Garmin is not the first company to produce a hybrid watch with a foot in the smart and analogue camps, but its Instinct Crossover does have a unique combination of features and functionality in a package designed to appeal to young, educated, urban customers.
Garmin’s success in the smartwatch market has been based on creating timepieces tailored to specific customers, many of which are already familiar with the brand through their sport and fitness activities or because they use the company’s very advanced navigation technology while in flight or sailing.
Garmin’s hardware and software combine to offer specific solutions for professional athletes and ordinary mortals doing their daily workouts; pilots and sailors; swimmers and sprinters, with different measurements recorded, tracked and shared on the ever-evolving Connected App.
Families of smartwatches also cater to different demographics.
The MARQ, now in its second generation, is the most luxurious and premium of the lines and likely to be bought by an older, more affluent customer.
Garmin’s Fēnix range remains the everyday choice for a slightly younger customer focused on sport and fitness.
And, since November last year, an entirely new collection of hybrid smartwatches named the Instinct Crossover for everyday health and wellbeing, has been on sale with the millennial and Gen Z demographic in Garmin’s sights.
“This is a new watch and new demographic for Garmin,” Ollie Stone, head of UK sales for Garmin, suggests. “We are catering to a younger, more urban, tech-savvy customer. They might be working in the media, in advertising, they might be photographers,” he suggests.
That might sound like an identical target market to the Apple Watch, but Garmin has come up with an entirely different proposition with two unique selling points.
First, the Instinct Crossover has a battery life that can be measured in months rather than hours.
Secondly, it looks and behaves like an analogue watch with hour and minute hands telling the time in front of an always-on, low energy consumption, electronic ink display — the same technology used in e-readers like Amazon’s Kindle.
“We created Instinct Crossover for active lifestyle individuals who prefer the look of a traditional watch but who are ready to tap into the functionality of a modern smartwatch,” says Dan Bartel, Garmin vice-president of global consumer sales.
“By eliminating the need to compromise between tradition and technology, the Instinct Crossover reimagines and redefines the modern adventure smartwatch.”
Retailing for £530, the family is in the same price category as Apple’s latest Series 8 watch, but that is where the similarities end. Garmin has not set out to cram every conceivable feature and function into the Instinct Crossover, it has focused on what its tech-savvy urban millennials want: a great looking watch rather than a lifeless square of black glass on the wrist; battery life that means it almost never needs taking off to recharge; and a suite of sensors and applications made for everyday health, fitness and wellness rather than attempting to be an emergency room doctor or Olympic athlete’s coach for the wrist.
The Garmin watch, and its Revo Drive movement, are always accurate because its analogue hands are automatically corrected if anything goes wrong. “The watch is tough, analogue and it can be charged using solar power,” Mr Stone says.
In essence, the Instinct Crossover is more of a competitor to a regular analogue watch — quartz or mechanical — from the likes of Citizen, Seiko or Casio, and Garmin expects it to be sold by the same retailers.
Instinct Crossover has Garmin’s full suite of wellness features including Sleep Score and Advanced Sleep Monitoring, plus Health Monitoring, which allows users to record key health metrics, such as Body Battery, stress, and heart rate in a single view.
Between the watch and its app, Garmin tracks VO2 Max, Pulse Ox2, Fitness Age, Training Status/Load/Effect, HRV Status, and Recovery Time. And it has everyday lifestyle tools like contactless payments and alerts for messages that can be read directly from the watch.
It all comes packaged in a 45mm rugged and lightweight fibre-reinforced polymer case that is water resistant to 100 metres and is worn on a comfortable silicon strap.
