mostly), but I don't really care about mapping features.

Check out my battery life estimated comparing AWU and Fenix on the linked post. Battery life is not the issue any more. Ultra has 29% larger battery than Fenix 6X. But at the same time, AWU has 20-50x more powerful CPU. This consumes energy if/when you choose to use it.

Having been using Fenix 6X daily for 2 years, I regard it as dumb. It is a great activity-measurement tool and trustworthy companion on a multi-day adventure. But by no measure it can be called no more smart than old Series40 Nokia feature-phones can be called smartphones.

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