Before jumping on the performance, it is important to highlight one major concern we have with the watch.
As it is clear that the watch can be used with both touchscreen and physical buttons. However, there’s one challenge here. And, that’s the operating system of the watch. After using it for a while and as soon as we started getting comfortable with it, one thing we noticed was that the operating system of the watch is solely designed to be used with the physical button only.
The touch screen of the watch is mostly for tapping on something like the ‘Enter or Ok’ or for minor navigation. For the rest of the things, you will have to rely on the buttons. For instance, the watch settings or menu can only be accessed by long-pressing the centre button on the left side. There’s no other way to do it, nor there’s any setting button to tap.
No doubt, you swipe up and down to access several activities and enable them. But to change the watch face, customise the watch face with different colours and information you want to see on the screen, etc can only be done from the Settings. And, this is just one example. There are lots of other things like adjusting the brightness of the display, customising the different power modes, managing notifications and alerts, accessing sensors, maps, music, connectivity, etc.
Adding a simple Settings button could have solved this problem easily. Then there is the user interface. We have been accustomed to using a simple and easy-to-use interface and Garmin’s interface is far from that. Although accessing activity-related information is easy, all you need to do is swipe up or down and it can also be customised, but still there is a lot of work required to make it more modern.
Apart from that, the watch comes with a companion app called Connect which allows users to access all the information related to the watch including activity details and all the information related to the user.
Also, there’s another app called Connect IQ that’s basically an app store for the watch.
The watch also comes with some pre-loaded watch faces which are good and offers quick insights as well.
Talking about health-related features, the heart rate sensor works fine and it is one of the most accurate heart rate sensor implementations we have seen. Apart from that the watch also comes with sleep tracking, a SpO2 monitor, both of which work fine.
Activity mode is the major highlight of the watch and we can say that the Fenix 7X is one of the best in this part. The watch offers tons of fitness modes including exotic modes such as mountaineering, running, biking, hiking, rowing, skiing, golfing, surfing, indoor climbing and more. It also comes with pre-loaded high-intensity interval training workouts, including AMRAP, EMOM, Tabata, etc.
We didn’t get a chance to test all the modes, but we did try biking, running and other regular activities and the watch tracks everything with at most accuracy.
The watch also comes with navigation where users can download the complete map offline right on the watch and use it when required. This is also something that most modern watches fails to offer.
The watch also shows notifications when paired to Android smartphones. Users can also pick or reject a call or respond to notifications right from the watch screen. But, the watch does have a calling feature, which means you’ll have to make the calls using your smartphone, irrespective of the fact that you can answer the call from the watch screen.
Apart from that, the watch also comes with a Real-Time Stamina function that allows users to keep track of their current physical strength, work on improving it and adjust their speed and intensity accordingly.
Garmin Fenix 7X Power Sapphire Solar is rated to deliver 37 days of battery life in smartwatch mode and 24 days in UltraTrac Mode. In our test, we never got a chance to deplete the watch to zero and even after continuously using it for 10 days in smartwatch mode, we were still left with 14 days of battery life with brightness set to 60%. Also, the built-in Solar, it helps improve the smartwatch battery life to a good extent and that can be clearly seen in the battery results.
For a smartwatch that offers these many features, it is really an excellent battery life.
