I have been wearing Garmin’s Instinct Crossover continuously for over a fortnight. I have not taken it off in that time and it still has 13 days of battery life remaining, despite always being on and displaying the time with analogue hour and minute hands along with useful information including the day and date, heart rate, sunrise time and weather shown using electronic ink on a black background.
If something interesting happens, such as reaching a step count goal, the watch vibrates and the dial will show that information instead.
It will also clear its screen and move the hands out of the way to show messages from the likes of Whatsapp and Messenger.
It is a good looking watch made from lightweight dark grey fibre-reinforced polymer and worn on a comfortable perforated silicon strap that is long enough to wear over a wetsuit, if necessary.
The dial has depth, with grey block hour markers jutting slightly inwards from a raised internal bezel.
A fixed outer bezel, integrated with the case, has labels for the watch’s five pushers that control or scroll through all its functions.
Regular Garmin users will take to these controls instantly. I needed a bit of time and the instruction book to master them, but now they are second nature.
The underside of the watch has a cluster of sensors that flash green as they gather data and beam it to a smartphone via Bluetooth, and a proprietary charging socket for the very occasional times it runs out of juice.
The closest competitor, in terms of how the watch looks and how it wears, is a G-Shock, but rather than a combination of analogue and LED displays, as Casio typically offers, the Garmin has an e-reader style display behind the analogue hour and minute hands that can show all the same information that is recorded by the watch’s sensors and processed on the excellent Garmin Connect App.
Comparing it with a similarly-priced G-Shock is a good way to look at the Instinct Crossover, not least because it is aimed at the same target market both in terms of educated, urban millennials or Gen Z customers, and in relation to the types of retailers that will do well with the Garmin watch.
At 53, I am a little older than Garmin’s sweet spot for the Instinct Crossover, but I like wearing it because it looks good at all times, unlike black screen OLED smartwatches, and I find the bold analogue hands, filled with lume, and the blocky hour markers clear and legible.
The e-ink display is also crisp and clear. It is segmented roughly in half along the centre of the dial, with notifications appearing at the top and the most commonly used information — day, date, month, heart rate, current weather and the next sunrise time shown below the centre line.
You navigate through the myriad function using five pushers, which I had to study a little before getting to grips with them.
The good news is that nothing awful happens if you just start button bashing because you can always step back to the beginning.
I find the Garmin Connect app incredibly intuitive and easy to use, although I really only brushed the surface in using all of its features.
A home screen shows far more information at one time than the watch, in my case I have it set up to show details of my heart rate, body battery, how many minutes of intense exercise I have done per day, how many steps, how many calories I have burned resting and while active, the quality and quantity of my sleep, my respiration pattern, stress level and even how many flights of stairs I have climbed and descended each day.
The app is also a community hub where I can join other people and compare my performance with theirs, set daily challenges to earn rewards and share news of my achievements.
I very much treat my Instinct Crossover as a great version of an analogue watch, which I much prefer wearing to a touch screen smartwatch, but with a huge amount of additional value from its smart features, connectivity and the app.
Like all Garmin products, it is designed to do the job its owner requires of it in as simple and stylish a way as possible, and it delivers precisely that.
The Garmin Instinct Crossover comes in black grey or blue priced at £530.
