The Apple Watch Ultra 4 and Series 12 watches are both incredibly similar, and surprisingly different – depending on your perspective. Yes, at a high level, the Ultra 4 is bigger (with a bigger battery), better GPS, satellite messaging, emergency siren, deeper dive capabilities, and plenty more. But at the same time, the two units share virtually every software feature – even things like the new Max Extended battery mode launched this year, Audio Intelligence, the internal processors, and more.

Thus, this list is all about helping you figure out what’s the same, and what’s different – and most critically: Whether those specific things matter to you.

You can already see my full Apple Watch Ultra 4 In-Depth Review here, and my Series 12 review is coming up very shortly (and you can find all my Series 12 accuracy data already in my Ultra 4 review too!).

Still, since announce of both watches, I’ve been wearing them side-by-side. Or rather, one per wrist, to see exactly how they differ. As a result, I’ve gathered 50+ features and how they compare. Some of these are big-ticket (or obvious) ones, like battery capacity differences and extra buttons. While others are more subtle, such as the differences in the speakers and microphones. Or how the display panels differ.

With that, let’s dive right into it!

The Pricing:

For most people, the price will be the main deciding factor. It’s also honestly the simplest one: The Ultra 4 is essentially double the price of the Series 12, at least at the base model. Once you start getting into bigger sizes though, and cellular, and other case types (like ceramic), the price difference quickly evaporates.

Apple Watch Series 12 Aluminum (42mm): $399USD
Apple Watch Series 12 Aluminum (46mm): $449USD
Apple Watch Ultra 4 (Titanium): $799USD (5G feature included)

Note that for the Apple Watch Series 12 Titanium or Series 12 Ceramic editions, those are only available with cellular. And for the Ultra 4, that comes with cellular as the only option.

Speaking of which, on the Series 12, if you want the cellular editions, they are:

Apple Watch Series 12 Aluminum (42mm 5G/cellular): $499
Apple Watch Series 12 Aluminum (46mm 5G/cellular): $549
Apple Watch Series 12 Titanium (42mm cellular): $699
Apple Watch Series 12 Titanium (46mm cellular): $749
Apple Watch Series 12 Ceramic (42mm cellular): $899
Apple Watch Series 12 Ceramic (46mm cellular): $949

As with most years, there are a slate of new bands for all the new units, both the Series 12 and the Ultra 4. In the case of the Series 12, that includes new Nike bands, and in the case of the Ultra 4, that includes new fabric bands and new translucent ocean bands. In most of this review I’ve been wearing the Black Titanium Ultra 4 with the purple Trail band. While the Series 12 I’ve been wearing is the 46mm bronze one.

So with the financial bits out of the way, let’s dive right into the differences beyond the wallet.

The Hardware Differences:

While software can change over time, the hardware won’t. Thus, everything in this section will be the way it is forever with your watch. And honestly, that’s where almost all of the differences are. As always when purchasing, try and decide whether or not a feature actually matters to you today/now, versus something that maybe-kinda-sorta might matter, versus something that you really wish you had.

Meaning, for me I’ll take the bigger battery life of the Ultra 4 over the swankier titanium case or ceramic case on a Series 12, for essentially the same price. Whereas my wife would choose the opposite.

In any case, here we go:

– Ultra 4 has a 49mm case size; Series 12 comes in either a 42mm or 46mm case size
– Ultra 4 stock case is titanium, whereas Series 12 base case is aluminum (with both Titanium & Ceramic case options at a premium price)
– Ultra 4 has a dedicated ‘Action’ button for quick actions
– Ultra 4 has ‘Precision Start’ for workout modes, versus 3-second countdown in Series 12
– Ultra 4 has satellite messaging capability (emergency SOS, text messages, FindMy location sharing)
– Ultra 4 has cellular built-in on all models, whereas Series 12 only in certain models
– Ultra 4 gets ~2.5 days battery life in the real world, Series 12 gets ~1-1.5 days (or 84hrs vs 38hrs in Low Power Mode. Officially, the regular battery life is 50 hours and 24 hours.
– Ultra 4 has GPS battery life of 18 hours, Series 12 is 10 hours
– Ultra 4 has GPS ‘Extended’ battery life of 25 hours, Series 12 is unclaimed
– Ultra 4 has GPS ‘Max Extended’ battery life of 45 hours, Series 12 is unclaimed.
– Ultra 4 has depth gauge to 40m/131ft, Series 12 to only 6m/20ft
– Ultra 4 has depth gauge certified for scuba diving (and meets EN13319 standard), Series 12 does not
– Ultra 4 has water resistance to 100m, versus 50m for Series 12
– Ultra 4 has 86dB emergency siren, Series 12 does not
– Ultra 4 has multiband/dual-frequency GPS/GNSS, Series 12 has regular GPS/GNSS
– Ultra 4 has three microphones, versus Series 12 has one microphone
– Ultra 4 has dual speakers, Series 12 has a single speaker (but there’s no audible difference in my tests)
– Ultra 4 has sapphire crystal display, and Series 12 base has CeramicShield 2, which Apple says is 60% tougher than the Ion-X glass on the Series 11.
– Ultra 4 display max brightness is 3,000 nits, Series 12 max brightness is 2,000 nits
– Ultra 4 display area is a smidge bigger at 1,245sq mm, vs 1196sq mm (46mm) and 970sqmm (42mm)
– Ultra 4 has a fully flat screen display top, whereas Series 12 has glass curves on edges
– Ultra 4 case weight is 63g (natural/black), versus 38-52g (46mm), and 32-42g (42mm)
– Ultra 4 case thickness is 12mm, versus 9.7mm for Series 12
– Ultra 4 case has button guard around Digital Crown & Button, Series 12 does not
– Ultra 4 has been validated to MIL-STD 810H standards, Series 12 has not
– Ultra 4 has an operating temperature of –4° to 113° F (–20° to 45° C), whereas Series 12 is 32° to 95° F (0° to 35° C)
– Ultra 4 has an expanded altimeter range of -1,600ft to 29,500ft (-500m to 9,000m), whereas Series 12 is 0 feet to 10,000 feet (0m to 3000m)
– Ultra 4 has a ceramic & zirconia crystal back case, Series 12 has an aluminum or titanium with a zirconia back case
– Ultra 4 Black has a protective DLC coating on the titanium, whereas neither Ultra 4 (natural/grey) nor Series 12 have DLC
– Ultra 4 fast charges to 80% in 45 minutes, but Series 12 does 80% in 30 minutes
– Ultra 4 fast charges to 18hrs worth in 15 minutes, but Series 12 does 12hrs in 15 minutes
– Both Ultra 4 & Series 12 can do 10hrs of sleep data in 5 minutes of charging

Most of these are self-explanatory, but a few might need some additional explanation/expansion:

– Two-way Satellite Messaging: This was introduced in the Ultra 3, and includes basically three core features. The first is emergency SOS via satellite (if outside of cellular range), the second is text messaging via satellite, and lastly, the ability to update your FindMy location via satellite. This does have some coverage limitations; currently, about 17 countries are supported for Emergency SOS & FindMy (the US, Canada, and most of Europe). However, for iMessage support, it doesn’t support Europe – just United States, Canada, Mexico, and Japan.

– 1 Mic vs 3 Mics: The Series 12 has a single mic and then uses the S11 SIP chipset to do audio voice isolation when calling from the watch, despite having only a single microphone. Whereas the Ultra 4 has three mics, so it can do the majority of that in hardware, but it will still take advantage of the just-added S11 SIP as well to improve that even further. Additionally, with these three microphones, it can do wind cancellation better.

– 1 Speaker vs 2 Speakers: Both watches can play music back these days (without headphones), as well as, of course, a wide variety of other tones/notifications/sounds. Now, despite the Series 12 only having a single speaker, it seemed just as loud for music in my side-by-side tests as the Ultra 4. There was no apparent difference in quality in my test either. You can see the decibel testing side-by-side in my video.

– Multiband/Dual-Frequency GPS vs Regular GPS: There’s nobody who will dive into GPS accuracy testing as deeply (or stupidly) as I do. In most of my tests, these are mostly a wash. Still, if you’re a bit of a nitpicker (like me), there’s definitely a difference between the Ultra 4 (with multiband) and the Series 12 (without it), where the Series 12 will occasionally be just offset or slightly incorrect. It’s rarely a big deal or meaningful, but it is something you can notice.

– Case Thickness: I just want to put this somewhere, but neither the Series 12 nor the Ultra 4 changed external case dimensions this year. So those remain the same as last year, with obviously the Ultra 4 being chunkier than the Series 12 (per the exact specs above). Note that the case thickness excludes the optical HR sensor bump.

– Display Differences: Both displays have the same LTPO3 OLED display introduced first on the Series 10, and now on both Ultra 4 & Series 12 (there were no display changes this year for either watch). This improves so-called off-angle viewing. However, the Ultra 4 has a 3,000 nit display, whereas the Series 12 has a 2,000 nit display. Let’s be clear: Both displays are well beyond overkill for even the sunniest of days (I live on an island in the Mediterranean), you won’t have any issues seeing either. The only notable difference related to the display is that the Ultra has a flat-display cover (lens), whereas the Series 12 has a domed display cover. But I don’t see any difference in real-world visibility either way there.

The official dimensions for the units are:

Series 12 (42mm): 374 by 446 pixels (989 sq mm display area)
Series 12 (46mm): 416 by 496 pixels (1220 sq mm display area)
Ultra 4 (49mm): 422 by 514 pixels (1245 sq mm display area)

When it comes to battery life, the TLDR is the Ultra 4 will get you 2-ish days, whereas the Series 12 will get you 1 strong day. At least in normal smartwatch mode. It’s as simple as that. Both received slight battery increases this year, in sports mode, via the new ‘Extended’ and ‘Max Extended’ modes. As well as slight increases in GPS battery life over last year (from 8-10 hours on Series 12, and from 14 to 18 hours on Ultra 4)

As for the GPS battery life, here are the specs per Apple:

Apple Watch Series 12: 10 hours outdoors GPS (they don’t publish Extended GPS power specs)
Apple Watch Ultra 4: 18 hours outdoors GPS, 25 hours Extended mode GPS, 45 Hours Max Extended GPS mode

Thus far in my testing of both units, the battery claims are holding (at least for regular GPS modes). I’ve covered this in my Ultra 4 In-Depth Review, and will do the same in my upcoming Series 12 In-Depth Review.

The Software Differences:

There are very few differences here, but there are a couple:

– Ultra 4 has Modular & Waypoints watch face, Series 12 does not
– Ultra 4 watch face has night mode (goes to a red coloring), Series 12 does not
– Ultra 4 allows up to 7 data fields per sport mode setting, whereas Series 12 allows 6 fields. Note this includes the time in the upper right corner
– Ultra 4 has Precision Start (using the Action button), though I’d argue that’s a software feature and not really a hardware feature, hence why I’m including it in both places

Again, this excludes software features dependent on hardware features from the previous section. For example, scuba diving modes require the better depth gauge of the Ultra 4, and satellite messaging requires the redesigned antenna of the Ultra 4, and so on…

Beyond that, it’s all identical across the board.

Things That Are The Same:

One could basically surmise that everything else is the same, and that’s essentially true. Nonetheless, I want to call many of these out, just to illustrate that they are indeed, the same:

– Both run WatchOS 27
– Both have the new heart rate sensing system, which is identical
– Both support the new Audio Intelligence features of Instant Shazam, Sound Recognition, and then later this year Siri Recap and Siri Rewind
– Both have the new HRV recording features
– Both have the new Readiness Scores
– Both get access to all the new Apple Health app features that are coming here shortly.
– Both models have full access to Workout Buddy, and all the other sports features
– Both have offline Siri introduced with the S9 chipset (and now on S11 chipset too)
– Both have features like Double Tap and Wrist Flick
– Both have Blood Oxygen capability
– Both have ECG, Sleep Apnea features, wrist temperature, and all other health metrics
– Both have the Sleep Score, and Hypertension Detection features
– Both have all the same sport modes (as listed in the Workout app)
– Both can do snorkeling via the Depth gauge (and Oceanic+ app), but only Ultra 4 does full diving
– Both have the Compass app, Backtrack, Offline Maps, etc (these are all WatchOS features)
– Both can play back music on their speakers
– Both have a minimum display brightness of 1 nit
– Both have an LTPO wide-angle viewing display, just different top-glass & sizes
– Both have 64GB of internal storage
– Both have a 4-core Neural engine (S11)
– Both have the S11 SIP (chipset)
– Both units have a secondary antenna that they can use for low-signal cases
– Both have a water temperature sensor
– Both units come with a wide variety of stock/base bands, even fabric ones as default options

See, there ya go, it’s not too messy!

As with last year, some of you might ask my preference – and it’s relatively simple: I use the Ultra watches over the Series watches. The reasoning is mostly battery-focused, and simply having to charge one less thing (in my gigantic pile of things). Secondarily, I do appreciate at least the option of having Emergency SOS on my wrist, even if the iMessage piece doesn’t really work for me (yet?) here in Europe.

With that – thanks for reading!

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Hopefully you found this review/post useful. At the end of the day, I’m an athlete just like you looking for the most detail possible on a new purchase – so my review is written from the standpoint of how I used the device. The reviews generally take a lot of hours to put together, so it’s a fair bit of work (and labor of love). As you probably noticed by looking below, I also take time to answer all the questions posted in the comments – and there’s quite a bit of detail in there as well.

If you're shopping for the Apple Watch Series 12 (42mm) or Apple Watch Ultra 4 (Trail Loop) or any other accessory items, please consider using the affiliate links below! As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. It doesn’t cost you anything extra, but your purchases help support this website a lot.

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Amazfit took one for the team. That’s probably the best way to describe the new Amazfit T-Rex Dual Solar, which features a combined AMOLED display with not just one solar panel, but two entirely different solar panel systems. Since the first AMOLED displays came out years ago, people have been asking for companies (well, asking for Garmin, I suppose) to make a Fenix AMOLED Solar combo-dish.

But Garmin has long resisted that idea, stating simply that the power equation just didn’t make sense, and that it was better to take that extra space and simply stick a bigger battery in there. Still, many fans really, really, really wanted an AMOLED watch with solar panels nonetheless, doubting Garmin’s team of battery and solar engineers.

To which Amazfit said: Hold my beer. Actually, two beers.

And thus, here we are, with probably one of the geekiest watches of 2026, including both a front and rear solar panel (yes, on the back). And yes, we finally got an AMOLED-Solar hookup, rejoice!

Let’s dive into it, as I suspect it might be the only one we’ll ever see. Still, I’m all here for the geeky!

Some Quick Spec Differences:

Now, the Amazfit T-Rex Dual Solar is essentially a T-Rex Ultra 2 watch from a features standpoint, though there are some notable hardware differences. Still, Amazfit says it’s basically a twin to that watch.

Key Amazfit T-Rex Dual Solar vs the Amazfit T-Rex Ultra 2 differences:

– Has a smaller 660mAh battery vs 870mAh on Ultra 2
– Has a smaller 1.3” AMOLED display vs 1.5” AMOLED display on Ultra 2
– Has deeper depth gauge allowance (50m, vs 45m on Ultra 2)
– Waterproofing spec of case is still 100m
– Has a white/red LED flashlight, vs white/green LED flashlight on Ultra 2
– Gains new LiveShare feature, though all Amazfit watches will gain this via App
– $649/649EUR ($100 more than Ultra 2 at $549/549EUR)

And then, from an overall standpoint, here’s how the Amazfit models differ – including notably the battery claims:

And then here’s a much deeper chart of battery details on the solar model:

At this point, it’s probably worthwhile noting that Amazfit says they aren’t trying to compete here with a MIP-based Fenix MIP/Solar model. Instead, they say that most people want that AMOLED screen, but the idea here is to offer that option to provide some extra battery gains via solar, if required.

The Solar Panel Features:

Now, I want to point out up front that while it’s clear the overall solar-to-gain equation here simply doesn’t work for any real-world scenario, what Amazfit has done around the user interface of the solar gains is so much better and more detailed than Garmin’s watch-based solar units. So, if there’s anything to take away from this watch, it’s probably that.

Still, we have to take a moment to appreciate what Amazfit has put together here, as I’m not aware of any other watch on the market with both front and rear solar panels. So, let’s start there, on the back of the watch.

This panel is obviously normally against your wrist, but the idea is that you can take the watch off your wrist during a break in a long adventure (such as a lunch break, or after you’ve hiked many hours and are done for the day), and then face it towards the sun. At which point, you’re gathering double the solar gains as the front panel. Amazfit says that the solar area is pretty close to double that of the front area, and equally, the gains are 2x that of the front panel.

There are a few things you’ll notice as a result of this. First, they’ve shifted the charging connector to the side of the watch, and gone with a different connector than all their other current-gen watches. This is a little bit of a bummer if you have something like their Amazfit Helio band for sleep instead (since now you need two different charging connectors), but I wouldn’t say it’s a deal breaker.

Next, is that with this rear-facing design, there’s a new ‘Solar Boost’ mode that gets activated when the rear-facing panel starts getting sun. You can technically also manually enable it, but practically speaking, once this thing ‘sees the light’, it pretty much activates immediately. That Solar Boost mode makes the rest of the watch inaccessible until you exit it.

Now, the main downside here is simply that the watch overheats in this flipped over mode really darn quick. Like, within 10 minutes quick in the toaster temperatures I live in (80-90°F/27-32°C). And once it does that, it doesn’t make any solar gains at all. Amazfit says in cooler temperatures (such as the top of a mountain), it’ll likely keep from overheating but still get plenty of solar juice.

Still, if you do the math here, even if I have to switch to the front panel, just 21 minutes of that is better than 10 minutes of the back panel, which then shuts off until it cools down. Nonetheless, that back panel, and the curvature into the optical HR sensor is super pretty/stunnng:

And certainly, in temperatures cooler than mine, it sounds like you won’t get overheating at all (such as in cooler alpine mountain temps).

When it comes to seeing those product gains, there’s a dedicated Solar widget. This widget starts off with a glance within the widget roll. From there, upon opening, you’ll see the last 4-hour graph, and the current/instant inbound power. Again, this is *NOT* total gains for the 4-hour duration, but rather the exact to-the-second current solar gains coming in:

However, that chart actually shows more than you might realize. It actually has two colors on it, such as below, showing both front panel and rear panel solar gains separately. I like this. Below you can see this where it was a bit breezier in the afternoon, and I managed to keep it cool enough:

In any case, below that you’ve got the Solar Index, which looks at the quality of the solar gains coming in. Again, you’ll notice the color coding.

And then finally, within this widget, there are gains materialized in the three core modes: Regular smartwatch mode, battery saver mode, and the watch-only mode (just time basically). I *really* like this, as it’s something that Garmin doesn’t do on their watches. Not so much the different modes, but they don’t show the battery gains (in days).

Note, however, this doesn’t account for your battery ‘losses’. Meaning, if you ‘lost’ 4 days of battery just by using the watch but gained 2 days from solar, you’re still at a 2-day loss. Also note, along the top you can change the timeframe 1d/7d/30d, which again, I rather like.

And all of this is also visible on the companion app too:

Next, back on the watch itself, there are a few final things I want to mention. First is that when you flip over the watch, it’ll automatically engage the rear panel. But, you can manually control that in the settings:

Likewise, you can manually force it into Solar Boost mode from the settings:

In the same place that you can force Battery Saver mode, as with any other Amazfit watch.

Now, for lack of anywhere else to mention it, the watch can indeed charge from completely dead (0%) using purely solar. So if you manage to kill it off, and then have a bunch of time to sit in the sun, it can jump-start it and get you back and cooking.

Ok, with that, let’s talk about some workouts, as well as general results from non-workout activity.

Real World Workouts and Gains:

I feel like every section here kinda has to start out with a ‘even if this boat sinks, at least they went down trying’. And in that case, I appreciate that Amazfit is pretty honest with the minimal gains you’d expect to see here in real-life conditions. In many ways, the solar aspects of this watch are really only useful if you’re in a situation where you’ve got pure blue-sky sun all day, but not using much of the watch itself beyond basic time operations.

Day out in sun with mostly back gains (roughly 6 hours):

Start day battery: 53% (9:45AM)
End day battery: 55% (3:15PM)
Note: Numerous overheat messages, don’t have battery % photos after 3PM, so just left gains above from 9-3PM

Another day out in the sun with mostly back gains (roughly 12 hours on back). I didn’t take a photo in the morning, but did take an evening photo with the solar gains listed:

Total time gained: 2.8d Smartwatch time
Total time gained: 8.4d Battery saver time
Total time gained: 14.0d Watch time
Note: Numerous overheat messages

And in fact, looking at each day I left it outside, it was almost always 2.5-3.0-days in smartwatch time gains via solar, regardless of whether it was front or back. That’s because on the back, it’d basically overheat (oscillating back and forth), whereas on the front it didn’t overheat (only once, I think), but gained less solar power (half the amount, but did it for consistently longer). But at the same time, it was also losing that amount each day in battery life, so it kinda ended up roughly a wash if I didn’t wear it at all (which defeats the point of the watch).

Next, a few different workouts. For fun, let’s actually start in the dark for an hour at night on a bike alongside my wife, who was doing a run for about 80 minutes. In this case, we can baseline the power draw (not always-on display, gesture-based, default GPS mode), with no solar gains:

Start battery: 45%
Duration: 1hr 20 mins
End battery: 42%
Loss per hour: ~2%
Note: At night, GPS enabled, no always-on display (gesture-based)

Next, we’ve got a 1-hour run yesterday. In this case, there were some initial scattered thin clouds, and I was getting about 30-40lux through that; then that single thin cloud moved on, and I was around 70-80lux. Obviously, occasional trees or body blockage, though I had tried to structure the route so that my wrist was mostly facing the sun.

Start battery: 43%
Duration: 1hr
End day battery: 41%
Loss per hour: 2%
Note: No overheat messages, generally quite sunny conditions, GPS enabled, no always-on display

Next, I went out for a 2-hour ride on a blue-sky sunny day. I even structured the route so that I had the watch facing the sun as much as possible for the ‘slower’ portions (gravel/ascending), and then more mixed for some of the faster descents.

However, for reasons that aren’t clear, it looks like the solar panel entirely failed to charge here. You can see that when I returned, the exact times the workout was going on, it showed zero solar power:

Amazfit is digging into it. There’s some theory that perhaps the automatic solar panel selection algorithm failed here and was actually activating the rear panel (they can’t operate concurrently), which would have been against my wrist. Still, even the moment the ride was saved/ended, solar charging resumed normally. Either way, here are those numbers:

Start battery: 51%
Duration: 2 hrs 12 mins
End battery: 46%
Loss per hour: ~2%
Note: No overheat messages, but also, seemingly no solar gains

Finally, here’s another nearly 3-hour ride, with mixed coverage. In this case, it was blue-sky sunny out, but some of the route and stoppage time had tree coverage, which reduced solar gains. But again, such is the real world:

Start battery: 16%
Duration: 2 hrs 57 mins
End battery: 10%
Loss per hour: ~2%
Note: No overheat messages, mixed sun conditions (due to trees)

Anyways, I’ll likely add in some more workouts with more data, though I think at this point there’s enough detail to get a relatively clear picture of battery gains from solar across various scenarios. Obviously, if you have less sun than I do, you’ll get less battery gains. Equally, if you have colder weather that’s still as sunny, you might get more gains from off-wrist scenarios.

Wrap-Up:

As I alluded to at the beginning, the Amazfit T-Rex Dual Solar is in many ways the very definition of form over function. But that’s OK. It delivered on the oft-asked request to merge together an AMOLED screen with solar, gains and battery life be damned.

And look – I appreciate Amazfit’s willingness to try and make this work. I think the back solar panel, and how it blends into the base of the optical heart rate sensor bump, looks great. Admittedly, I’ll almost never see it on my wrist, but hey, that’s kinda like having fancy underwear. Likewise, I really like Amazfit’s way of showing the battery gains in the solar widget. Though, I do wish they showed total cumulative lux hours throughout the day, similar to Garmin. But otherwise, the solar gains widget is just way more data practical/useful on Amazfit than Garmin.

Still, we can’t overlook the obvious here: The solar gains are, even in a best-case, crazy-sunny, stick-your-watch-outside-all-day scenario…basically negligible. In the days I stuck it outside all day, I gained a mere 2-3% of battery life. But equally, remember on those days I wasn’t wearing the watch (which would have consumed far more power with the display turning on optical HR sensors, algorithms, etc…). Once you put it on your wrist, as I showed during a GPS workout with body vs sun position/trees/etc… you quickly get to a near wash in battery gains between a sunny day and a night activity.

In other words, the reason AMOLED+SOLAR was resisted historically is because it simply didn’t make sense. You had to shrink your battery considerably in order to fit all the extra solar pieces in there (just like Amazfit did). And then you have to shrink your display to fit the solar ring around that (which Amazfit did). And then once you did those things, with the power draw of AMOLED, you were left with a watch that actually gets less battery life than what you started with (which is where Amazfit lands now). And that ignores that it’s also more expensive.

Nonetheless, as I said, first attempts don’t always work out. But hopefully Amazfit takes another swing at this down the road. I certainly don’t expect Amazfit to venture into MIP-based displays, especially as that market further dwindles. But I do like seeing a company push the bounds of things, even if it’s not quite a product I would buy.

With that, thanks for reading!

Found This Post Useful? Support The Site!

Hopefully you found this review/post useful. At the end of the day, I’m an athlete just like you looking for the most detail possible on a new purchase – so my review is written from the standpoint of how I used the device. The reviews generally take a lot of hours to put together, so it’s a fair bit of work (and labor of love). As you probably noticed by looking below, I also take time to answer all the questions posted in the comments – and there’s quite a bit of detail in there as well.

If you're shopping for the Amazfit T-Rex Dual Solar or any other accessory items, please consider using the affiliate links below! As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. It doesn’t cost you anything extra, but your purchases help support this website a lot.

Amazfit T-Rex Dual Solar

Amazon

And of course – you can always sign-up to be a DCR Supporter! That gets you an ad-free DCR, access to the DCR Shed Talkin' video series packed with behind the scenes tidbits...and it also makes you awesome. And being awesome is what it’s all about!

Thanks for reading! And as always, feel free to post comments or questions in the comments section below, I’ll be happy to try and answer them as quickly as possible. And lastly, if you felt this review was useful – I always appreciate feedback in the comments below. Thanks!

The Fenix 9’s arrival brings an expected hardware and software bump over the previous model, but I’d argue it actually indicates a number of other interesting changes about how Garmin plans to iterate the Fenix line, not just now, but going forward as well. I’ll dive into all those later.

However, looking at the present, the Fenix 9 expands LTE & satellite connectivity to the solar models (as well as bringing it to the 43mm AMOLED model), and then increases the display brightness a bunch. Atop that, there’s a huge slate of sport-focused changes. This is notable, as neither the Fenix 8 nor the Fenix 8 Pro launched with actual new sport features (at least, depending on how you define scuba diving for the Fenix 8). Instead, both launched with notable hardware achievements (such as the speaker/mic/scuba bits in the Fenix 8, and satellite/LTE in the Fenix 8 Pro). It seems like Garmin has learned from all those criticisms and found a solid balance this time around in both camps.

In any case, both my wife and I have been putting an assortment of Fenix 9 units through their paces over the last little bit. Everything from the usual swim/bike/run, to gym sessions, sessions with the indoor rower for the new rowing features, and of course, some crazy long hiking to test out the new rucking features. Atop that, I’ve dug into the new SkiErg sport profile, spent some time free diving, and plenty more. It’s been busy around here!

Lastly, these are media loaners from Garmin. I’ve already ordered my own unit at the regular price (Fenix 9 Pro 47mm with the orange button), for long-term usage purposes. As always, I don’t accept advertising from any company I review, and no company sees my reviews before you do. So, if you found this review useful, consider becoming a DCR Supporter, which gets you an ad-free site, plus the behind-the-scenes video series between both myself and my wife on everything that happens in the DCR Sports Tech Cave/universe.

What’s New:

As with most new watches, the newness can be bucketed into two groups: Hardware and software. However, what’s unusual with the Fenix 9 is that this time around Garmin is actually pushing the new Fenix 9 software updates back to existing Fenix 8 series watches (as well as other newer models). More on that in a second.

First up, from a hardware standpoint, here’s what’s new:

– Pro models get a revamped flashlight, added green LED (also has existing white & red LEDs)
– Increased display size to the largest yet on a Garmin watch (1.5” for 51mm Pro model)
– Increased display sizes in certain other models
– Increased display brightness to 2,000 nits on the base model series
– Increased display brightness to 3,000 nits on the Pro model series
– Made Titanium case standard on all Pro models
– Made Sapphire glass standard on all Pro models
– Increased storage to 64GB on all Pro models
– DLC-coated versions got a $50 price increase over previous models
– Got rid of MicroLED option in the Fenix 9 series
– Thickness changes slightly between various size models (some thinner than before, some a bit thicker)
– Overall case size changes slightly in some models (a bit smaller case on the Solar models, but equally a bit thicker)
– Pricing otherwise remained the same from the Fenix 8 Pro series

From a display and case-size standpoint, here’s what you’re looking at:

Case thickness-wise, there are some slight differences as noted above; most are a wash, and of course there are many different models to look at, but here are some items of note:

– Fenix 9 Pro vs Fenix 8 Pro: The thickness here decreased on the Fenix 9 by 0.5mm to 13.3mm for the 47mm, making it the same thickness as the Fenix 8 non-Pro.
– Fenix 9 Pro SOLAR vs Fenix 8 Solar: Inversely, this one gained 0.5mm to 15.8mm

In terms of pricing, here’s how that looks:

– Fenix 9 Base: From $999 (43/47mm are $999, 51mm is $1,099)
– Fenix 9 Pro: From $1,099 (43/47 are $1,099, 51mm is $1,199)
– Fenix 9 Pro inReach: From $1,199 (43/47 are $1,199, 51mm is $1,299)

Atop all that, there are new QuickFit bands with ComfortFit straps (yes, the naming is confusing). Essentially, these are new nylon bands that have the QuickFit adapters for quickly swapping them, whereas the previous UltraFit straps didn’t have quick-release mechanisms. There’s a bunch of different colors as well, of course.

Next, we’ve got the software newness. As noted, almost everything here is going back to existing Fenix 8 models. I’ve got a full separate post on that here. Still, there’s a lot of new stuff here, especially in certain categories like indoor rowing, rucking, and the new Garmin Epic feature.

– Added new Garmin Epic feature, which groups multi-day events/adventures (both on-device, and on Garmin Connect)
– New Stamina zone concept (see below, both on-device and on Garmin Connect)
– Added New Stamina Endurance time concept
– Added New Stamina trending feature (on Garmin Connect)
– Added New Running & Cycling Stamina graphs/curves
– Added New Rucking/Pack-Weight calorie breakout for activities (in multiple sport profiles)
– Revamped algorithms around pack-weight, to more accurately cover calorie impacts
– Added New Rucking target calculator on-watch: Can tell you how far you need to go for a certain goal & pack weight
– Added ability to change pack-weight mid-activity
– Added Dedicated Rucking Reports (summarizing pack weight, calories, elevation, pace)
– Added Rucking Multisport mode option
– Added New on-device Rucking structured workouts with GoRuck
– Added New Ski Erg Profile (officially called ‘XC Ski Indoor’)
– Huge update/change for Indoor Rowing
– Added new heart rate zones for rowing, and max heart rate
– Added new power zones and power curves for running
– Added new indoor rowing FTP values/estimation
– Added new indoor rowing VO2Max values
– Added lactate threshold for rowing, and performance condition
– Added indoor rowing activity profile countdown timer (5-second timer, to let you get ready)
– Added support for indoor rowing to update Training Status (e.g., Productive, Unproductive, etc…)
– Added new Garmin Locate feature within Garmin Messenger app
– Added ability to see athlete heart rate, pace, distance, and elevation information in Garmin Messenger App
– Added inReach weather updates feature (get weather updates via satellite)
– Added Rolling GAP as a data field (both kilometer and mile)
– Added Rolling GAP as a structured workout target option
– Added new on-device watch face editor (AMOLED-only models)
– Added new ‘Field Tools’ feature, including ABC, measure height, reference point, and more

And then, here’s another set of new features that the Fenix 9 series gets, but the Fenix 8 series won’t get, largely due to hardware constraints (or, in the case of the GPS modes, so they don’t have to re-test all of the existing models’ official specs for new battery claims).

– Added new Dynamic Battery GPS modes, which basically simplify the naming of the satellite modes
– Mapping: New Perspective view (sorta a tilted map view)
– Mapping Performance: Smoother/faster zoom
– Mapping Performance: More responsive heading updates (orientation)
– Added new ArcheryX feature

Again, if you’ve got an existing Garmin Fenix 8 series watch, you’ll eventually get all of the features in the first list. The timelines on that remain fuzzy, but Garmin says it won’t be this year. Given this is almost certainly all the same codebase (like, literally, that’s how it works now and is explicitly why the Fenix 8 is getting these features), that seems like the company is purposefully holding those features back to drive Fenix 9 sales. I suppose that’s better than not doing it at all, but equally that’s a far cry from Apple’s approach, where in ~10 days the existing Apple Watch owners will get virtually everything announced for the new Apple Watches announced tomorrow. But hey, baby steps, I guess.

The Model Options:

When it comes to choosing a Fenix 9 series unit, you’ve basically got three choices to make, in roughly this order:

1) The Display Type: AMOLED or MIP (Solar)
2) The Size: 43mm, 47mm, and 51mm
3) The ‘Level’: Base, Pro, or Pro inReach

I’d argue that most people will want to choose the AMOLED base model (probably 47mm), while the main reason you’d want to choose the Pro inReach model would be for the built-in satellite messaging capability/built-in LTE capabilities. But keep in mind this isn’t like most LTE smartwatches that share your phone number. This is effectively a hidden Garmin phone number that mostly requires using the Garmin Messenger app to communicate. Garmin’s LTE functionality is really focused on LiveTrack (via LTE) type scenarios and brief in-sport messaging, rather than texting at the grocery store. Likewise, for satellite messaging, it’s not fast, so this is really about deep-woods-type scenarios (either status updates or emergencies).

Nonetheless, for the display side, you’ve got the new 3,000 nit AMOLED display on the Pro models, and 2,000 nit display on the base models.  The existing MIP-based display (with solar built-in). There are no MIP options without solar anymore in the Garmin Fenix lineup. The AMOLED display is more brilliant and clearer in resolution than the MIP-based option, but the MIP-based option has roughly double the battery life in real-world conditions.

I don’t buy into the argument that the MIP-based screen is easier to see in any conditions anymore. It simply isn’t.

I’ve tested both side-by-side at night, at sunrise, in full-blown Mediterranean midday sun, atop mountains, at sunset, and more. And there’s no scenario where the MIP-based is easier to see. People often point to sunny conditions as a MIP over AMOLED scenario, but that just isn’t the case; even in places like being on a boat in the Mediterranean Sea in summer, the AMOLED is easier to see than MIP, especially the moment it’s at an angle. But again, to each their own; you’ve got those choices/options. The underlying features are identical on both watches, save a few display-related features only available on AMOLED (namely color shift, and the new watchface picker).

Next, you’ve gotta choose the size. This one is fairly straightforward to be honest. While there have been slight shifts in sizing thickness from past Fenix watches, for the most part if you’ve already got a past Fenix watch you’ll be in the same ballpark with these new ones (though, Solar is notably chunkier than in the past).

In my case, I mostly prefer the 47mm size for my wrists, which are 17 cm (or ~6.5 inches), though honestly I’ve also been mostly wearing the 51mm Fenix 8 Pro unit over the past year. Still, it’s nice to shift back to the 47mm now.

As for my wife, her wrists are 14 cm (or ~5.5 inches), and she’s very much in the camp of the 43mm. In fact, it’s why she didn’t use a Fenix 8 Pro over the last year, because the Fenix 8 Pro wasn’t offered in a 43mm (only a 47mm/51mm), and it was just far too big for her wrists.

Finally, the last piece is deciding on which level: Base, Pro, or Pro inReach. All three have identical software features, except, of course, the added LTE/Satellite features on the Pro inReach.

Instead, the differences between Base & Pro (non-inReach) are about material finishes/updates (and a bigger storage size that you may or may not care about):

– Pro adds brighter 3,000 nit display (over 2,000 nit on Fenix 9 base)
– Pro adds faster internal processor
– Pro adds full titanium case (vs just the bezel)
– Pro offers a MIP/Solar display option
– Pro adds green flashlight
– Pro gets slightly longer battery life in most categories (due to the processor upgrade)
– Pro 51mm adds 1.5″ screen vs 51mm model is a 1.4″ screen on base

Then the next step up to Pro inReach gets you the satellite communications & LTE pieces:

– LTE Live two-way voice calls
– LTE LiveTrack (30-second sampling rate)
– LTE Voice Messaging
– LTE Text Messaging
– LTE Weather
– LTE & Satellite Emergency SOS
– LTE Location Check-Ins
– LTE Incident Detection & Assistance
– Satellite Messaging (basic texting)
– Satellite position/location check-ins
– Satellite Emergency SOS (via Garmin Response)
– Satellite updating of weather (new in the Fenix 9 Pro)

Finally, here’s the battery chart of the new models, I’ll dive into real-world usage later on in the battery section.

Got all that?

As I said above, I think the base model AMOLED covers most people. However, for my wife, both of us love having the LTE LiveTrack for her solo runs (especially at night). She hates running with a cell phone, so this solves that gap for her. She’ll virtually never use the inReach piece on the watch.

As for myself, I virtually always run/ride with a phone these days, so the LTE piece isn’t adding much. That said, I do often run/ride outside of cellular range (a mere 2-3 minute run from my doorstep has no cellular coverage into a national park). While my phone has satellite messaging, I love the idea of using my watch if I fall and need to summon assistance. I’m not going to take a dedicated inReach device with me for a random Tuesday 40-minute run.

However, at the same time, for any more ‘legit’ runs/rides deeper into the mountains, I’ll take an actual inReach device (rather than the watch one). I’ll explain in more detail why in the satellite messaging section, but in short, the technology on the watch inReach (Garmin’s specifically) is very different (and lesser) than the normal Garmin inReach devices. It’s slow, cumbersome, and finicky. Yes, it’ll get you out of a pickle in an emergency, but it’s pretty fiddly beyond that.

With that, let’s get into the basics.

The Daily Usage Basics:

In this section I’ll dive through all day-to-day usage bits of the Fenix 9 series, including things like the hardware basics, activity tracking, sleep tracking, ECG, notifications, and more. The sections that follow will cover the various sports features (and more). You can use the quick-access panel at the left to jump between sections.

First up, you’ve got buttons (and display). The Fenix 9 has both a touchscreen and buttons, allowing you to do any operation using either buttons or touch. There are only a handful of actions that require a button press (notably starting/ending an activity), but otherwise you can choose which you prefer. Use both, or disable touch entirely if you want. Or, disable it for certain sport profiles but not others. The world is your oyster here.

The Fenix 9 features Garmin’s standard 5-button layout that’s been used for nearly two decades. If you’re coming from other watches, it might take a bit to get used to. Then you quickly realize how efficient it is, especially for tough weather conditions, or just quick-access in the middle of an interval. The upper-right button is your start/stop/enter button; the lower-right is back/escape. And then on the left side you’ve got up/down, as well as long-press of the middle for settings and long-press of the upper-left for controls (or short press for flashlight).

Atop that, you can customize any button you want (e.g., long press, double press, etc…) to do any task you want.

Since I just mentioned that upper left button, now’s as good a time as any to mention the flashlight updates. The Fenix 9 Pro models get an additional green LED to the flashlight (alongside the white & red LEDs).

As with before, a double-tap of the upper left button opens the flashlight menu for quick enablement and changes. It’ll retain whatever setting you had used last:

For my wife, she won’t use another watch long-term unless it has a flashlight. While both of us are super sporty and enjoy after-dark athletic adventures (I mean…outside of course), the reality is most of the time the flashlight is just super handy to get around the house or hotel at night (such as helping a child), find something under a couch, or any other task you might grab your phone’s light for. Except this is always on your wrist.

Garmin says the new flashlight LEDs are just as bright as previous, and I’m mostly inclined to believe them. It is a ‘whiter-white’ than the previous slightly-yellow light. Though, the new LED somehow seems brighter than the old one. Either way, I approve for the Pro, though it’s not something that would drive me to get the Pro otherwise (since I’m not a huge green-flashlight person).

(At left, Fenix 8 Pro white flashlight at full brightness, at right, Fenix 9 Pro white flashlight at full brightness).

Moving away from the flashlight, let’s get back to the watch face. Below, one of the stock watch faces:

The Fenix 9 has a new watch face editor, along with a new grouping of watch faces together. This allows for easier selection and on-device editing of watch faces. Note that the Fenix 9 Solar doesn’t have the new watch face picker (likely due to the lower resolution of the display), but does allow for all the same watch face customization otherwise.

As with before, you can basically modify/tweak any data component (called a ‘complication’) on the watch face from the watch. Swap it out to whatever you want, change the color scheme, etc. And also, as before, you can download likely thousands of watch faces from the Garmin Connect IQ App Store (with most watch faces being free), or simply create your own (for example, with a photo of your kids, ice cream, etc.).

Sliding down from the watch face, you’ve got the widget glances. These are fully customizable, allowing you to pick which data bits you care about (and remove the ones you don’t), whether it’s daily activity stats, training stats, weather, or some other 3rd-party app.

Any given glance can be opened for a more detailed view of that topic. For example, here’s the steps one opened:

Or, the Jetlag Advisor, which is a feature that lets you put in your travel details (cities, departure/arrival times), and then it gives you advice on what you can do to minimize jet lag.

And of course, one of the things it’ll suggest is sleeping. Perhaps even taking a nap. But as far as sleeping goes, you’ll simply go to sleep when you want, and it’ll track all your details. During your sleep, there’s a dedicated sleep watch face. This ensures you don’t get blinded in the middle of the night by an AMOLED screen. Of course, this has been around a while, and it’s even on the MIP-based watches as well (though those won’t generally blind you).

You can customize when this turns on, and in the case of AMOLED, you can also automatically enable RedShift if you want (which makes everything red like a submarine movie).

Once you do wake up, one of the first things you’ll see is the Morning Report. This customizable report shows your sleep stats from last night, your training-related metrics (like Training Readiness), and upcoming scheduled workouts, as well as calendar entries. You can disable this if you want, but most Garmin users quickly find it one of their favorite features (and remember, you can tweak/customize what’s shown):

Note that the Fenix 9 series does have the smart alarms like the Fenix 8 did, allowing you to set up regular alarms, or alarms that will find the ‘optimum’ time to wake you up based on sleep phases/stages. For example, if you set an alarm for 8AM, it’ll find the best time between 7:30AM and 8AM to wake you up (that makes it hurt less). If it gets to 8AM and that optimum moment isn’t found, it’ll wake you up then.

In any case, back to your sleep stats, you’ll see those, of course, in that report, or just in the sleep widget, such as this:

From an accuracy standpoint, I haven’t had any abnormal wake-up/fall-asleep times with the Fenix 9, and as always, I sleep wonky hours. As noted in other reviews, I don’t do comparisons of sleep phases/stages, because the comparative technology to do so simply isn’t accurate (only about 80% accurate in a best-case scenario, so we’d never use that low of a bar for comparing heart rate sensor accuracy vs chest straps; thus I’m certainly not going to mislead you and do it here). But for the times I went to sleep and woke up, it’s been matching the slate of other devices I have within 5-10 minutes pretty well (Apple Watch Ultra, Fitbit Air/Google Pixel Watch 5, Whoop 5.0/MG, and Oura Ring 5).

The Fenix 9 also includes a bunch of sleep coaching and sleep consistency features that have been around a generation or two. Here are some photos of those below. In general, I find the Sleep Coach relatively useless since it always just tells me 7hr 40mins (the highest it’ll show), though I’ve got nothing against the sleep consistency feature.

Next, there’s the Health Status dashboard. This essentially streamlines the five core nightly stats that most of the industry has agreed upon, consolidated into a dashboard. They are: Heart Rate (sleep resting), HRV, Respiration Rate, Skin Temperature, Pulse Ox (SpO2).

When one of these stats gets out of alignment with your baseline (which is looking at your specific historical data), it’ll throw a notification to you. Sometimes these are normal variances, such as if you go to a hotel room that just simply has far colder/more powerful A/C, which drives your skin temperature lower. Others might be more concerning (like plummeting HRV values).

In fact, let’s talk about HRV now, which is Heart Rate Variability. This metric first takes a 19-day baseline to establish your normal values (each night). You’ll see your nightly data before then, just not the color-coded ranges yet. Once you have that, it’ll trend it over the previous 90 days of your historical data. Everyone is different here, so don’t look at my data and assume it’s somehow correct. My equally athletic wife has ranges about 20-30ms higher than me, and then inversely, my also very athletic friend DesFit has ranges about 10-15ms below mine. What matters is how your ranges trend.

Generally speaking for me (and most people), if you start getting sick, your HRV values will plummet roughly a day or so before you have actual noticeable symptoms. So when I’m about to get sick, my values will plummet from the 50’s to the low 30’s, which tells me trouble is brewing. Yet at the same time, there are many factors for HRV, including fatigue (such as jet lag), alcohol consumption, drug consumption (both ‘good’ and ‘bad’), and even really hard training days. Generally speaking, having about two glasses of wine within a few hours of bedtime will drop my HRV average down about 10ms for the night.

Yet as you can see above, there are all sorts of fun exceptions to the rule. You’ll see that crazy high spike a few days ago, that was for the 10hr/50km trek I did. In that case, that triggered a rare inverse HRV reaction, which actually spikes HRV as a body’s response. That’s incredibly rare for me (usually it just drops after heavy workout activity), but this was enough of a shock to the system to do the opposite. In any case, tracking HRV is full of fun stuff.

With that noted, all of the above stats, including steps/activity, sleep, floors, heart rate, and countless other metrics, are of course also visible in the Garmin Connect app (or Garmin Connect on the web/desktop).

Finally, rounding home here, I’ll note that the Fenix 9 series uses Garmin’s ELEVATE Gen5 optical heart rate sensor, which was introduced with the Fenix 7 Pro in 2023. That’s the latest optical HR sensor that Garmin has, and includes ECG support. You can see the sensor below:

ECG on Garmin devices is medically certified in a boatload of countries to detect Afib (atrial fibrillation) during a manual session. You’ll go through a few steps to enable the feature (namely ensuring you understand it doesn’t detect heart attacks), then you can do a manual ECG reading anytime you’d like. That’ll produce a result on the screen to detect Afib, and then atop that, produce a full PDF that you can send to a doctor. Again, this is a medically certified feature on the device.

However, while that is medically certified, Garmin doesn’t yet have any sort of passive Afib detection, like virtually all of their competitors have had for years (which just operates in the background). Equally, Garmin doesn’t have any official medically certified sleep apnea detection like Apple (instead, Garmin has ‘Sleep Disturbances’, which is basically a non-medically certified view of that concept). Further, Garmin doesn’t have anything in the blood pressure realm on the wrist (they have their Index BPM instead). But again, no other smartwatch or mainstream wearable company has any medically certified blood pressure features (and all the ones that aren’t medically certified are kinda sketchy AF in my testing).

Finally, last but not least, there are notifications. On a Garmin watch, these notifications will be controlled largely from your smartphone, and appear on the watch (inclusive of emoji/etc…). For iOS users, you won’t get any photos, nor the ability to respond (due to Apple restrictions). For Android users, you can both respond to messages as well as see photos. Note there is a WhatsApp Garmin Connect IQ watch app, allowing some limited responses as well (for both iOS and Android)

Note that the voice/speaker features haven’t changed since the Fenix 8 (except that the speaker simply got a bunch louder in the Fenix 8 Pro, and that carries into the Fenix 9 series). So if you want to dive into those pieces, check out my Fenix 8 Review Speaker/Voice/Mic section for all the details). And the same goes for the Garmin Pay & Music components, which haven’t changed in years either. You can use Garmin Pay (NFC) on your watch to pay for things, and download music from Spotify/Amazon Music/YouTube Music just like in the past, for offline listening away from your phone/connectivity. Again, I cover this previously here – it’s all identical on the Fenix 9 series.

Sports Usage:

It probably goes without saying that if you’re getting a Garmin Fenix device, you’re pretty likely to be using it within sporting activities. Though equally, these days that’s not always the case (some people just like the battery life). In any case, the Fenix 9 continues to carry the torch of being (by a massive margin) the most capable sport watch on the market. Factually put, nothing comes close in terms of features or depth of those functions. Of course, whether or not you’d ever use a fraction of the features is an entirely different question.

The Fenix 9 adds a bunch of new sports features around rowing, rucking, stamina, grade adjusted pace, and more. I’ve split out the rowing & rucking pieces into their own category below, but for the others, I’ll roll the new bits into this section. Keeping in mind, with likely 300-500 different sports features/functions/combinations on a Fenix series watch, it’s impossible to cover everything here. Most of it though hasn’t changed since the Fenix 8 series.

With that, the first thing you’ll do is choose your sports/activity mode. To do that you’ll tap the upper right button, and then choose the applicable sport mode. You can pin your favorites, or sift through the numerous buckets of activity types to find what you need.

From a sports standpoint, here’s the full list that’s on my watch as of this writing (though, Garmin usually adds at least a few new sport modes during the course of each year via their quarterly updates).

Run, Track Run, Treadmill, Virtual Run, Indoor Track, Walk Indoor, Trail Run, Ultra Run, Hike, Walk, Adventure Race, Bike, Road Bike, Bike Indoor, MTB, eBike, eMTB, Cyclocross, Gravel Bike, Bike Commute, Bike Tour, BMX, Strength, Rucking, Golf, Mountaineering, Bouldering, Fish, Hunt, Disc Golf, Horseback, Expedition, ArcheryX, Obstacle Racing, Inline Skating, Pool Swim, Open Water, Triathlon, Mixed Session, Swimrun, Cardio, Mobility, HIIT, Yoga, Pilates, Treadmill, Elliptical, Stair Stepper, Row Indoor, XC Ski Indoor, Climb Indoor, Bouldering, Floor Climb, Boxing, Mixed Martial Arts, Jump Rope, Cow Tipping, Scuba Dive, Apnea Dive, Snorkel, Ski, Snowboard, Backcountry Ski, Backcountry Snowboard, XC Classic Ski, XC Skate Ski, Snowshoe, Ice Skating, Snowmobile, SUP, Kayak, Row, Surf, Kiteboarding, Windsurf, Snorkel, Whitewater, Boat, Sail, Sail Race, Sail Expedition, Wakeboard, Wakesurf, Water Ski, Tube, Soccer/Football, American Football, Basketball, Baseball, Softball, Volleyball, Cricket, Lacrosse, Rugby, Field Hockey, Ice Hockey, Ultimate Disc, Gaming, Tennis, Pickleball, Padel, Racquetball, Squash, Badminton, Table Tennis, Platform Tennis, ATV, Snowmobile, Overland, Motocross, Motorcycle, Meditation, Breathwork, Jumpmaster, Track Me, Tempo Training (Golf)

For the purposes of simplicity, I’ll just choose the running profile. Once you select a given sport mode, if outside it’ll start to find GPS. If you’ve got external ANT+ or Bluetooth sensors (like a heart rate strap, or cycling power meter), it’ll go off and connect to those too during this time. And finally, it’ll lock heart rate using a higher power on the optical HR sensor. You can see the status of all this here:

Meanwhile, if you scroll down, you can add structured workouts, load a course/route, and change other settings for that sport (such as data page customization). When it comes to data pages, you’ve got effectively an unlimited number of custom data pages you can add, along with a slate of pre-canned ones (including various charts). Each custom page can have between 1 and 8 data fields on it (of your choosing). If you want to add the new rolling Grade Adjusted Pace (GAP) data fields, you’d do that in the data field page options.

For structured workouts, you can create those on-device (such as a simple structured interval workout), or you can download them from Garmin Connect (including from 3rd parties like TrainingPeaks and more). Whereas for courses, you can create those using Garmin Connect (free), or from 3rd parties like Strava Routes, Komoot Routes, or a gazillion others.

For the purposes of today, I’ll actually load in a route, so I can quickly show the new map perspective pieces. One thing I’d recommend enabling is ClimbPro (annoyingly, on each profile), which shows the status to the top of the climb, as well as even descents, if you want it.

Once you’ve got everything loaded that you want, you can simply press start to get going. At this point you’ll see all your configured data pages. That could be just a simple single data page, or a complex assortment that only a data geek could love. Here’s a slate of them from this run.

In there you can see the new rolling GAP data field. This will either be shown in rolling 1-mile GAP, or rolling 1-kilometer GAP, depending on how you have your watch configured. You can see I also created one showing my instant pace (with nifty chart), as well as my rolling GAP pace in the middle. I had set a lap GAP at the bottom, but for whatever reason it wasn’t showing up.

Next, to briefly touch on the mapping pieces. The main new piece here is the new perspective view. Here’s an example of that side-by-side with the regular view. The perspective view is on the left, the regular view is on the right. The difference can be subtle, depending on what’s around you.

Of course, one of the big things that Garmin talked about with the launch of the Fenix 9 is the faster map rendering pieces. This comes in a few different forms. First is the panning speeds (which they do by pre-loading tiles around you), and the second is route calculation speeds. And yes, things do seem faster side-by-side than the Fenix 8 Pro (you can see this in the video), though I wouldn’t describe either as a massive shift from a map panning/zooming/moving standpoint.

For route calculation, that does indeed seem faster. I did a 65KM trail run route side-by-side, loading it up, and it was definitely faster. Equally though, if you normally start a run with a course (as 99.9999% of you would) this actually doesn’t matter, since Garmin doesn’t pre-calculate routes. Instead, they just do it quietly behind the scenes. Instead, this actually only matters if you on-device create a new route and calculate it (which I’d bet only 1-2% of people ever do on a Fenix watch). You can see those differences quite visibly below:

Speed test: Create a running route to 55mi/99km away (actual course ended up being 82mi/132km):
Fenix 8 Pro: Never finished, after 90+ minutes
Fenix 9 Base: 19m 48s
Fenix 9 Pro: 11m 20s

Speed test: Load a pre-existing 40mi/65km route:
Fenix 8 Pro: 14 seconds
Fenix 9 Base: 8 seconds
Fenix 9 Pro: 8 seconds

Again, there’s exactly zero reasons you’d ever create a 55mi/99km running route on the device itself to a point far away, short of your plane crashing in the mountains of a location where your Garmin inReach service doesn’t work. Simply put, no runner would ever walk out their front door and say “Yes, I want to run 100KM without knowing where I’m going and I want zero input into the routes I take”. But, it does show the differences in the routing engine.

In any case, yes, the Fenix 9 is faster than before, but it’s also far slower than all of its competitors for moving around the map. But as anyone (including Garmin) will correctly point out, virtually all of Garmin’s competitors have static map images, which aren’t routable. Whereas Garmin’s maps are actually routable maps (allowing for on-device re-routing/etc…). Simply put, there are trade-offs to Garmin’s more detailed and fully routable maps. And as much fun as it is to pan/zoom around a map endlessly on YouTube, it’s just not something I do in real life in any of my silly-long navigation adventures. Every once in a while I might check something, and it might take an extra second or two…but…shrug?

In any case, as you’re navigating along, you’ll see your course displayed, as well as any waypoints you’ve created (shown on ‘Up Ahead’), which are super handy for longer treks.

When you approach a turn, it’ll let you know the distance and direction to the turn. And likewise, you’ll also see the distance to any other forks in the trail, just so you can be aware of them as you approach them (even if you aren’t taking it).

If you go off-course, it’ll notify you, though it won’t automatically re-route you (most people don’t actually want that in trail hiking/etc scenarios, whereas for cycling scenarios, you tend to want it). You can either sort yourself out, or trigger a re-route if you want.

Next, going back to some of the new non-navigation features, there’s the new Stamina updates. Garmin has had Stamina for a while now, which basically looks at your recent training fatigue and recovery, and then your overall fitness, and figures out how far/long you can go before you go kaput. With the Fenix 9 updates, it now also has new Stamina zones. You can see these on the watch itself at the bottom, those color-coded areas:

These correspond to new Stamina zones shown in Garmin Connect for running and cycling. Which, in turn, are mapped to what are essentially intensity levels. The curves are displayed above it, for both time and distance. And then in running for pace, and cycling for power.

And you can see these Stamina zones on your watch as well (under Widgets > Endurance Score > Stamina Zones / as well as Top Contributors):

All of this is within the Endurance Score & Stamina page, which now gets a breakout of your activities in the Endurance Score, and then you can do the historical curves as well. Mine interestingly don’t change too much year over year.

This is interesting stuff, though I do feel like it’s just a bit of yet one more zone to look at. We’ve got running power zones, running heart rate zones, lactate threshold values, grade-adjusted paces, and now stamina pace zones. Plus whatever other zones I’ve forgotten. There’s nothing wrong with more options, though it’s not something I’ll be leveraging on the regular. To each their own, though.

Now, once your workout is done, you’ll get a summary of your activity, which has plenty of information to dig into. And of course, you can see this all on Garmin Connect Mobile (or desktop) as well:

Which then is a good time to briefly look at the Training Status, Training Readiness, and other related pieces. None of these have changed in the Fenix 9, so we’ll quickly skim through them, but do so in a separate section to keep things tidy.

Training Readiness & Planning:

In this section, I’m going to dig into some of the training features. Again, these are all largely identical to the Fenix 8, with the exception that Training Status now supports rowing (more on that in the rowing section).

From a training standpoint, these features include:

– Race Planning/Calendaring
– Automatic coached workouts (for running and run/walk plans)
– Training Load (Training Status)
– Training Recovery
– Training Readiness
– Race Finish Time Prediction
– VO2Max Tracking

There are lots of other aspects that tie into these, but that’s the general gist of the core features.

To start, I’ll quickly cover race calendaring, noting that you do not need to put an event on your calendar for any of these features to work. You can simply not list anything at all, and the watch will automatically suggest running workouts for you to make you more fit; it’s just that those workouts won’t be tailored to a specific distance/event. Meaning, if you don’t tell it you’re running a marathon, it’s not going to suggest the weekly long runs that you’d associate with a marathon event.

To add an event, you can go to your Garmin Connect app and simply create an event, which can even search databases for the exact race (which is handy later as it pulls in the exact course/route, as well as weather conditions).

You can create multiple events, and prioritize events (e.g., A/B/C priority). These will then ultimately show up in your Race Calendar widget, which can predict your finish time (as of today). The Fenix 9 will then show what you’d do if you ran it today, versus the projection it has. Generally speaking, you’ll want a bit more variability in your running to get more accurate times here. In my case, I’ve been doing mostly trail running lately, which isn’t super good at helping Garmin figure out my road-running paces, because it doesn’t account for the technical aspect of terrain. Once I shift more towards road-running, these times tend to drop pretty quickly.

Now, regardless of what’s on your calendar (or not), Daily Suggested Workouts (DSW) will generate a workout daily to get you to that goal (or just to keep you fit). It does this based on looking at what it needs to do, while balancing your training readiness (e.g., sleep, other workouts, recovery times, etc…). In fact, it’ll even change in the middle of the day if you had exceptionally poor sleep, or went off and did some other high-intensity activity instead.

You’ll see these automatically when you open the Run app, and you can look ahead at your schedule as well:

But you can also change various settings related to it, such as specifying the day you do your long run, days you can’t run, and so on. You can also see these workouts going forward.

In general, I find the Garmin Daily Suggested workouts fairly conservative, which means they’ll err more on the side of avoiding injury than pushing you to the edge. They’ll still deliver very hard workouts, but they won’t ramp up mileage (or intensity) as hard as some coaches might.

Remember that Garmin’s coaching platform is just like any other coach and their coaching style, it has its preferences and quirks. I’ve had some coaches that are very aggressive in terms of ramping up mileage (because they know me as an athlete can typically handle that), and other coaches that are very conservative, preferring to avoid any injury at all (knowing that the most successful athlete is the one that gets to the start line).

In any case, one of the aspects that’s leaned heavily on here is Training Readiness, which looks at a few key metrics each day to figure out how ‘ready to train’ you are at any given minute in the day. This score shifts throughout the day, based on recovery time, whether you just finished a workout, and so on. Meaning, you might wake up with a Training Readiness score of 46, and it might slowly climb to 60 by early afternoon (because your recovery time from the previous workout has improved). However, once you complete that hard interval workout, it might drop down to 12, because now your literal “readiness to train” again is very low. So in my case today, this climbed from mid-40’s in the morning to mid-50’s, before I did a run that brought it back down to the low-30’s.

Training Readiness is based on the following factors:

– Sleep (last night)
– Recovery time (from last workout)
– HRV Status
– Acute Load (training load)
– Recent Sleep scores (over the past 7 days)
– Recent Stress (over the past 7 days)

The score is most heavily weighted based on recovery time and sleep, meaning if you go out and do a marathon, it’s going to show a low training readiness score, regardless of your acute load, HRV status, etc… That is, unless your effort was low-enough intensity that it didn’t make a dent because you do marathons every day or such. Again, it’s all based on what the norm is for you.

Garmin has had Training Readiness for a few years now, and generally speaking, I find it a very good indicator of how ready I am to train. Which doesn’t mean I always listen to it, but I’ll use it as one tool in my shed. If I wake up and it’s showing a score of ‘8’, and I feel rough, it’s probably time to do something easier. Whereas if I wake up and feel good and the score is 20 or 30, I’ll likely rally. Again, remember Garmin skews conservative when it comes to trying to keep you uninjured. This is a big piece of that.

One of the metrics that make up Training Readiness is Acute Load, which is perhaps the best overall metric for looking at your Training Load. This metric shows your historical load range over the past 30 days as the green range, and then the last 7 days trending line atop that. It’s super helpful for figuring out how things compare to your baseline:

With that, you can see your Load Ratio, which shows whether you’re trending up or down. Generally speaking, you want to keep your upwards increase in training load at upwards of 1.2ish (meaning, you’re doing 20% more in the last 7-days, than the average 7-day period over the last 30 days). For example below, you’ll notice Monday is still empty (I took these shots before my run). Once I did my 1-hour tempo run up a mountain, that added about 271 units of training load, bringing me to nearly 900 for the 7-day period. This in turn put my load ratio back in the ~1.2 range.

Which then carries into Training Status. Training Status is more like a true coach that just focuses on whether the ‘type’ of training you’re doing is going to make you faster. Meaning, is it a balanced diet of easy workouts, hard workouts, etc… It mostly ignores factors like sleep/stress (except it does account for HRV). Whereas Training Readiness is looking at all those factors together.

Training Status is going to give you scores like Productive, Unproductive, Maintaining, Peaking, and Recovery. Generally speaking, I’d say that with Training Status in the last few years (new devices in the past few years), it’s now pretty hard to get into an Unproductive status unless you deserve it.

In my case, I apparently deserve it these days. Initially, I had some wonky zones set back a few months ago, and then I thought I fixed that, and was good, and then it all fell apart again a few weeks ago. Though I managed to get one day of ‘Productive’, so, I took some photos. I’ve been Unproductive for weeks, then productive for one day, before landing back on ‘Maintaining’. Sigh.

In any case, generally speaking, for the last few years, I float between Productive or Maintaining most of the time, with occasional Peaking or Recovery if I’ve cut a lot of training load quickly (such as going on vacation, or tapering before a race).

Of course, one really important thing to understand about Training Status (and correspondingly the VO2Max predictions) is that it’s heavily reliant on a varied diet of running, meaning longer runs, shorter-high-intensity runs, tempo runs, etc… If you’re only running a steady-state moderate-intensity 30-minute run every other day, it’s going to struggle to be super accurate.

But I find that when I have that varied diet of training run types, it really does a good job at figuring out life and my VO2Max more accurately. And further, as a benefit, that’s generally speaking how you should be training anyway.

Garmin Epics:

Next up is the new Garmin Epics feature, which is kinda like an adventure showcase/journal combined into one. An Epic is designed to group multiple activities together, along with your other data (including sleep metrics, training load, etc…) into one cohesive story. An Epic does not require a new Garmin Fenix 9 watch, and even more, can be created using data from past Garmin adventures (even years ago). They can also include different types of activities in one Epic (e.g., hiking, swimming, running, cycling, etc…). Basically, an Epic is just a big bucket of things you want to group together.

There are essentially two parts to an Epic. The first is the piece you create on the Garmin Connect Mobile app, defining the dates and a route/course (if applicable). And then the second piece is on the watch, where you can see a widget with your Epic details.

Starting off with the Garmin Connect Mobile bits, you’ll create the start/end points of the Epic. This can be up to 89 days (as a timespan), and you can load in a singular long route file. This is the only part that’s a little bit tricky, in that some people might have a long trek/route split into a bunch of smaller files/routes. Note that you don’t need a route for an Epic, it just calculates remaining distance/elevation/etc if you have it loaded.

Once all that’s done, you’ll go off and do your activity. One thing of note is that anytime you start an activity, it’ll actually show you the name of the Epic on that page, along with the Epic course details (which is handy). But otherwise, during a workout itself there’s no specific during-workout features, but rather, it’s post-workout.

Here, on the watch itself, you’ll see a new Garmin Epic widget that shows you progress towards the course completion (if a course is loaded), as well as other summary stats about your totals over the course of the Epic duration (defined period). This includes things like sleep stats and training readiness stats.

I will say that I’ve had a bunch of weird bugs in this area around having non-course activities mixed in there (such as the swimming/etc…) that solidly confused it. None of these were deal-breakers, but there are definitely some on-device bugs in this realm (as seen above, with remaining distance/ascent time)

Instead, I think the cooler part is actually the on-app bits. Here you can add photos to a given activity, and then see those all grouped together into a single cohesive storyline (which can be shared/linked out). Here’s a quick gallery of my Tour de Mont Blanc one, as a much prettier example:

Overall, this is a cool feature. I’ll be interested to see if Garmin continues to evolve this feature (beyond expected minor bug fixes), or if it stays static. Garmin often has a history of creating these new features, and then never evolving them. Whereas this is a feature where there’s tons of things they could do to evolve it, such as automatically pulling in the full Epic activity list of photos/stats and creating Instagram-friendly movies, etc…

New Rowing & Rucking Features:

Look, I get it, there’s virtually no similarities between Rowing and Rucking (except that most rational people find both of them painful to do). However, in this case they’re arguably the two marquee new sports features of the Fenix 9 series, and atop that, they both start with ‘R’. Thus, they get to share a section.

We’ll start off with rowing, and then get into rucking. In the case of rowing, as a reminder, here’s a quick list of the new features there:

– Added new heart rate zones for rowing, and max heart rate
– Added new power zones and power curves for running
– Added new indoor rowing FTP values/estimation
– Added new indoor rowing VO2Max values
– Added lactate threshold for rowing, and performance condition
– Added indoor rowing activity profile countdown timer (5-second timer, to let you get ready)
– Added support for indoor rowing to update Training Status (e.g., Productive, unproductive, etc…)

So, let’s dive into it. Previously, you could pair up a rower to the indoor rowing profile, but you didn’t get any of the added metrics (e.g., FTP/VO2Max/Training Status Updates, etc…). Now, all that happens is that you pair up some sort of power meter device. If you have a Concept2 rower (with PM5), you’ll still pair it as an ANT+ FE-C rower, since that’ll also give distance and stroke information (which a straight power meter profile wouldn’t). But from a practical standpoint, the new metrics only require power and heart rate to calculate. So if your non-Concept2 rower only does power, you’re still good.

(Note: When pairing a Concept2 rower, in the settings menu there’s an option for ‘Always on’, which means anytime the display turns on, it starts broadcasting. If this is your rower, enable that to make your life faster/easier, than enabling it each time manually.)

Once you’ve got your rower paired up to your watch, then you’re ready to start rowing. There’s actually a new 5-second countdown timer that you can enable, so you can be ready to start rowing exactly when it counts down to zero. Otherwise, just start going.

Like in the past, the watch will display your power information, as well as stroke & distance information if that’s transmitted from your rower. In the case of the PM5, it was showing values within 1-second of the display’s values, so within the realm of ANT+ update frequencies. However, more notable here is the new rowing-specific power and heart rate zones. You can customize these within the user profile settings:

However, before you run off and do that, know that one of the other new features here is the fact that it’ll do this for you. When you finish any workout that’s at least 15 minutes long at 70% of your max HR, it’ll update your VO2Max stats. Further, it’ll update your rowing FTP values, and finally, if applicable, it’ll update your lactate threshold values. Here’s an example of that after my rowing on Saturday:

I did an initial ride nearly two weeks ago (about 25 minutes long, purely steady-state), and it immediately was able to identify a VO2Max and FTP value (w/kg estimate). Though that was 36 hours after finishing the 50KM/10hr trek, so my legs were a little squishy. But since then I’ve been constantly traveling and unable to get back to the rower. But last night I did, and this time I mixed it up with a bunch of 60s interval efforts (60s on/off repeats). In this case, I got a notably higher VO2Max & FTP estimate. Which makes sense, just like in running and cycling, the more data you give it, the better.

As with cycling and running, the ‘default’ VO2Max stat you’ll see on the Training Status page is the one you spent the most recent time in. In my case, that’s running, so that’s what controls my VO2Max listed there (otherwise it’d be a little rowing icon).

Now, I know you’re expecting Rucking next…but no. I’m going to briefly mention that Ski Erg is also a new sport profile. Except it’s not called that (for trademark reasons), it’s called ‘XC Ski Indoor’. This doesn’t update/change your rowing-specific stats. But it does support the ANT+ FE-C equipment profile, including power, distance, and stroke rate. If you don’t connect to supporting equipment though, you won’t get stroke rate.

So if you have a Concept2 Ski Erg, it’ll pair up exactly the same way as the rower, and send all those stats to it:

Ok, with that, off to the new Rucking features. As a quick reminder on those, here’s what’s new in this realm:

– Added New Rucking/Pack-Weight calorie breakout for activities (in multiple sport profiles)
– Revamped algorithms around pack-weight, to more accurately cover calorie impacts
– Added New Rucking target calculator on-watch: Can tell you how far you need to go for a certain goal & pack weight
– Added ability to change pack-weight mid-activity
– Added Dedicated Rucking Reports (summarizing pack weight, calories, elevation, pace)
– Added Rucking Multisport mode option
– Added New on-device Rucking structured workouts with GoRuck

In my case, I decided to induce all the pain by going out for a near-50KM hike with a ~30lbs/14kg pack for 10 hours in the 90°F/32°C sun. Oh, and 4,400ft/1,100m of elevation and off-road terrain in there too. Obviously, people ruck with far higher pack weights (myself included), but equally, most people don’t go 10hrs straight for nearly 50KM. In any case, I weighed up my pack before setting off:

From there, you’ll enter it within the pack weight option that you see when you open the Rucking profile. One annoyance is that at the moment, *only* the Rucking profile fully supports all the pack weight pieces. While other profiles (like hiking) do allow you to add a pack weight, that’s sorta ‘old-style’, and won’t do all the extra calorie breakouts and reporting pieces, or allow you to change it mid-ruck, like the Rucking profile supports. Hopefully they simply update the other profiles (e.g., Hiking) to match the official Rucking profile. Oh, and you can, of course, have pounds or kilograms. I mix and match to keep people on their toes.

The big change here in terms of mid-activity bits is that it allows you to update pack-weight during the activity itself, and it’ll actually track those changes later on. Once you’ve begun the trek, aside from updating pack-weight, there’s actually nothing else to see feature-wise.

So, here’s a pretty picture of me up in the mountains:

I will note that a bug exists where the ‘Active Calories’ showed zero calories the entire time I was in the activity. Garmin says it’ll be fixed in the next firmware update. Still, given the entire point of this whole rucking thing was to show accurate Active Calories, it’s these sorts of bugs that shouldn’t be slipping by.

In any case, you can adjust the pack weight at any time, which will be meaningful if you look at the calories from pack weight afterwards. Which, after 10 hours is exactly what I did, see those results. When you save the activity, you’ll see this new screen as part of the post-activity summary (as well as a new ‘Average Pack Weight’ field on the summary screen):

As seen above, it’s pretty self-explanatory, and shows the breakout between your base calories, and the added pack weight calories. In my case, I’d argue that number seems curiously low. My body weight is listed as 194lbs in the watch/Garmin Connect, and the pack weight was listed as 29lbs. As such, 15% of my body weight. However, to ‘only’ have an extra 600 calories after 10 hours in 90°F temps with all that elevation gain seems…underwhelming. In looking at various other opinions/academic studies online, with those temperatures and altitude gain, the expected % increase should have been substantially higher.

I asked Garmin about it, and here’s what they said:

“The pack-weight calculation is not based on the pack-to-body-weight ratio alone. The ratio is passed through a non-linear scaling curve, which means heavier packs have a disproportionately larger impact than lighter packs. Elevation, terrain, temperature, distance, and pace are already captured in the total calorie estimate, while the pack model estimates what portion of that energy is attributed to carrying the additional load”

Obviously, Garmin has their own science peoples within the FirstBeat teams, which are well regarded and often quite science-backed. Yet still, this doesn’t seem to pass my gut-check test.

In any case, back on the watch itself, there’s a new Rucking target calculator. This allows you to enter ‘2 of 4 workout goals’, comprised of: Distance, Time, Pace, or Calories, and then it’ll automatically calculate the suffering required of the remaining two (you specify your pack weight aside from that):

So for example, I can say that I want to go for 70 minutes, with a pace of 10 mins/km, and then with a specified pack weight of 29lbs, it’ll get me 7km and 454 calories:

Likewise, there’s also the ability to do rucking-specific workouts, along with a new partnership with GoRuck providing some of those workouts to do.

Finally, last but not least, you can now add Rucking to a multipart profile. Thus, if you wanted to ruck, then Bike, and then give-up on all that and just go for a swim, you can do such a thing. As they say, variety is the spice of life.

Diving & Underwater Usage:

Now,  I don’t have a dedicated section on diving within the Fenix 9 review, though the feature hasn’t really changed since it was introduced on the Fenix 8 two years ago (so check out that full section instead). The Fenix 9 continues to support diving down to 40m in depth, either in a scuba or apnea (free diving) scenario. Plus, it also supports snorkeling. I’ve used the Fenix 8 & Fenix 8 Pro many times for scuba adventures, and then more recently I used the Fenix 9 Pro for some free diving, below:

I’ll likely expand this section out in the coming weeks with more scuba experience/details, but again, everything is identical to the Fenix 8 in the scuba realm. The key difference between the Fenix series diving features and the Descent MK series diving features is that the Descent MK series includes support for air integration (Garmin’s T1/T2 tank receivers), whereas the Fenix doesn’t (note that the Instinct-based Descent G series is more like the Fenix). Further, the Descent MK series supports deeper depths. There are plenty of other differences (like support for underwater communications), but those are the biggies.

But for me, I just get tons of usage out of the depth gauge elements, as both my wife and I are constantly in the water here exploring. It’s just handy to know how deep we’ve gone, and have that automatically trigger as well (though I wish I could set the trigger depth to slightly deeper to avoid it triggering every time I jump in the pool).

In any case, more to come there (scuba-wise).

LTE & inReach Usage (Pro inReach):

This section is only applicable to the Garmin Fenix 9 Pro inReach models, which are the models that contain extra hardware allowing for both LTE features as well as two-way satellite-messaging features. These features were introduced on the Fenix 8 Pro last year, but have been expanded very slightly now with both a weather over satellite feature, as well as a new ‘backup satellite’ (alternate) positioning feature in case you’re having troubles.

The features are divided into two sections, LTE and satellite. When it comes to LTE features, Garmin offers the following features over their LTE network, via LTE-M (which requires lower power as an ecosystem, including voice calling over LTE-M):

– LTE Live two-way voice calls
– LTE LiveTrack (30-second sampling rate)
– LTE Voice Messaging
– LTE Text Messaging
– LTE Weather
– LTE & Satellite Emergency SOS
– LTE Location Check-Ins
– LTE Incident Detection & Assistance

In addition, they also offer satellite text messaging; more on that in a second. Notably, the watches are cross-region compatible due to LTE-M. Meaning, you can use your European model in the US for LTE-M (and satellite), and vice-versa.

Next, for the satellite features, these are more focused on updating status and asking for emergency assistance. Unlike LTE, which just works in the background, all of these features require holding a watch out in front of you to maintain a specific orientation towards a satellite (this is the same with Apple, Google, and others).

– Satellite Messaging (basic texting)
– Satellite position/location check-ins
– Satellite Emergency SOS (via Garmin Response)
– Satellite updating of weather (new in the Fenix 9 Pro)

And then finally, when it comes to the launch of the Fenix 9, Garmin also added a few more things at the same time that are largely tied into the Garmin Messenger app. These aren’t actually dependent on the Fenix 9, but I figured I’d mention it here:

– Added new Garmin Locate feature within Garmin Messenger app
– Added ability to see athlete heart rate, pace, distance, elevation information in Garmin Messenger App

Ok, so with that covered, note that none of these LTE or inReach pieces are free long-term, despite all of their competitors offering the satellite pieces for free. Getting things set up requires setting up an account within Garmin’s inReach platform. This gives you 30 days free, after which it is $9.99/month for unlimited LTE stuffs, and emergency-only Satellite bits. Beyond that, there are additional fees for satellite check-ins/texts that I’ll cover below (or, a higher-priced plan).

From there, you’ll see a menu option on your watch that shows the different connectivity status options, in terms of how and when it leverages both LTE & satellite. Essentially, you can leave it on Auto, force it off/on, and any number of combinations within that.

By default, in ‘Auto’ mode, the unit will go into ‘Auto Standby’, which basically saves power unless it needs it for a specific LTE operation (e.g., LiveTrack, making a call, etc… if your phone isn’t nearby). The upside to this is that it saves a bunch (boatload) of battery. The downside is that if someone tries to make an inbound call to you, and you don’t have your phone, the call won’t come in.

One of the things I’ve learned over the past year is that this is pretty handy if you actually don’t care about LTE connectivity; it’s best to just set it to ‘Satellite Only’, which means to essentially shut off LTE on the watch entirely, and just use my phone connection. Since the Satellite messaging pieces require a bunch of knowingly manual steps, it’s not something that can happen in the background anyway.

In any case, for LTE, if enabled, it’ll show you the signal strength when you start an outdoor activity at the top, or you can always see it by long-holding the upper right controls menu button:

Looking at the most common use case for me and my wife, LTE LiveTrack will automatically send a link to my configured friends/family. You can do this within the Garmin Connect settings, including whether to send the course (I do), as well as whether it just automatically triggers every time (I do that too). At the top, you can see the 4 recipients that get it (if I were to click-in, it’d show the names). And notice the toggles for ‘Show Course’ and ‘Auto Start’.

When it comes to a LiveTrack itself, there’s no difference between what you’d see from an LTE connection directly on the watch and what you’d see using the phone. It’s all the same.

From the watch, you can use both pre-canned messages (including ones you can customize), as well as the little keyboard.

When it comes to someone sending messages to you, the ‘easiest’ method is the Garmin Messenger app, because that’ll automatically include location information and other details about them (including the new Locate feature). However, technically speaking, you as the watch user can send a message to any text message number, and then they can respond. It’s just that the phone number isn’t ‘yours’ (nor can it be your existing phone number).

Likewise, only voice messages can go to the Garmin Messenger app, and only voice calling can go to the Garmin Messenger app. In this case, you can just select the person from your contacts, and off you go:

I very rarely have used this over the last year with the Fenix 8 Pro, and did poke at it a bit with the Fenix 9 Pro. It works fine, but isn’t anything special either. Like most watch calling, the speaker/mic quality is blah at best for these sorts of scenarios. You can get a quick conversation done no problem, but you won’t want to tell your life story for hours.

Here you can see my wife calling my phone via her watch (her phone isn’t with us). On my phone, the ‘Garmin Messenger’ app is what the call is coming through, similar to how a WhatsApp call would come through.

One handy part though is for voice messages, these will actually enumerate as text transcriptions. This is something Garmin has rolled out across all of their Messenger app-based units over the last year, and it’s super handy. So you can see me recording the message on my watch, and then her receiving it (all via LTE), and receiving both the actual audio, as well as the transcription.

Note also that if your child has a Garmin Bounce watch (which has LTE too), there’s zero integration between the Garmin Bounce side (including the Garmin Jr app) and these watches (or the Garmin Messenger ecosystem). They might as well be entirely separate companies at this point. That said, I’ve also not really had a scenario in the last year where I needed that integration, but again, it shows just how siloed Garmin often is when it comes to many of their product teams.

In any case, as I said above, the main benefit for me and my wife is the ability to get LTE LiveTracks during runs/rides, either because one of us isn’t running/riding with a phone, or perhaps the phone simply died during a long day of riding. The LiveTrack continues on.

Next up then are the satellite messaging pieces. These remain mostly the same as last year, except now you can get weather updates via satellite, and there’s a new backup connection option.

With the Fenix 8 Pro and Fenix 9 Pro inReach series, the antenna now allows for on-demand connectivity to GEO satellites, which is very different than the much larger antenna form factor of a typical inReach device. This means that, unlike a typical inReach device, this will only send messages to the satellite when you position your arm in a specific orientation. That’s because it needs to point to an exact satellite, whereas a typical inReach device has a huge antenna to find the correct satellites in virtually every orientation. The traditional Garmin inReach Iridium devices use LEO satellites, about 66 of them, and much closer to Earth. Whereas GEO is more limited in service areas: Covering a specific area of the Earth, focused on a specific area of the Earth, and thus, a specific coverage area.

Therefore, the coverage maps are essentially the Continental US/Canada (+ about 50 miles offshore) and the vast majority of Europe, where satellite services are provided by Garmin’s satellite umbrella partner, Skylo (different from their handheld inReach devices).

Next, when it comes to satellite features, by default, everything will run over LTE if that’s available first. You can force it to a satellite if you need to, but there’s really no point if LTE is there. Still, if you’re outside cellular range (or Bluetooth range to your phone), then when you go to send a text message from the watch, it’ll prompt you to go into satellite mode. This will first have you double-check the compass, which is then leveraged to point towards the right satellite location. Note this is a change from the Fenix 8 Pro series, where you’re going to *KEEP YOUR HAND/ARM OUT*, basically away from your body. If you hold it against your body, it’ll actually block the signal, since it’s effectively coming out of the bottom of the watch.

At which point, you’ll then get a further UI piece to refine connectivity towards that satellite. This piece seemed to take about 20-30 seconds to get a lock on the satellite.

After that’s done, it’ll send the message, which is pretty quick (5-10 seconds), and then confirms the message is sent. It’ll also receive any inbound messages.

Note that this uses the exact same user interface as the LTE messaging above. In fact, it’ll first try to send messages using your phone, then try using LTE, and finally, failing that, it’ll ask to use LTE. You can see the satellite icon indicating it was sent via satellite.

Now one thing that’s worthwhile noting is that on the Fenix 9 series, there’s actually a new ‘alternate’ way to send a message, in the event your unit is having trouble getting a satellite message out. This new method will pop up after multiple failure attempts:

When you select the new ‘Alternate’ method, it’ll re-initialize a new system (it literally tells you this), and then asks you to remove the watch, turn it around, hold it by the straps, and face the back towards the sky.

From there, the sending process is the same, and sends within the same amount of time.

Lastly, as you’d expect, there are the Garmin SOS features, leveraging Garmin’s Response Center, for emergencies. You can access that via the controls menu, which then gives you 10 seconds to cancel it, in case it was accidentally activated. As with the other features, it’ll first try via LTE, then satellite.

Again, as someone who has been using the Fenix 8 Pro with satellite features over the last year, I’d argue if you plan to do a lot of satellite message sending, just get a Garmin inReach device (all you need is the inReach Mini 2, usually on sale at $249). The key reason is that with the Garmin watches, you have to specifically hold your arm out and wait each time you send a message (including location updates), which is a giant pain in the butt if you want frequent updates. Whereas if you just want to have someone automatically update your position, doing so with the Garmin inReach Mini devices clipped to a backpack is the way to go. It just does it every few minutes automatically, lasts forever, and just works. Also, it has a much more widely available satellite coverage range.

Finally, I will note that much has been made about the satellite types of the Garmin watches, in that if the satellite you need to talk to is blocked, it won’t be able to send the message. For example, if you were/are up against a cliff, and the single satellite it needs to talk to is in the direction of the cliff, it can’t send the message. And yes, that is indeed true (of both Garmin & Google watches, though not Apple Watches, which use a different satellite system more akin to that of the traditional Garmin inReach watches). That said, equally, I don’t think it’s a huge dealbreaker as a backup emergency option. I think I found only one place in the last year where I couldn’t send a message out via the watch due to obstruction, and simply moving back 10 meters solved it. Obviously, if I was in a spot I couldn’t move 10 meters back, then yes, that would be a problem.

Point is, while I do much prefer the satellite systems that Apple is using on their watches over what Garmin is using, I don’t think it’s as big a deal as some might think. Instead, I’d argue just how slow and cumbersome getting a satellite message out on a Garmin watch is compared to how efficient it is for an Apple Watch, is probably more notable. But again, different things for different folks.

GPS Accuracy:

The Fenix 9 Series has a slightly modified GPS configuration, with new software-defined GPS modes (e.g., Max Accuracy). These modes are very similar to the past, except that now all modes have SatIQ enabled within them. Yet others are a bit more streamlined. For example, “UltraTrac” is gone (after nearly two decades), and replaced with the more logically named ‘Max Battery’. Previously, UltraTrac would update once every few minutes (roughly), but many folks mistakenly thought it meant more like “UltraGood” accuracy, which in reality it was the opposite.

Anyways, despite initial confusion, the ‘Max Accuracy’ option does indeed force multi-band on the entire time. However, Garmin says that their SatIQ technology also tweaks additional parameters on that particular setting when environmental conditions require. They aren’t saying what those are, presumably for competitive reasons.

In any case, I’ve been testing this across multiple continents (North America & Europe), across a ton of different scenarios including openwater swimming, cycling, running, and in the mountains, cities, and more. In most cases, I’ve been using two Fenix 9 units, though sometimes more and sometimes with my wife’s data as well.

Starting off with this part trail-run, part road-run (including having very tall mountains to the side of it), we can see at a high level that everything looks good. In this case, I had set the older Fenix 8 Pro to forced Multiband, while I left the newer Fenix 9 Pro in a default configuration (with SatIQ).

If I look at one of the sections in the trees, you’ll see the tracks are basically identical:

And the same goes for along the twisty-turning shoreside path:

Next, let’s look at a run through some buildings. Nothing crazy tall yet, but more in line with what most people might stumble into on a daily basis. Some of these hotels are quite tall (10-15 stories), but most of them are in the 6-8 story range. Again, to set the scene, at a high level things look pretty clean across all of them:

Looking at an out-and-back pier section, there are some slight differences in getting from the boardwalk to the pier itself, but once on the pier, all of the units are basically perfectly fine, within a meter or two.

Next, on this cornering here, if we wanted to nitpick, the Fenix 8 Pro is the most accurate, followed closely by the Fenix 9 Pro. The Pixel Watch 5 & Apple Watch Ultra 3 both cornered through some buildings.

This next section here goes *under* a pool (those blue things you see is the pool about 8 stories up). So basically, like going under a big bridge, except with people drinking fruity cocktails. Here the Fenix 8 Pro was again the most correct, with the others about 2-3 meters offset (opposite sides). Hardly much to complain about. And again, remember the Fenix 8 Pro here is in forced mulitband, whereas the Fenix 9 is in a default SatIQ configuration.

Lastly, on this set, just for fun, to point out how close these units are. In this case, the two Garmin Fenix units are *on* the sidewalk, whereas the Apple/Google units are about 1-2 meters off the sidewalk in the field. You’d never really care about this type of difference, but I figured I’d at least acknowledge it.

Next, continuing our tall building adventures, here’s me in downtown San Francisco with a slate of different units in different configurations, both Fenix 9 and Fenix 8 units. I’d run up and down these streets, which have buildings upwards of 60 stories high, and relatively narrow streets. At a high level, here’s the route, which includes some bits along the waterfront to get there, then the sweeps up and down the business district:

From a wear standpoint, here’s how they were worn/configured (obviously I hadn’t yet strapped in that solar unit). My logic here was I wanted to see the difference between the two Fenix 9 GPS configurations side-by-side on the same wrist, so that body-side wasn’t a factor.

(Above left to right: Apple Watch Ultra 3, Garmin Fenix 8 Pro in forced multiband, Garmin Fenix 9 Pro Solar in default, Garmin Fenix 9 Pro AMOLED in Max Accuracy/forced multiband)

Along the waterfront, the units are pretty close, though the Apple Watch Ultra is consistently making small errors, such as the one below:

Diving into the sweeps up/down the downtown building sections, we’ve got the first slate here. We can see the Apple Watch Ultra 3 makes some turning errors (cutting through buildings). The Fenix 9 Pro in Max accuracy makes one slight street-side error around Battery Street. Though it is otherwise pretty much identical to the other units. Overall, despite being directly next to massive buildings, this section doesn’t prove to be an issue.

Next, we’ve got another sweep. Again, the Apple Watch Ultra 3 struggles the most here overall; though that same Fenix 9 Pro in Max Accuracy also makes a solid error, cutting into some buildings by perhaps 10-20m in one of the turns that you see towards the bottom right.

Finally, there’s this little bit here, where you can see the two Fenix 9 units are a bit more center of street than sidewalk. I was indeed on the sidewalk here, where the Apple Watch Ultra 3 & Fenix 8 Pro placed me. But I suspect this is more tied to body position than anything (those units were on my left side, whereas the two center-street units were on my right side). While you might think the ones with more ‘air’ to work with would get better results, I’ve long ago learned that multi-path errors in tough downtown environments can often show themselves in funky ways.

In any case, looking at those downtown scenarios, I’d argue that Garmin’s SatIQ in the default scenario does *exactly* what you want it to do (scale up as needed), and there was literally zero downside to choosing the default battery-saving mode over the forced Max Accuracy mode. Obviously, there may be some place on earth where it matters, but in this incredibly difficult test, it simply didn’t matter.

Next, looking at a few quick spots on my 10-hour hike through the mountainous areas, there are a few notable sections to poke at, with four different Fenix 9 units:

For example, as I approach this ridge line on both sides, you can see the units are fairly close together:

However, it’s the peak of this ridge I want to look closer at, with this large overhang towering out over me:

Here, we can see some slight deviations among the units, though, none more than about 2-3m (one unit on my right side, in green, and then one unit in a different spot on my left side in purple).

The remainder of the entire hike had plenty of quirky spots, but none others that were this noticeable.

Now let’s just quickly look at a road ride into the mountains, and then finish up with an openwater swim. Note in this case, I included not just the two Fenix 9 Pro units on my wrists (one on each wrist), but also the 43mm Fenix 9 Pro on my wife’s wrist. Given she was cycling within 2-3 meters of me at all times, it’s more than applicable enough to at least spot any wonky GPS errors. For slight track differences, just keep that in mind. Again, here’s the high-level map:

Then, looking at the overall mountain sections, things look pretty much identical:

And then zooming in closer, you can see the tracks going up/down (this was an out-and-back) are identical on the watches. That’s nice, given the high speeds here descending. You’ll notice there’s a single second (yes, one second) where a single data point on my wife’s 43mm unit is offset just beyond the road. I don’t know offhand what happened there (maybe she pumped the pause button a second or something; I don’t know), but otherwise for the entire route, all our watches are identical, and also matching the larger dedicated bike computer.

Note that if you want to look at another gravel ride into the mountains, you can find that here to look at, also with dual Garmin Fenix 9 Pro units (Solar & AMOLED)

Lastly, we’ve got an openwater swim. I had one watch per wrist, and both were in the same configuration (default satellite modes). Plus a watch on the swim buoy. As you can see, the right-wrist one oddly struggled for most of this swim. Whereas the left-wrist one was spot-on. I don’t really know why. About the only section the wrong-one got right was the long-straightaway. We had stopped shortly after each of the turns, which in GPS oddity situations will usually either fix it, or break it. In this case, it kinda just kept all wonky.

I’ll do more swimming over the next little while and see if I have any other failboats or not.

Overall though, setting aside the swimming pieces on one watch, I don’t really see any meaningful and/or consistent real-world difference between the new GPS modes and the old GPS modes/units. More critically, as before, I don’t see much value/gain to selecting forced Max Accuracy (previously forced multiband) on a regular basis, unless you have a very specific/repeatable scenario that causes SatIQ to stumble. Otherwise, you’re just burning extra battery for funsies.

Heart Rate Accuracy:

The Garmin Fenix 9 Pro has the same Gen5 optical HR sensor as the Garmin Fenix 8 Pro, the Fenix 8 prior to that, and the Fenix 7 Pro prior to that. There’s nothing wrong with that, as it’s still one of the best optical HR sensors on the market in a watch in terms of accuracy (if not, the best). In this case, I’ve been putting it through its paces like normal, but since the case and weight are roughly the same, I’d expect it to perform roughly the same. And indeed, it does.

I’ll run through a few different scenarios to demonstrate that. First up on the easy side, we’ve got a relatively steady run I did for a bit under an hour:

As you can see, the Fenix 9 was perhaps a few seconds delayed in the first 30-60 seconds, and then from there out was basically the same as the chest strap and Apple Watch Ultra 3. Both the Apple Watch & Fenix 9 bobbled the heart rate very slightly (for a few BPM) at different points during the run for a few seconds, but nothing of any real consequence. So, all good here.

Just as a quickie, here’s another steady-run run, no issues. This time the Fenix 9 vs the Pixel Watch 5 (plus a chest strap to compare):

And another mostly steady-state but slightly higher intensity run. A few climbs tossed in there. Again, zero issues:

Next, we’ve got a rowing workout. Obviously, rowing can be challenging on wrist-based optical HR sensors due to how your wrist muscles tighten, causing optical HR sensor issues. Though, this was out in the sun on a hot day, so that makes things a bit easier. Note that the Whoop band was worn on the bicep here. Again, virtually perfect here save a couple seconds at the 13-minute marker.

Next, an outdoor road cycling ride into the mountains. This one is actually really impressive. Outdoor cycling tends to be one of teh most challenging things for optical HR sensors to get right. And so in this case, not only did one watch get it right, but both watches (I had a Solar on one wrist, and an AMOLED on the other). I kinda had assumed at least one of them would dork things up, but in reality, both were virtually spot-on. That ‘down’ period there about 2/3rds the way through was simply taking some photos at the top, followed by the descent back down the mountain.

Lastly, among the interesting workouts, we’ve got this 2hr gravel ride, including a solid climb and solid descent. Frankly, this surprised me as to how good it is. Again, to have two watches perform this well wrist-based on gravel is super impressive. Kudos.

Ultimately, while the Gen5 optical HR sensor is the same as the past, there’s also nothing bad about it when it comes to heart rate accuracy in a watch form factor. It continues to be one of the most accurate on the market, and certainly so when you consider it’s 1-second update frequency (even the newer Apple Watch Series 12/Ultra 4 only have 5-second update frequencies).

Across numerous runs (more than shown here), even more trainer rides, and plenty more workouts, I just didn’t see any issues here. Of course, as I noted in my Garmin Cirqa In-Depth Review, there’s a reality to the weather conditions largely being summer weather: Hot. That makes it far easier for optical HR sensors to get accuracy right, compared to colder weather. Again, especially for wrist-based optical HR sensors.

(Note: All of the charts in these accuracy portions were created using the DCR Analyzer tool. It allows you to compare power meters/trainers, heart rate, cadence, speed/pace, running power, GPS tracks, and plenty more. You can use it as well for your own gadget comparisons, more details here.)

Battery Testing (Real World):

In this section, I just want to quickly outline the battery burn over a few different activities, as well as daily life.

First though, to quickly start with the official chart of battery life across all the units. Yes, it’s a bit of an eye chart, but at least it’s consolidated in one easy spot.

For daily battery burn, I was mostly using the 47mm Fenix 9 Pro inReach model, with it usually set for ‘Auto’ as the LTE/Satellite configuration. This meant that it would essentially leverage my phone as needed for LTE connection, and then save battery otherwise. In this configuration, I was getting around 5ish days of battery life, but that’s inclusive of roughly 1-2 hrs of GPS workout time per day (some days more, some days less, but on average). This is in the ballpark of what I saw on a similar 47mm Fenix 8 Pro unit. I believe this is slightly short of the official Garmin claim in terms of smartwatch battery life, but that claim assumes 30 minutes of GPS time per day, rather than my reality of 4x that.

Next then, the more interesting ones, is GPS battery burn across various units/activities. In this case, I tried to make these as identical as possible. That included setting up identical settings/configurations/etc…

First, this gravel ride. Solar on one side, AMOLED on the other, both 47mm units. No LTE enabled on this one, nor any navigation. Just riding, power meter connected, and LiveTrack via the phone. This is using the default satellite configuration mode.

As you can see, the solar unit has nearly 3x the battery life in this scenario closer to sunset. On this ride, there were very few trees to block the sun, and equally, on the outbound direction, the unit was facing the sun.

Next, a road ride, mid-day. Here we can see substantially less battery life for the Solar unit, though, about the same ~40hr estimate for the AMOLED. This again shows how variable the solar benefit can be. Again, this is using the default satellite configuration mode. My wife wore her 43mm unit as well, though you can see in that configuration with her profile, it was burning far more battery than the next test with my settings.

Next, we’ve got a 10hr hike. This started before sunrise, and then finished later in the day. Placement was one per wrist, and one per hand. In theory, that might mean the hand-units (the 51mm and 43mm) might have needed to work slightly harder for optical HR, though I had them strapped in pretty tight, so I doubt it.

(The orange strap one is the 47mm AMOLED, the blueish/grey strap one on the upper hand is the 51mm AMOLED, then down below the smaller black strap is the 43mm AMOLED, and the lower left one is the 47mm SOLAR)

Given it was a one-way hike, the Solar unit was facing the sun almost the entire time, which would have significantly helped it. Equally though, there were trees and rocks and cliffs and such that blocked it. This is pretty real-world, assuming real world is a Mediterranean island with what is still summer sun. All units had an identical course loaded, and for the most part I was on general data fields, except when I needed to double-check the map briefly, or climbing with ClimbPro. All units were using optical HR.

Next, we’ve got about 6.5hrs out on the water, with a Solar vs AMOLED test. This was an out-and-back route, so roughly speaking it should be a wash in terms of solar time. You can see here that again, pretty consistently, the AMOLED floats at about 40hrs of battery life (estimate). The Solar was double that. There were no trees/mountains, or even clouds out here, though I did take occasional dips in the water.

Finally, here’s another fun 6.5hr activity out on the water, this time with the LTE configuration forced on the entire time. This meant that it was constantly trying to update my LiveTrack location via LTE (since I had LiveTrack enabled, and my phone connection disabled). Further complicating matters, is that a fair chunk of this area had no cellular location, thus, it probably was trying even harder at times. Anyways, here’s the result of that:

As you can see, forcing it into LTE definitely took a chunk out of the battery life there. I suspect the first/last portion being ‘flat’ was because I was mostly stopped then versus moving, and definitely 100% in LTE coverage then. It’s unclear to me which factor was more important.

As always, I could rabbit-hole for weeks/months on different battery tests/configurations. But in short, I think this gives you a rough idea of what to expect for different amounts. As always, solar will usually be more than AMOLED, though equally, all of these tests were done in super sunny weather where I live – with virtually no cloud cover. If you live/etc in a place with overcast skies, you’re simply not going to get anywhere near this much extra solar battery life. You will still benefit though from the battery gains of a MIP screen, though how much is kinda variable on a lot of factors.

Equally, one can remember that you could reduce the accuracy level slightly and get far more battery life out of the Fenix 9 AMOLED units too. Or, you could add a chest strap to gain battery life, etc… Meaning, there’s lots of other tradeoffs you could make if you don’t want MIPS/SOLAR, but want more battery life than shown here.

Software Stability & Bugs:

This section is dedicated to the issues and bugs I saw during my Fenix 9 series testing, including both bugs I saw as well as my wife saw. This includes all units/models I have in my possession. After the extremely rough buginess/stability of the recent Garmin Cirqa release, which has followed more than 18 months of generally less stable releases from Garmin, I was keen to see how things would handle on the Fenix 9.

Overall, this is an improvement over the Cirqa release, though, not without its bugs. Most of these bugs were not ‘mission critical’ (meaning, they didn’t block me from completing a workout, and didn’t cause full loss of an entire workout). Instead, they were just annoying. All of these are present on the current/final/production firmware. These are things like empty/incorrect data pages, unexplainable messages, high battery burn on one watch, and more. Examples include:

– Stress score missing on-device, saying it needs three consecutive days of data, despite being worn 24×7 for weeks
– Endurance Score sporadically missing on-device, saying it needs two weeks of data, and then showing up again half a day later. Rinse/repeat
– Numerous bugs/errors around Garmin Epic’s, and especially around not properly enumerating activity data from multiple workout types over a time span. It’s clear there wasn’t enough testing on this scenario (e.g. doing swim/bike/run activities as part of an Epic, but also having a course for some of it)
– Rucking activity not initially sending LiveTrack or course data during workouts (this appears to have been a one-time thing)
– Unable to sync/update maps via Mac on Garmin Express (even on MacOS26)
– Super high battery burn rates on my wife’s 43mm unit (two different units). However, when I reset the unit and put my profile on it, the battery burn seems normal. Meaning, this may be tied to some bug/issue on some setting within her profile, rather than mine or the watch.

Next, there’s the not-exactly-bug category that as of this past week, Apple released MacOS27, and with it has broken Garmin Express for Fenix 9 users. Oddly, this did actually work on MacOS27 during the summer.  The singular area that matters for 99% of users, if you have to download a new map region (e.g. going to North America from Europe). While you can do that over WiFi, it takes approximately forever/hours. The map update with the Fenix 9 specifically and Garmin Express are different than the Rosetta issue, however. As a side note, Garmin has recently splintered the map regions a bit into slightly smaller chunks, which makes the WiFi slightly more viable from a hotspot in a hotel room as I found out last week. Either way, Garmin says they’re going to update Garmin Express sometime before the end of the year, but that doesn’t really help people today – no matter the Mac-related issue they have.

Finally, I have had multiple crashes – both on my watch and my wife’s watch. In my case, it was during a trail run where it just randomly reset/crashed as I was running down a hill, for no obvious reason/interaction. I was able to resume the run/activity a few mins later, though lost the time in between when it crashed and when it resumed. In the case of my wife’s, it crashed while she was drinking a glass of wine. Twice, I think. In her case, the only thing she lost was her focus on the wine consumption. Fear not, though, given there’s no Wine Readiness Score, she wasn’t dependent on her Garmin watch to complete her adventure.

Wrap-Up & Final Thoughts:

The Fenix 9 feels in many ways like what the Fenix 8 Pro launch should have been: A cohesive story of all the models getting updates with satellite connectivity, new sport features, and plenty more. Which isn’t to say the Fenix 8 Pro launch was bad, but rather, it wasn’t a complete picture. The Fenix 9 solves that. And for the most part, it does so quite well and quite reliably. Setting aside the bugs I had above, all my activities have recorded without issue, navigation without issue, and other Fenix 9 Pro inReach features without issue. I genuinely appreciate that when my wife goes out for her late night long runs alone (without a phone), I’ve got tracking on her. Even if it’s just to drop-off some more snacks. Something that wasn’t possible in the Fenix 8 Pro series, because it didn’t have a small enough unit for a small female wrist.

If we look at the new features of the Fenix 9 series, I appreciate the sport focus here. The addition of a slate of rowing features, Ski Erg features, and other sports things is great. I’ve haphazardly done indoor rowing when the moment fits, but this actually has me a bit more excited to do more indoor rowing (and have been scouring Facebook Marketplace for a used unit). Perhaps that’s silly, or perhaps that’s no different than any other bit of motivation people have from smartwatches today (be it hitting step goals, closing rings, streaks, or the such). And for those actual rowers, this finally makes a Garmin device capable of truly tracking their training loads.

One of the most notable things about the Fenix 9 release isn’t the Fenix 9 itself. It’s Garmin’s decision, the first in some 15+ years, to actually bring software updates to a previous-generation watch (the Fenix 8 and Fenix 8 Pro are considered the same ‘generation’ from a Garmin standpoint, despite being a year apart). This is a massive shift in Garmin’s stance, and one I suspect is being driven by how their competitors approach software updates (including Apple, COROS, and others). However, just as notable is this is only the 2nd time in Garmin’s 14-year history of the Garmin Fenix series, the non-Pro and Pro models were announced at the same time (the other being in 2019). Historically speaking, those would flip-flop every year. That flip-flop led to ever-more-confused consumers thinking that the ‘Pro’ model was a higher-end model, when in reality it was simply the next year’s model. This shift remedies that, yet also maintains the new annual Fenix release cycle appended to UTMB, for the second year in a row (previously it floated at every 14-18 months).

Overall, I think this is a fairly solid launch for Garmin. They’ve maintained the ‘choice’ aspect of the Fenix lineup (e.g. display types, sizes, etc…), done so without increasing the prices over previous crazy-pants prices, and delivered on most of the features that people wanted coming out of the Fenix 8/Fenix 8 Pro series. All while concurrently delivering those software features back to the Fenix 8 owners. Hopefully this is the ‘new Garmin’ that we get to keep for a while.

With that, thanks for reading!

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Hopefully you found this review/post useful. At the end of the day, I’m an athlete just like you looking for the most detail possible on a new purchase – so my review is written from the standpoint of how I used the device. The reviews generally take a lot of hours to put together, so it’s a fair bit of work (and labor of love). As you probably noticed by looking below, I also take time to answer all the questions posted in the comments – and there’s quite a bit of detail in there as well.

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The Apple Watch Ultra 4 is arguably the biggest internal update the Apple Watch has seen in a number of years, and certainly the biggest Apple Watch Ultra series update since launch. It has a far better optical heart rate sensor than in the past, new audio intelligence features, and even a brand-new Readiness score system built atop all of that. Plus, there are promises of further new features later this year with a new Apple Health app that’s consumer-friendly, as well as more audio intelligence features.

But probably the most notable thing about both the Ultra 4 and the new Series 12 (which both my wife and I are also testing) is that new optical HR sensor, which is backed by an Apple study involving 1,400 people, including the majority of whom were dual-wristing other competitor watches. In this post (and the above video), I’m going to dive into some of those claims in that Apple-backed paper, and most critically, whether they stand up to real-life scrutiny out on the road (and trails, and gyms).

With that, let’s dive into it!

What’s New:

There’s a lot new in this unit, and I’m going to cover virtually all the new features throughout this review. But if you’re looking for the quick and dirty, here’s everything that’s new on the Apple Watch Ultra 4, compared to the previous Apple Watch Ultra 3:

Apple Watch Ultra 4 Hardware Updates/Changes:

– Gets new S11 chipset, which has features from the new A20 Pro chips of the iPhone 18 Pro
– Gets new secure audio processing exclave within that (for Audio Intelligence)
– Ultra 4 increased battery life to “over 2 days” (50 hours, technically)
– Ultra 4 adds revamped ‘Extended Battery’ (GPS) mode and new ‘Max Extended Mode’ (GPS workout battery life of 45 hours, without reducing either GPS or recorded HR data
– Boatloads of new bands for all of them, including new translucent Ocean bands on the Ultra
– Ultra 4 offered in same two core colors (black or silver)

Apple Watch Heart Rate Sensing Hardware Update:

– New heart rate sensor with increased electrode surface area for better ECGs
– New photodiodes below it for better workout capture
– New LED array below that for better 24×7 HR readings
– New HR sensor is thinner (bump) than in the past
– Increased background (non-workout) HR readings to every 5 seconds (60x more than before)
– Increased HRV readings to every 5 minutes (24x more than before)
– Claim of Apple Watch Series 12/Ultra 4 “Most accurate heart rate sensing in a wearable”
– Published their own white paper to support that claim, with competitor comparisons

New HRV Features:

– Added overnight HRV trending/recording within the Vitals app (as one of key metrics)
– Added new HRV into new ‘Daytime’ view in the Vitals app
– Requires 7 nights of initial data on a watch to get HRV trends in the Vitals app

New Readiness Score Feature:

– Each morning you’ll get a new score
– Score is based on a range of 0-10 (zero being worst, 10 being highest)
– Four core descriptors you can get: Recover, Pace Yourself, Ready, Go For It
– Can be viewed on the watch or the Fitness App
– Leverages your Sleep data, Vitals Metrics, Training Load, and recent Activity data
– Requires 7 nights of initial data for the HRV trends, before it can populate Readiness Scores.

New Health App Redesign (on phone, coming later this year):

– Adds new AI summary and recommendations
– Adds Apple Intelligence guidance, including suggesting intervals
– Adds new Health Age: Based on Sleep, VO2Max, HRV, Heart Rate, Exercise Minutes, Steps, and optionally Labs
– Adds new longevity Tab, based on Nutrition, Metabolic, Overall Movement, Sleep, Hearing, Heart metrics, mental wellbeing
– Adds support for pulling in lab work
– Adds new VO2Max test (test can be done in living room in 6 minutes)
– Adds new other tests for flexibility, movement mechanics, strength, and more, which can be trended.
– Health app coming later this year in beta in English

New Audio Intelligence features (on-device, some features later this year):

– Everything done on-device, without need for your phone (at least for immediate processing)
– [Available today] Adds Sound Recognition alerts for sirens, doorbells, baby crying, and more (shows up as text on watch)
– [Available today] Instant Shazam: Will instantly show you the name of songs when you raise your wrist
– [Available later 2026] Live Rewind: Double-tap the Digital Crown to get a text-only transcription of the last 15 seconds of spoken words
– [Available later 2026] Siri Recap: Will summarize conversations/spoken words heard around you into a recap that’s available on your phone.
– Can configure all features independently (enabled/disabled, plus further focus-mode-like controls for Siri Recap)

Got all that? Phew, let’s get right into the daily usage bits.

Daily Usage Basics:

In this section I’m going to dive into the daily basics of the watch – mostly from a health and activity tracking perspective. Obviously, given the wide-ranging capabilities of the Apple Watch as a smartwatch, there’s far more that I’m not going to cover here (such as music storage/playback, contactless payments, 3rd-party apps, etc…). These largely haven’t changed this time around, save for the handful of new Audio Intelligence features that I mention later in the review.

With that, the first thing you probably already know is that the Apple Watch Ultra 4 requires an iPhone be paired with it. It’s unable to pair to an Android phone, and needs an iPhone 11 or newer (it needs an iPhone capable of running iOS27, full list here). In turn, for Apple Intelligence-related features, it needs an iPhone from that list (basically an iPhone 15 Pro, or 16/17/18 anything). Said differently, if you’ve bought an iPhone in the last few years you’re probably good, but if you’ve got something distinctly older, you might be limited on features (or not work at all).

As for the watch hardware, the externals of the Apple Watch Ultra 4 haven’t changed any since last year (save for the heart rate sensor on the back I’ll discuss in a moment). It’s still the same 1.98” screen capable of up to 3,000 nits of peak brightness. I’ve had no issues seeing that screen in bright conditions, or inversely, no issues with it being too bright in dark conditions (it’s capable of dropping down to a tiny 1 nit of brightness at night). In the case below, out on the sea…albeit with not exactly the correct sports profile to track it…but hey, it worked.

On the side of the Ultra 4 you’ve got three buttons. The left side has the Action Button, which is unique within the Apple Watch lineup to just the Ultra series. This button is customizable, though in my configuration it opens up the workout app, and then once that app is opened and a workout started, it’ll act as a lap button. Again, you can choose which app to leverage, and then what you want it to do within that app.

Meanwhile, on the other side you’ve got the Digital Crown and a side button. The Digital Crown is effectively your enter button and scroll wheel, while the side button gets you to the controls menu (to see battery status and other control features). Here’s that controls menu, showing battery status:

As someone who’s been wearing the Apple Watch Ultra for a few years now, I can say that all of this works reasonably well in dry conditions, is so-so in wet conditions, though it mostly falls apart in colder conditions with gloves. Specifically, when it comes to wet workouts with gloves, you’re unable to get to things like the ‘end’ workout screen, which requires a swipe to the left on the screen. Certainly lots of other touch-screen-focused watches have this problem as well (in varying forms), whereas most of the endurance-sports-focused watches have dedicated buttons for stopping a workout. Again, I’ve mostly gotten used to this quirk, but it’s really the only time Apple’s touch-forward interface becomes problematic.

Anyway, on the watch you can customize the watch face by long-pressing, and tweaking complications as you see fit. In my case, I swapped out the upper right complication on this watch face for my Readiness score, as you can see (shown as ‘4’ here):

Meanwhile, one of those complications shows my activity rings. The famed ‘closing of the rings’ refers to Apple’s three ring colors, which are pinkish for movement, greenish for exercise, and blue for standing (once per hour). You can customize these levels, and even pause streaks/them in the event of some life situation.

Here you can see my rings from today, which was a reasonably busy day with a few-hour ride as well as a track workout later on.

Meanwhile, in order to sleep overnight, I can tap the little sleep stats bed icon on the watch face, or the Sleep app on the watch, to bring up my sleep stats, including some historical trends:

As always, I don’t compare/review the sleep phase/stage data, because doing so would be basically fake news. The ‘best case’ scenario for accuracy of a pro-level ‘gold-standard’ device is only in the low 80% range, and we’d never use a comparison chest strap that was only 80% accurate to judge workout accuracy. So, I’m not going to mislead you here and do the same. Instead, I look at the times I woke up and fell asleep. In this case, it’s been within a few minutes each day/night. For example, this morning’s times of 12:24 AM to 8:17 AM were spot-on within a minute or two (I can fall asleep super easily most nights, and easily track within a couple of minutes what time I woke up).

Next, switching topics entirely, is charging and daily battery life (I’ll dive into GPS battery a bit later). In this case, Apple has improved the charging specs of the Series 12 and Ultra 4. They say that’s been accomplished via both small tweaks in the charging cable itself, as well as algorithm changes in how the watch charges, especially around quick/brief charges (e.g., putting it on the charger for 15-20 minutes during a morning shower/getting ready).

Specifically, Apple has tweaked its charging numbers as follows:

– 80% in 45 minutes (same)
– 100% in 75 minutes (same)
– 18 hours of battery life in 15 minutes (was 12 hours in 15 minutes)
– 10 hours of sleep tracking in 5 minutes of charge (was 8 hours in 5 minutes)

And indeed, it’s definitely been noticeably faster, albeit more so on the Series 12 than the Ultra 4 – but still, I did a double-take one of the first times I was charging it for those short, quick charges.

As for Apple’s “2-day” battery claim (technically 50 hours), that’s been squeaking by and holding up, despite all my silly hours of workouts each day. I probably balance out the workout battery drains by not generally using it for calls or listening to music from the watch, but again, I’ve been getting those 2 days for sure (as I was in the past with the Ultra 3.

Next, note that there is a new Apple Health app coming later this year, though at present it’s not yet available. That app is dramatically revamped, and looks to finally be a proper consumer-facing Health app, rather than what was previously designed as simply a repository for Apple HealthKit data (Health data). Fear not, the HealthKit piece is still there, but a new front has been stuck on it, allowing for regular people to actually make use of the data in there.

I’ll be doing a separate review of that once it releases. Thus far, from what I’ve seen, it looks really good, but again, more details once I get hands-on.

Finally, note that of course there are specific Ultra features which have largely continued as-is since the introduction of the Ultra series a few years back; they include the list below, with the satellite messaging-related features having been introduced last year in the Ultra 3:

– Action Button
– Emergency Siren
– Battery Life (longer)
– Depth gauge features, down to 40m
– Satellite Messaging, Satellite Emergency SOS, and Satellite FindMy

I’ve covered all of these previously in my Ultra 3 review, and they haven’t changed this year. I will shortly have a full comparison post/video to the Apple Watch Series 12, though you’ll find the general gist of it is the same as my Series 11 vs Ultra 3 video/post.

Readiness Score & Vitals:

Now normally (and in the future), I’d likely just blend the Readiness Score & Vitals sections into either the Daily Basics or Sports sections, but given it’s new this year (for Readiness, and expanded Vitals), I’m gonna pull it out into its own section to make it a bit more detailed.

Apple’s new Readiness Score is effectively competing with readiness scores from Google/Fitbit, Garmin, and, to a slightly lesser extent, Whoop & Oura (those last two don’t really have the same type of dynamic and singular scores that Google or Garmin do). The score starts off with having two key components: A numerical value and a descriptor. The numerical value is from 0-10 (with zero being the worst, and 10 being the highest). And then within that, there are four descriptors you can get. Here’s an example of my score yesterday about 90 minutes after I woke up (it’ll change dynamically through the day, as I’ll show, though it hadn’t changed yet here):

You can see my score was a ‘7’, with a descriptor of ‘Ready’. Here’s a quick look at the descriptors available, and their corresponding ranges:

Or, numerically:

– 0-1: Recover
– 2-4: Pace Yourself
– 5-7: Ready
– 8-10: Go for it

These scores are in turn based on four core umbrella categories:

– Fitness: This is primarily your workouts, but can also include other activity
– Overnight Vitals: This includes your overnight resting heart rate, respiration rate, wrist temperature, and overnight HRV
– Daylight Vitals: This includes your resting heart rate during the day, and HRV during the day
– Sleep Score: This is your sleep score from last night, based on sleep times/durations/phases

Getting a readiness score requires some historical data. The longest period is 7 nights’ worth of HRV data before your first Readiness Score will populate, which is done on a per-watch basis. Likewise, other per-watch metrics include your wrist temperature. As well as your resting heart rate and respiration rate. Point being, it’ll be 7 nights’ worth of days (with a minimum of 4 hours of sleep per night), before you get a score. Finally, your data is then trended against a 49-day historical span (7 weeks). Apple says they found that the right balance is using historical data as a counterweight, versus being too long to not track recent fitness gains.

Now, as noted, your score is dynamic throughout the day. That’s similar to Garmin’s Readiness score, which is dynamic throughout the day, whereas Google/Fitbit’s readiness score is not dynamic throughout the day. So fast-forward a few hours later, and around 1PM I went out for a 2-hour-long road cycling ride:

This ride was of medium intensity. Nothing too crazy. Upon returning and saving my ride, the watch immediately notified me that my Readiness score had dropped down to 5 – still ‘Ready’ (from 7). That makes sense, as my ‘readiness’ to train or tackle additional load was now lower. Inversely, had this not been crazy-busy watch review season and I somehow had time to take a nap, that score could then improve a few hours later (perhaps to 6 from 5).

Now, fast forward again another few hours later, and it was time for a group track session under the lights. In this case, my readiness score was still 5 at the start of the session.

An hour later of 8x600m repeats at a reasonably strong pace, I saved my workout. Initially, the Apple Watch Ultra 4 didn’t update my Readiness score. Whereas the Series 12 worn on the other wrist immediately updated it to 3 (Pace Yourself). However, about two hours after I completed the run, the Ultra 4 finally updated its score to a ‘3’ as well, as seen below:

It was a bit odd that it took so long to show up, but it’s also a pattern I’ve seen with the Series 12 (both are paired to different phones, though they do share the same backend account). For example, the Series 12 showed my sleep score immediately on my phone, but refused for 4 hours to show the sleep score on the watch, and thus no readiness score. Then magically, it showed both. Likewise, I often get null results (as seen below), only for it to update seconds later, or show an entirely different incorrect value for a few seconds before correcting. And finally, I’ve seen occasional crashes of the watch itself here in this menu area, within/around the Readiness score & Vitals pages. None have caused data loss, just time lost as the watch reboots. Apple says they’re looking into it.

Point is, there seem to be some minor ‘speed’/display bugs to work out there. Apple says they’re working on it, and hope to have fixes shortly.

Now of course, these scores are still ‘early days’ for Readiness. I’ve only got a few days of Readiness scores as of this writing. And in fact, the Daytime HRV value trending still hasn’t shown up (I get daily values, but not yet trending). Apparently, that is a bit more picky on how it establishes that trend, despite now having 8 days of data on it. I’m not terribly sure what to do with the Daytime HRV values anyways. Huawei semi-recently started adding that on some models, but otherwise, nobody else shows consumers daytime HRV values. This is probably because they are incredibly variable minute to minute and hour to hour in a non-resting state. I’m honestly a bit surprised that Apple went down the path of exposing them, but…here we are.

The key thing to understand here is that Apple is actually comparing to your historical values for that given time slice of the day. And those historical values exclude any periods of movement or workouts. In other words, for an active person it may take far longer to build-up a daytime HRV baseline, because you’ll get very few (if any) daytime HRV data points. For example, take a look at my data points here, and focus on the ones roughly between 9AM and 11PM. In some cases for certain days, I have zero values for a given hour time slice (e.g., 2-3PM).

Thus, I have to keep waiting until my ‘hourly’ cup is full for a period of 7 days for each hour of the day to see the recovery HRV value during that time period. Further, it means I could see a trended vitals value from 4-5PM, but not 2-3PM. Apple says they’re doing this to ensure the data better maps to your circadian rhythm. I get the thinking here, but this just seems really complicated, in a very not-Apple-like-way.

Oh, you can also see your daytime HRV values in the revamped Heart app on the Apple Watch, for example, this: here at the end of my day:

Now, as for the nighttime HRV values, Apple says it does a simple average of the in-sleep values for the night. This is great, and adheres to the industry norms of what others do. Further, Apple uses RMSSD for their nightly/recovery HRV values (and all values shown in Vitals), again, letting you compare it with others.

Whereas for the previous value type of SDNN, Apple says it’ll still use that for irregular rhythm notifications, an input to the Health Age feature coming in the new app, as well as some other features.

Finally, to round things out, as noted, Readiness depends on the Vitals scores that you’ve seen previously (launched previously), just with HRV added in there. Here’s how that looks each day:

If you have an outlier (as defined as a comparison to your personal historic baseline), then it’ll turn pink. If you have multiple outliers, it’ll also push a notification to you to be aware of it. These outliers can and will also drag down your Readiness score. In fact, when it comes to ‘why’ your Readiness score is lower, you can see that both within the watch, as well as the ‘Readiness’ chunk in the Fitness app (and eventually the new Apple Health app). Here are some examples throughout the day as it changed:

Overall, I think Apple’s Readiness implementation is pretty solid. It roughly follows what others have done, and does so in an equally easy way to understand. Very Apple-like. Though, I’m hoping the delays are merely a one-off fluke. That said, I’ll be revisiting this in a week or two with some thoughts on how the Readiness Scores compare to others. For example, last night after the track workout, you can see how these two aligned. I’d argue the truth is probably halfway in between here.

In this case, keep in mind that Garmin has *far* more HRV data in my account than Apple does, since Apple merely has 7 nights’ worth (and Garmin has years). Further, Apple doesn’t let you leverage different-watch data in these trends. So in my case, all my years of Apple Watch data is mostly irrelevant when I switched to the Ultra 4. Whereas again, Garmin has years of data (but only leverages the last 90 days). So it’s likely to have a bit of a house advantage in the short term. Still, there is no industry standard for how to define a Readiness score; it’s up to each company. Ultimately, a gut check is still required. But again, more down the road.

Sports Tracking:

The Apple Watch Ultra series is quite a capable sports watch, depending on how you plan to use it. I’ve used it without issue in the past with the Ultra 3 for long 15-hour single-day treks 70KM into the mountains. And then with the Ultra 4, across numerous sports. Sure, it won’t have quite the depth of sports information as a Garmin Fenix series watch (especially when it comes to navigation/mapping), but if you don’t plan to get lost in the woods, then the Ultra 4 will likely cover you just fine.

To begin, you’ll open up the Workout app. That app can be accessed via the Action Button (assuming you’ve configured it in a default setting), allowing you to select a sport type. Apple has a huge list of sport types (here’s the full list). In general, the key difference between Apple and something like a Garmin/COROS/Amazfit/Suunto/etc…is that Apple will distill all cycling down to ‘Outdoor Cycle’, whereas the others will have separate sport profiles for Road Cycling, Mountain Biking, Gravel Cycling, eBike, eMTB, etc… Same goes for running just being ‘Outdoor Run’ versus others having Trail Run, Track Run, Adventure Run, etc…

In any case, while Apple announced new sport modes last year with the Ultra 3/Series 11, there are no new sport modes this year on the Ultra 4/Series 12.

Once you’ve selected a sports mode, you’ll see in the upper corners that there are four ways to get into additional settings/features (shown above):

Upper left: Workout Views (aka your data pages/settings)
Upper right: Workout goals & structured workouts (aka the different ways you can have the watch tell you to suffer), including the new Extended and Max Extended modes
Lower left: Music (all things music)
Lower right: Workout Buddy & Voice Alerts (thus, all things voice-over related)

You can customize your data fields (called ‘Workout Views’), within the watch, selecting the data fields you want. Again, there’s a reasonable level of customization here, but you can’t go super-crazy with lots of hyper-specific endurance sports data fields. It’s a balance. More than Google, but less than Garmin.

There’s also the ability to do structured workouts, which can be created on the phone, or pushed from platforms like TrainingPeaks, Strava/Runna, and more:

One of the new features of the Ultra 4/Series 12 is the new Extended and Max Extended modes:

This extends out the GPS battery for the Ultra 4 from 20 hours to 25 hours in ‘Extended’ mode, whereas the ‘Max Extended’ mode gets you 45 hours of GPS battery time. Here are the trade-offs:

Extended mode (25 hours GPS): Retains everything but turns off always on display, and running form metrics turned off. Cellular operations gets batches a bit. Everything else remains on, this is effectively the previous ‘Low Power Mode’ renamed.

Max extended mode (45 hours GPS): Retains 1-second GPS update rate (with dual/multi-band satellites), HR data recorded at every 5 seconds like normal, but showing a 5 minute rolling average on screen instead of instant updates. No splits, no alerts, no custom workouts. Plus previously cellular batching, no running metrics, and display not always-on.

In any case, with all that sorted, once you start the workout, it’ll show your data pages as normal (assuming a normal configuration). There’s nothing really unique here for the Ultra 4 compared to the past. Here’s an example of some data fields:

One slightly notable thing is that Workout Buddy (which was introduced last year) will audibly tell you about your Readiness Score within the intro to each workout. Or at least, all my workouts thus far. Still, as with the past, I find it frequently hallucinates about the things it says, even over the past week. Both making up things that don’t exist and just saying downright weird stuff (phrasing especially). That said, on the whole I don’t mind it, and have learned to kinda treat it like the tipsy uncle at the wedding party. Usually entertaining, even if he says some downright wonky things. Of course, you can still turn it off if you don’t like it.

When it comes to post-workout stats, Apple has a pretty brief list on the watch itself. Nothing fancy here:

Though, you can get slightly more data in the Apple Fitness app on your phone, and see/re-arrange stats. The track workout map is a little wonky here because we were actually going on/off track in between some intervals.

One of the stats you’ll see is your training load. Within the Apple realm, training load is a combination of the duration of your workout, and the Effort Rating you give it. At the end of every workout, it’ll ask you to rate your suffering, such as this:

When you do so, it’ll feed into the overall Training Load that Apple has, and trends against your historical norms. This means that it’s a bit more subjective than other companies, which have a specific algorithm tied to heart rate (usually).

The downside to this is that you may not be a great judge of your effort (or specifically, how to compare a short intense track workout vs a longer duration easy run). But inversely, this ‘solves’ for the problem of dealing with really long but relatively low-heart-rate efforts (like a 15-hour trek). In the case of Garmin/etc… those tend to be given very low training load values (even less than a 5-10KM run), since the heart rates tend to be lower. Yet, those longer 12-15 hour efforts often have far greater strain on your body than a 5-10KM run.

Realistically though, if data is your jam, you’ll still probably find Apple’s Fitness app pretty thin on stats, analysis, or even the ability to dig /zoom deeper into things like heart rate charts. This area could use some love. Thankfully, there are plenty of apps that are out there, which can easily tap into the Apple Health data (via HealthKit), and slice and dice your data any number of ways.

As I’ve said before, one of my favorites continues to be HealthFit, which I use for syncing data to numerous data platforms (including any moment now the DCR Analyzer), but also tons of other platforms. And then beyond that, it has tons of ways to analyze your data.

I don’t have any skin in the game there, it’s just an app I’ve been using for more years than I can count. And I appreciate that there’s a real human developer dude behind the scenes, and isn’t just another vibe-coded AI slop app. My inbox is full of those, sadly.

Likewise, when it comes to navigation and routing, you’re almost certainly going to need a 3rd-party app if you’re doing anything even mildly complicated (or, if you live outside the US). I wrote a bunch about this last year in the Ultra 3 review, and none of it has changed here either. Apple’s mapping/routing/navigation situation is probably now the single biggest gap for the company when it comes to competing with most other endurance sports watches on the market.

Oh, and one last thing – battery during workouts with GPS. I’ve been collecting some of that data for longer activities over the last week; here are a few data points to consider from my testing:

2 Hour Ride (GPS):

– Ultra 4 Start: 32%
– Exact Duration: 2hr 4mins
– Ultra 4 End: 21%
– Extrapolated battery capacity/hours: 18hr 47mins (estimate)

6 Hour Activity (GPS):

– Ultra 4 Start: 82%
– Exact Duration: 6hr 36mins
– Ultra 4 End: 46%
– Extrapolated battery capacity/hours: 18hr 33mins (estimate)

These are just slightly below the 20-hour GPS battery claim in normal mode, but given my much brighter surroundings of crazy-sunny weather, it’s more likely to have to power the display brighter to compensate slightly. Or, it could be some other random factor. Either way, this is within the ballpark for me.

Audio Intelligence Features:

With the Apple Watch Ultra 4 and Series 12, Apple has introduced a new ‘Audio Intelligence feature set. This feature set is partially lit up today, with the remaining coming later this year. I’m going to cover the bits that are available today in this review, and then down the road I’ll cover the rest once available.

Just for quick context though, here’s the full set:

– Everything done on-device, without need for your phone (at least for immediate processing)
– [Available today] Adds Sound Recognition alerts for sirens, doorbells, baby crying, and more (shows up as text on watch)
– [Available today] Instant Shazam: Will instantly show you the name of songs when you raise your wrist
– [Available later 2026] Live Rewind: Double-tap the Digital Crown to get a text-only transcription of the last 15 seconds of spoken words
– [Available later 2026] Siri Recap: Will summarize conversations/spoken words heard around you into a recap that’s available on your phone.
– Can configure all features independently (enabled/disabled, plus further focus-mode like controls for Siri Recap)

So looking at the two that are available today, the first one is the sound recognition piece. This one will automatically notify you on your watch when it hears certain sounds. This is designed for those who may have trouble hearing certain noises/sounds and want a notification on their wrist.

You can configure these sounds on the phone, and then the watch will handle the microphone and notification pieces. Previously, this was done by the phone. Meaning, you no longer have to have your phone with you for these to work.

I enabled a few of these, and they worked with varying levels of success. The coughing one worked perfectly every time (ok, a bit too perfectly at the moment in our household).

I also had the doorbell one enabled, and funny story – it triggers every time I start the Nespresso machine we have. To be fair to Apple, the pump sound on that machine does legit sound like many European-style buzzer doorbells, so…can’t fully blame Apple here. Not sure if I can rename this one “Someone is making coffee without you” or not, I’ll look into it.

I also had enabled the glass break one, and didn’t expect it to actually trigger, but sure enough, a few mins ago I was dragging some things off of the patio before a thunderstorm is about to drench it all, and it triggered there. Not exactly correct, though the metal-on-tile sound might not have been that far off, I guess.

In any case, the other one available today is the instant Shazam song recognition. This is different from the past in that historically it’d have to listen to it for a bit, then send an audio file to Shazam, and then wait for that to happen. Now you just raise your wrist, and it works instantly. That’s because it’s constantly listening/analyzing in the background, and further, they changed the architecture to now send a small audio signature, rather than the full song. It legit shows the current song the moment you raise your wrist.

Again, I’ll dive into all the remaining Audio Intelligence features, including Live Rewind and Siri Recap later this year, once those are announced. Certainly, I’ve got some pretty legit privacy concerns there, and I’m keen to see if further changes happen before Apple rolls out these features, based on the public feedback we’ve seen thus far.

GPS & Heart Rate Accuracy:

The Apple Watch Ultra has a new optical HR sensor, which includes both new hardware and new software features that I’ve outlined earlier (like the frequent HRV updates and now-5-second background HR update frequency). Here’s the quick recap on those features:

– New heart rate sensor with increased electrode surface area for better ECGs
– New photodiodes below it for better workout capture
– New LED array below that for better 24×7 HR readings
– New HR sensor is thinner (bump) than in the past
– Increased background (non-workout) HR readings to every 5 seconds (60x more than before)
– Increased HRV readings to every 5 minutes (24x more than before)
– Claim of Apple Watch Series 12/Ultra 4 “Most accurate heart rate sensing in a wearable”
– Published their own white paper to support that claim, with competitor comparisons

But the better question is whether or not that accuracy paper/study represents the real-world testing I saw, and if not, why not?

I dive into this in the video quite a bit, and will probably expand it out into a separate post. But the key thing to understand is that the Apple Watch Ultra 4 and Series 12 only have an update frequency during workouts of “on average” every 5 seconds within a workout. It can be every second, or every 3 seconds, or every 5 seconds…but it can also have gaps of 20 seconds. All of that depends on whether or not the HR sensor algorithm decides it has enough quality confidence to plot that data point. If not, it simply skips it.

Think of it like this illustration as a timeline (this is just something I quickly whipped up to show you how it works after multiple discussions with Apple):

From there, Apple will throw away anything that doesn’t meet its quality confidence level, thus leaving you with something like this:

Now remember that all other wearables simply always plot a data point every second, including every one of the competitors in Apple’s study. Further, in Apple’s study they *only compared the exact data timestamps from their file, to the reference Polar H10 device”. Meaning, using the example above, they only compared the values for the green dots. Not all the missing timestamps.

And as you’ll see, Apple has a lot of missing timestamps, especially when it’s unsure. So, rather than give you the wrong answer, it simply gives you no answer at all. And from a study grading standpoint, it was designed such that “no answer” = “the correct answer”. Which…ummm…is very slanted towards Apple, to say the least.

But setting aside Apple’s lopsided study, let’s look at the actual accuracy of the data. Because, to be fair, it’s very good. Is it better than its best competitors? Probably not; it seems about the same. But again, it’s really good.

First up, a relatively steady trail run:

At a high level, this looks very, very good. No major concerns here. But of course, when we zoom in, we’ll find countless examples of sub-5-second gaps, and other gaps like this one here for 11 seconds. In this case, the Apple Watch is factually wrong – both with the gap and without the gap. Remember, in the study scenario, it wouldn’t have been docked points for this, because it didn’t plot a point.

Next, what about a Peloton bike ride, with some solid intervals in there? Again, at a high level, this looks really good:

And indeed, it is good. Except there’s still plenty of gaps here, like this 12-second one. And of course, on the watch itself, it’s also only opening the heart rate display every 5 seconds (regardless of data points). So any fast-moving intervals will be wrong 80% of the time on the display.

Perhaps some rowing is next? Again, at a high level things look really strong – save for that one moment we see around the 8-minute marker that it hiccups:

And that moment is a whole combination of errors. First it skyrockets upwards incorrectly, and then it flat-lines with a 14-second gap (when Apple probably realizes it’s wrong and goes silent), then it tries to correct and takes another 10-15 seconds to get back to being correct.

And again, we can do this all day long. Here are some 10x400m running intervals, which look very strong at a high level

Zoomed in, it’s still strong, but also with a number of gaps in there, sometimes shorter here, but certainly present:

Or this track run (8x600m), which looks fairly reasonable at a high level:

But once we zoom in, we see numerous moments where there’s ‘normal’ ramp rate separation for optical heart rate sensors:

But also some heart rate spikes, such as this:

And finally, an outdoor ride of a few hours. Again, at a high level this looks really good. Like, really really good. Exceptionally good, in fact:

And had it not been for Apple’s study, I probably wouldn’t have over-thought it. But with the claims there, it’s hard to ignore moments like this:

Or these:

And these:

Again – I think overall Apple’s delivering on a world-class optical heart rate sensor. And I fully understand their thinking of ‘not recording data points that don’t have a good confidence level’. I’m OK with that. Really, I am. But it seems disingenuous to then judge everyone else on a full data set, while Apple gets to ignore the ‘hard parts’ it can’t be sure of.

Meanwhile, when it comes to GPS accuracy, things are nearly identical to previous, though there is one minor change. Apple has confirmed that GLONASS is no longer part of the constellations that the Apple Watch Ultra 4 will leverage. They said it should have no impact on accuracy, and based on what I see, that’s the case. This follows a trend with other companies removing it as well, given the increased satellite availability of the Galileo constellation, among others.

In any case, as for GPS accuracy, let’s quickly look at a few workouts. This is one of the sets of intervals I did around and around and around, and indeed, the Ultra (and others) was very good here:

Looking at this trail run next, at a wide/high level, everything looks quite good.

Once in the trails, we can see that the Ultra 4 & Fenix 9 are very close to each other, though the Series 12 isn’t quite as accurate (it lacks multiband):

We see this in a number of places, where the Ultra 4 & Fenix 9 are very close to being perfect/are perfect:

Still, there are a handful of very brief moments where the Fenix 9 outperforms it, getting my exact placement/position correctly here, and the Apple Watch Ultra 4 (and Series 12) was just slightly off (but only a couple of meters):

Meanwhile, on road cycling up in the mountains, things were pretty good. Here’s the high-level map:

And then, zooming in to these switchbacks, you can see things look fairly close between them, with a little bit more perfection from the Ultra 4 over the Series 12:

Though zoomed in further to this switchback, it’s hard to decide which one is most correct. They’re all good enough here:

Ultimately, for GPS accuracy of the Apple Watch Ultra 4, I don’t see any meaningful change here (negative or positive) over the Ultra 3, which was largely perfectly fine across the board.

Wrap-Up:

The Apple Watch Ultra 4 is a solid upgrade for earlier Apple Watch Ultra series owners, especially the Apple Watch Ultra 1 that got left behind on the WatchOS 27 train this year. Likewise, for those wanting more battery life than a conventional Apple Watch (non-Ultra), this delivers on that. The optical HR sensor is definitely the best Apple has ever made, and the results you see above in the heart rate accuracy section certainly show that. Whether or not it’s 1bpm better than their competitors, as Apple’s study suggests, is a bit harder to support. The reality is they just aren’t comparing the same data points equally, and thus making that claim in real life is quite challenging. I would agree it’s better than most sensors out there though.

As for the new Readiness features, I’m pretty happy with what Apple delivered here. Having a dynamic score throughout the day is critical, and a piece that both Whoop & Google/Fitbit are missing. Apple’s implementation is fairly close to the broad strokes of what Garmin has, though Garmin’s tends to be a bit more responsive at this point. Perhaps once Apple sorts out their initial teething bugs around disappearing readiness values, it’ll be fairly similar. My limited results thus far show both values to be reasonably similar in overall score average. But again, more longer term data is needed there.

Finally, as for the audio intelligence features, at this point the two features they have launched with will be appreciated. The instant Shazam trick is pretty good, and for those needing a hearing assistant, the sound recognition pieces should be handy. Both do seem to have occasional quirks, but neither seems like a show-stopper at this point.

Overall, I suspect the Ultra 4 will become one of the two watches that stays on my wrists year round, replacing the Ultra 3 that sat there over the past year. With that, thanks for reading!

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Hopefully you found this review/post useful. At the end of the day, I’m an athlete just like you looking for the most detail possible on a new purchase – so my review is written from the standpoint of how I used the device. The reviews generally take a lot of hours to put together, so it’s a fair bit of work (and labor of love). As you probably noticed by looking below, I also take time to answer all the questions posted in the comments – and there’s quite a bit of detail in there as well.

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Apple has just announced the Apple Watch Ultra 4 and Apple Watch Series 12, and I’d argue they’re the biggest leaps in Apple Watch hardware and features since they launched the Ultra series back a few years ago. Apple has significantly revamped the heart rate sensor package on both units, bringing in a bunch of features that both everyday users and data geeks have been asking for, for a while. And unlike in past years, when Apple kinda alternates between whether the Ultra editions or the Series editions get the hardware updates, this time both watches got it at the same time with the new S11 chipset.

However, there’s more than just a heart rate sensor and new S11 chipset (including bits from the new A20 Pro chipset of the iPhone 18 Pro). There are also new audio features that I suspect will be quite controversial down the road. These new audio features include a TiVo-like 15-second rewind option to see a transcription of what was just said, but more notably a 24×7 summary of all conversations occurring. There are, however, the less-controversial alerts for sirens/doorbells/etc…, and then the downright cool instant display of any music in the background via Shazam (like, instant-instant, because it’s always monitoring).

In any case, I’ve got a complete run-down video above of all the features on the Apple Watch Ultra 4, and I’ll be publishing a similar video for all the features on the Series 12 (spoiler: You can literally watch either video; they’re nearly identical since all the features are identical, save the final pricing/model bits).

The Changes Detailed:

If however, you just want the nitty-gritty on all the changes, I’ve outlined everything below in a nice consolidated manner. Again, I outline everything else in more detail/explanations in the video above. I’ll try to pull some of those snippets of the video into longer-form text below. Not leaving Apple’s campus till crazy-late last night has me a bit behind the curve.

Apple Watch Series 12 & Apple Watch Ultra 4 Hardware Updates/Changes:

– Gets new S11 chipset, which has features from the new A20 Pro chips of the iPhone 18 Pro
– Gets new secure audio processing exclave within that (for Audio Intelligence)
– Series 12 display cover material increased to be 60% stronger
– Series 12 offered in four colorways (Grey, Black, Gold, and new Dark Bronze)
– Series 12 offered in a ceramic option (white or blue)
– Series 12 offered in Hermes edition
– Series 12 retains 24-hour battery life claim
– Ultra 4 offered in two core colors (black or silver)
– Ultra 4 increased battery life to “over 2 days”
– Ultra 4 adds revamped ‘Extended Battery’ (GPS) mode and new ‘Max Extended Mode’ (GPS workout battery life of 45 hours, without reducing either GPS or recorded HR data
– Boatloads of new bands for all of them, including new translucent Ocean bands on the Ultra

Apple Watch Heart Rate Sensing Hardware Update:

– New heart rate sensor with increased electrode surface area for better ECG’s
– New photodiodes below it for better workout capture
– New LED array below that for better 24×7 HR readings
– New HR sensor is thinner (bump) than in the past
– Increased background (non-workout) HR readings to every 5 seconds (60x more than before)
– Increased HRV readings to every 5 minutes (24x more than before)
– Claim of Apple Watch Series 12/Ultra 4 “Most accurate heart rate sensing in a wearable”
– Published their own white paper to support that claim, with competitor comparisons

New HRV Features:

– Added overnight HRV trending/recording within the Vitals app (as one of key metrics)
– Added new HRV into new ‘Daytime’ view in the Vitals app
– Requires 7 nights of initial data on a watch to get HRV trends in the Vitals app

New Readiness Score Feature:

– Each morning you’ll get a new score
– Score is based on a range of 0-10 (zero being worst, 10 being highest)
– Four core descriptors you can get: Recover, Pace Yourself, Ready, Go For It
– Can be viewed on the watch or the Fitness App
– Leverages your Sleep data, Vitals Metrics, Training Load, and recent Activity data
– Requires 7 nights of initial data for the HRV trends, before it can populate Readiness Scores.

New Health App Redesign (on phone, coming later this year):

– Adds new AI summary and recommendations
– Adds Apple Intelligence guidance, including suggesting intervals
– Adds new Health Age: Based on Sleep, VO2Max, HRV, Heart Rate, Exercise Minutes, Steps, and optionally Labs
– Adds new longevity Tab, based on Nutrition, Metabolic, Overall Movement, Sleep, Hearing, Heart metrics, mental wellbeing
– Adds support for pulling in lab work
– Adds new VO2Max test (test can be done in living room in 6 minutes)
– Adds new other tests for flexibility, movement mechanics, strength, and more, which can be trended.
– Health app coming later this year in beta in English

New Audio Intelligence features (on-device, coming later this year):

– Everything done on-device, without need for your phone (at least for immediate processing)
– Adds Sound Recognition alerts for sirens, doorbells, baby crying, and more (shows up as text on watch)
– Live Rewind: Double-tap the Digital Crown to get a text-only transcription of the last 15 seconds of spoken words
– Siri Recap: Will summarize conversations/spoken words heard around you into a recap that’s available on your phone.
– Instant Shazam: Will instantly show you the name of songs when you raise your wrist
– Can configure all features independently (enabled/disabled)
– Siri Recap feature can be configured based on day, times, locations, etc., akin to Focus Modes
– Apple says no recorded audio is accessible to the user or Apple (meaning, you can’t see an audio file), and that summaries are happening on-device.
– Apple says that no speaker names are identified in summaries, and that no exact quotables/transcriptions are included in Siri Recap
– The exception to the ‘quotables’ rule is if you send a Live Rewind 15-second clip to Siri, it’ll be included in the Siri Recap

Got all that?

Now again, I recap all of this in a bit more detail in the video, and I’ll try to expand this section out with my thoughts. I’ve got some legit concerns around the Siri Recap feature specifically, in terms of privacy (not just my privacy, but people around me). Equally, I’m keen to see how it works for certain scenarios (e.g., the note-taking type scenario in a meeting). There are obviously plenty of note-taking technologies that summarize meetings/etc, so viewed in that thinner window, this isn’t entirely different.

Either way, stay tuned for plenty more on these watches coming up with my full in-depth reviews of both of them. With that, I’ve gotta jump out the door for a workout. There’s real-world data to be captured!

“This is not a race”- That’s the (repeated) words of the announcer at last night’s running event at Apple Campus. And I suspect those same words might have been spoken five months ago on April 1st, 2026, when a bunch of runners gathered for a 50KM event around the famed Apple campus loop (often called ‘The Spaceship’).

Now, I’ll likely expand on this post with more written details down the road, but since time is tight and the Apple Watch unveiling event starts in 9 minutes, I’ll let you watch the video I put together this morning about the secretive 50KM event that occurred a bit earlier this year.

Enjoy, thanks for reading, and stay tuned for plenty more Apple Watch details later today!

Zwift has just launched an updated Zwift Ride bike, the Zwift Ride V2. The changes here are entirely focused on fit. Specifically, making it appealing to riders on the shorter end of the spectrum. The good news for you is that I have exactly such a tester in my family: My wife, who is vertically challenged.

Beyond the fit portions, there are no new features on the Zwift Ride bike, assuming you don’t count an adjustable crankset as a feature. Likewise, the pricing remains the same, and best of all – all of these upgrades are available for existing Zwift V1 owners for seemingly quite reasonable prices.

So, let’s get into it!

What’s New:

Now, in this section I’ll quickly run through everything that’s new, which is entirely fit-focused. There are no new technical features here, or anything else feature-wise. It’s simply about increasing fit compatibility for not just a single-rider household, but a multi-rider household with the new hot-swappable seatpost design.

– Increased compatibility for shorter riders, down to 4’10” (146cm).
– New seatpost design (upper) to have quick-swap bolt (retains industry-standard saddle)
– New four-position adjustable bolt seatpost design (can still do saddle front/back movement too, and angle)
– New bear-claw adjustable crankset supporting crank sizes: 160-175 mm
– New handlebar is constant diameter from the stem to the end of the handlebars (simply larger)
– Shrunk frame size standover height (see photos below with measurements)
– Decreased top-tube length (see photos below for measurements)
– Now has a squirrel badge up front (this is obviously the most important change)
– New Zwift rider sizing card for these new shorter people :)
– Zwift Ride remains priced at $1,299USD/€1199/£1099

If you’re a taller rider, then there are no changes here for you (for most people anyway), and it remains recommended up to 6’6” (198cm). Whereas for shorter riders, it brings it down to 4’10” (146cm).

In addition, there will be new accessory bundles available starting today for existing Zwift Ride V1 owners, and include:

– New $99 for adjustable bear claw crank set (for V1 bikes)
– New full seat post swap design can swap into existing V1 bike, accessory package available for $74.99 / £65.99 / €74.99
– New seat post ‘topper’ piece (to allow multiple riders) for $49.99 / £45.99 / €49.99

Availability is from today for North America and Europe, whereas for APAC and LATAM it’ll be available by the end of the year (2026)

A Quick Look at the Changes:

Ok, so let’s take a quick look at some of the hardware pieces here, especially the new seatpost design, as it’s pretty clever. First up, the lower portion of the seatpost itself is identical to before, allowing existing Ride V1 owners to swap it out for the new Ride V2 version. Next, you’ll notice the top of the seatpost is different than before. This top portion allows you to remove the piece that connects to the saddle from the seat post itself, so you can hot-swap riders’ saddles quickly (between different people in the same household):

While swapping saddles itself may not be everyone’s jam, by doing this, you can also effectively hot-swap the position of the saddle, because that upper portion allows the usual saddle position/movement (forward/back/tilt angle), but also allows for four different lower saddle positions below the saddle rails. There are essentially four bolt positions to choose from:

It’s a super clever design that makes it really easy to either move saddle position within the same saddle or to just swap it entirely between riders.

Now, for two of the slots/positions, you’ll need to flip the saddle around. Otherwise, things might be a bit uncomfortable. But this is just a one-time change for that particular saddle topper. And again, you still maintain all the usual in-saddle-rail adjustment options.

Next, there’s a reduced standover height, as seen below (photo measurements courtesy DesFit), which again helps with shorter riders.

And then alongside that, a reduced top-tube length, to again help with fit for shorter riders. Because taller riders can easily shift the other components front/back to maintain their same fit, this doesn’t have any impact on them.

After that, you’ll find the bear-claw style adjustable crank length design that Zwift launched in spring 2025. Now it’s also available for purchase separately. This allows you to put the pedals in whatever crank length you want:

So you can see me here inserting the pedals into the slot I needed:

Next, there’s an updated card for figuring out fit. Now those long-time card geeks among us (I’m sure there’s some), will notice that they managed to keep the existing fit measurements on the card the same, while adding icons/emojis for the extra fit positions:

To which these emojis then match the actual seat post itself:

Nifty, huh? Look, stop laughing; I said it was measurement card geekery – I didn’t say it was world-changing.

Oh, and lastly, there’s the slightly changed handlebar that maintains the same diameter around the corner rounding piece:

Again, a very minor change on this piece, but figured I’d mention it. The actual buttons/etc are all the same.

Wrap-Up:

These are some nice changes to the Zwift Ride, even if they aren’t technical or feature-driven in nature. It’s most notable because arguably the single biggest grouping of complaints about the Zwift Ride V1 was simply around fit, not features. Sure, there’s still a portion of the population that would prefer a rubber belt instead of a chain (though rubber belts bring lots of power transfer challenges if not done right). But overall, the Zwift Ride remains one of the best options on the market today for those who want an indoor bike, with technically having the fiscal or product commitment issues that buying a $2,000-$5,000 indoor bike might bring.

We saw JetBlack also announce their new indoor frame offering last week, though availability won’t be until later this fall. I’ll take a look at that once it comes out. As I said when the Zwift Ride first announced, and continued with the Elite Square, the idea of a snap-on frame for existing trainers is brilliant for both manufacturers and consumers alike. It makes it far easier to upgrade a portion of the setup as time moves on, and does so at a relatively reasonable cost.

And Zwift making all these upgrade components available for existing owners demonstrates that upgradeability concept. I will say though, the Squirrel badge may be my favorite part. That said, equally, the swappable badges is something that I think Zwift has kinda missed the ball on from a marketing standpoint. There have been so many opportunities over the last few years that Zwift could have handed out badges like this (such as at the Tour de France Femmes they headline), or event/race series, etc… and to my knowledge, that hasn’t happened.

In any case, nice move here by Zwift on the bike overall. With that – thanks for reading!

While the Wahoo RIVAL watch was discontinued a number of years ago, Wahoo’s making another go at courting runners with a new Apple Watch app. Though, the company is quick to point out that they see this as the start of that journey, rather than the destination. And of course, one has to remember that Wahoo makes one of the most interesting treadmills on the market today, the Wahoo KICKR RUN, so their relationship to runners is hardly just a curiosity.

However, this launch is more than just a Wahoo ELEMNT-like experience squished into an Apple Watch app. Instead, it’s actually about the platform (app) Wahoo has, and their longer-term vision. In fact, you don’t even need to use the Apple Watch app to record a run to use the rest of the platform. You can pull in runs from other devices, like a Garmin Watch or phone app.

First though, let’s go through the watch app, then the platform, and then the future.

The Apple Watch App:

The Apple Watch app is ‘bundled’ with the Wahoo Fitness app, so effectively once you’ve got the Wahoo Fitness app installed, the Apple Watch app will usually automatically install on your watch (in the same way other companion apps install). If it doesn’t, you can just go into your Apple Watch settings in the ‘Watch’ app on your iPhone, and force it to install there.

Once installed, here’s the main recording dashboard. The thing about the Wahoo app is that it’s mostly about recording the data, rather than a recreation of something like the Wahoo Rival watch (or a Garmin watch). At the top you’ll see the running options for Treadmill and Outdoor:

But equally, there’s a small pile of other sport profiles listed as well, seen down below:

These include, in total:

Treadmill Running, Running, Biking Indoor, Mountain Biking, Road Cycling, Gravel Biking, Walking, Gym (Strength), and Other.

Next, there’s the ability to pair sensors by tapping that little sensor icon you see:

This can include heart rate sensors, the KICKR RUN treadmill, cycling power meters, cycling speed sensors, and cycling cadence sensors. Again, in theory, here you can use this instead of a Wahoo ELEMNT bike computer. I’m honestly not sure why you’d do that (since to most people Wahoo’s main value certainly isn’t their app, but their bike computer hardware). But as I’ll talk about in the next section, if their goal here is to court people to their platform, then maybe this fills the gap for someone.

In any case, let’s keep our eye on the prize here, with the Running focus. Once you open up the Running sport mode, you’ll be here, on this pending screen:

This follows the rough design language of the default Apple Watch app. In the upper right corner, you have a settings panel. This includes enabling/disabling the countdown, auto pause (yes/no), auto lap (distance or time), and then any specific plan that you have.

And then the main thing here is being able to edit your data pages. You can toggle on/off the titles in the upper right corner, and then use the Digital Crown to increase data pages (or decrease them). It allows up to 7 data fields per page. And you can toggle field titles on/off if you want.

You can then swipe left/right through various data pages to tweak them. There are roughly 7 data pages, including a map page (though no routing is available here), and they’ve got a set of pre-configured data pages for you. The biggest and most important thing here is arguably that Wahoo’s got an absolutely massive set of data fields to choose from. This is where this really shines over Apple’s default implementation, or many other Apple Watch apps for workout recording. These fields mirror much of what you saw on the Wahoo Rival watch, or what you’d see on their bike computers. Geeks rejoice!

Heading back to that main page, you’ve got the ability to toggle the little chart-looking icon, which pulls from your structured workouts (in Wahoo SYSTM) that are planned. Also, if there are any workouts planned on the calendar, these will show up automatically when you open the app.

With all that settled, it’s time to go for a run. To be honest, this is pretty straightforward. You run, and you see the data populated in the data fields you’ve configured. You can see some examples from one of my runs:

The main ‘party trick’ here from a Wahoo standpoint is that, just like their bike computers, you can use the Digital Crown here to increase/decrease data fields on a single data page (like you’d do on an ELEMNT bike computer with the up/down buttons). In other words, you ‘zoom’ one way and it sheds data fields to make the fields bigger, and then you can increase the number of fields to make them smaller. You can arrange which fields are ‘lost’ first, so you can keep the most critical when you want it, and increase it otherwise. This feature is called “Perfect View Zoom”.

If you’re executing a structured workout, you’ll see alerts/notifications as you approach and begin each interval component:

Now, once your run is done, you’ll see a nice list of summary stats from the watch, which is well done.

Sadly, I don’t have good photos of the watch as it was too dark when I finished this run, and my other runs (I’ve been on a sunset running streak lately). But above are some screenshots of it, from my Apple Watch.

At which point, we end the piece on the watch and head over to the phone for the next bits.

The Larger Training Platform:

To be clear, Wahoo’s play is ultimately to get you to pay money into a subscription. Obviously, like every other company right now, they want that recurring revenue. In the case of Wahoo, they’ve got two core apps, plus one legacy app. The two main apps are:

Wahoo App: This is the one for managing Wahoo devices, such as bike computers, sensors, etc… It’s also where you can see completed activities. In the case of the Apple Watch however, while you can see completed activities here, you actually can’t configure any settings here. This app is free for non structured training functions, but has paid tiers inside of it as well.

Wahoo SYSTM App: This is Wahoo’s main training app, which is sorta an evolution of the old Sufferfest content they acquired, as well as training content from other acquisitions along the way. This app is paid.

Finally, there’s the Wahoo ELEMNT app, which is the ‘older’ app that manages older Wahoo ELEMNT devices, such as a Wahoo BOLT V2 or such. Newer Wahoo bike computers use the Wahoo app.

And now is a good time to point out that there are three tiers to the Wahoo app:

Free: Workout tracking on app and (future) recovery features

Wahoo CORE (US$4.99 / £4.99 / €4.99 per month): Adds training load related features

Wahoo PRO (US$17.99 / £14.99 / €17.99): Adds personalized recommendations, a full workout library and advanced planning tools

In any case, once your workout is done, you’ll see a slate of data on the Wahoo app. Outside of the dimensional training load pieces, all of this is free, and Wahoo does a good job here of organizing the data in both a data-rich UI, as well as one that’s easy to understand. You can dig into stats quickly, highlighting exact points, and it’s all pretty clean.

I like the ability to skim across the workout and see various stats. Roughly reminds me of things from TrainingPeaks.

One of the items you’ll notice though, is the ‘Dimensional Training Load’. This is presented within the app, showing your holistic training load over weeks/months/etc, as well as on a per-workout basis.

The DTL pieces do require the CORE subscription cost, yet they equally feel somewhat incomplete. You see, Dimensional Training Load values are only calculated for Running, Cycling, and Walks. Outside of those three sport types, only the raw duration is considered. It doesn’t look at your heart rate (intensity). This is peculiar on many fronts, given Wahoo’s own app has strength and yoga workouts in it. Further, Wahoo doesn’t leverage your workout perceived effort rankings to tweak the DTL values (as Apple would in their calculations). Trust me, I tried.

Instead, a 25-minute moderate-intensity rowing or strength effort is treated exactly the same as 25 minutes of a relaxing yoga session. Or just 25 minutes of sitting still (recorded as a workout). All of which heavily skews these calculations.

Adding insult to injury, when it comes to the workouts you can get from the higher-end Wahoo plan, there aren’t any dedicated running plans. There are standalone running workouts (roughly 133 workouts), but there isn’t any plan if you wanted to train for a marathon or such. You can choose a triathlon plan (which includes swim/bike/run workouts), but no running plans.

For a company that’s selling arguably the best/coolest running treadmill on the market today, it seems like a pretty big omission to not have any dedicated running plans. On top of that, the app today doesn’t provide any recommendations for you, using the individual workouts they have. Meaning, there are no such daily suggested workouts or other automatic workout recommendation engine.

Finally, the last bit of frustrating piece is if you have a secondary device (such as a Whoop device) in addition to the Apple Watch, you end up getting endless duplicates via Strava. That’s because about 18 months ago, Wahoo changed their Strava connection such that it’s always bidirectional. Thus, every workout you post to Strava ends up back in the Wahoo app. While there are certainly very useful reasons you might want that, there’s no toggle to disable the sync from Strava to Wahoo. So now you have to clean out a bunch of duplicate sessions every day. Or just give up and have broken training load. [Update: Wahoo says you can now choose single-direction only. However, if your account is like mine and linked a long time ago, you’ll need to delete the Strava connection entirely, then re-connect, and deselect access to Private Activities]

Going Forward:

Wahoo seems to have the beginnings of an interesting concept here. The on-watch piece allows for more customization than most Apple Watch apps do (and certainly more than the stock Apple Fitness exercise app). It brings with it a ton of data fields, and data field customization that’s known to Wahoo in their bike computers. And if you were already a Wahoo cycling-focused customer who’s an occasional runner, this would get you a cohesive training picture. Likewise, Wahoo noted that they have many Apple Watch users within their KICKR Run treadmill customer base, so this gives those people the outdoor solution to Wahoo’s indoor product.

Wahoo says that in the future the app will include recovery metrics, sourced from the Apple Watch, such as your sleep-related data, in much the same way the Wahoo RIVAL used to capture that data. Eventually you might see specific workout recommendations as well. They believe that with the things in the oven, they will be a “disruptive entrant” to this portion of the market.

However, one of Wahoo’s biggest challenges is the same thing that’s challenging the rest of the structured workout industry: AI. While Wahoo has really good video-content workouts for cycling, with great content behind it, that doesn’t really exist in the Wahoo app for running. On top of that, Wahoo doesn’t have any actual running plans at the moment. Nor do they have next-run-type workout recommendations. Thus, in effect, you’re paying for structured running workouts, which are a dime a dozen these days. You don’t even need AI for that; you can find countless free ones on the interwebs with 2 seconds of work. And then beyond that, there’s a million vibe-coded apps to do structured workouts on the Apple Watch. In other words, I struggle to see what Wahoo brings to the table here for runners.

Of course, Wahoo heard my concerns, and acknowledged that if they were focused purely on runners, then this wouldn’t make much sense. Instead, it sounds like they’re looking at this from the holistic training standpoint, including a focus that if someone was in the Wahoo ecosystem already (perhaps a cyclist), and wanted to stray a bit and run, this could fit the bill in keeping their training in one spot.

And I think on paper it does, but only really for people who were already paying for SYSTM for the cycling side of things, including cycling plans and multisport plans (triathlon). But there aren’t any running-only plans today.

Later this fall, the company says the pieces involving recovery metrics, as well as 24×7 health and sleep metrics that the Apple Watch can provide, will start to be integrated into the platform. How that ends up looking exactly will probably be the biggest driver for whether or not the platform at large makes sense.

Ultimately, it’s interesting having Wahoo focus back on the running side here, and some sort of running watch aspect. I’m looking forward to seeing what those next pieces look like, and if they can pivot slightly to find a product that is appealing enough for runners to want to subscribe to.

With that, thanks for reading!