The Garmin Instinct Crossover starts at $500 and goes on sale Tuesday, while the solar-powered model costs $550. International pricing wasn’t immediately available, but the US price for the base model converts to around £435 and AU$770, while the solar model is around £477 and AU$848. The Instinct Crossover is a hybrid smartwatch — meaning it includes some of the qualities of both smartwatches and regular analog watches. Hybrid watches typically offer longer battery life than regular smartwatches like the Apple Watch, as they compromise on some features. The Instinct Crossover, for example, doesn’t have a color screen, but it can display notifications and supports Garmin Pay for digital payments. Like Garmin’s other Instinct watches, the new Crossover was designed primarily for outdoor enthusiasts looking for a durable fitness tracker. It comes at a time when Garmin faces increased competition from traditional smartwatch makers such as Apple and Samsung, which command 29% and 9% of the total smartwatch market, respectively, according to Counterpoint Research. The Instinct Crossover has many of the health tracking features you’d expect from a Garmin watch, including sleep tracking with a sleep score, blood oxygen measurements, heart rate variability tracking, and VO2 Max stats, among other metrics. It’s also shock and heat resistant, along with the MIL-STD-810 durability standard. Water resistance is rated for 10 ATM, which means it can withstand pressures up to 100 meters deep, similar to the Apple Watch Ultra. But the Instinct Crossover’s battery life seems to be one of its standout features. The Solar Edition should last for 70 days in smartwatch mode, thanks to its solar charging, according to Garmin. In battery saver mode, which retains analog features like time, date and stopwatch, Garmin says the solar-powered Instinct Crossover has “infinite” battery life. But you’ll need to make sure you meet the recommended solar charging requirements to get that level of battery life, which Garmin says is three hours per day in 50,000 lux conditions. The base non-solar model also lasts for nearly a month in smartwatch mode, according to Garmin, which seems like it’s about on par with the Instinct 2’s 28-day battery life. Turning on GPS drops that to 110 hours , but it’s still a long time to be active. This could make the Garmin Instinct Crossover attractive to those who want a watch they can wear for daily training and sleep tracking without having to charge it in between. In addition to long battery life and wellness features, the Garmin Instinct Crossover features navigation features such as GPS, TracBack to find your way back to a starting point, and Waypoint, which allows users to track a given location in relative to their position. There’s also a Tactical Edition of the watch that adds night vision compatibility, stealth mode, dual-format GPS, and a kill switch. The Garmin Instinct Crossover is another sign that smartwatch makers are paying more attention to battery life, particularly in more expensive models designed for sports training. Garmin is a long-time household name in the world of fitness and running watches, but Apple and Samsung have only just begun to focus more closely on this market. Apple launched the Apple Watch Ultra in September, its biggest competitor yet for performance watches like those made by Garmin. Besides the larger screen, titanium build, dual-frequency GPS, and depth gauge, the Ultra’s estimated 36-hour battery life is one of the biggest features that sets it apart from the Series 8. The case is similar for the Samsung Galaxy Watch 5 Pro, which differs from the standard Galaxy Watch 5 with a titanium design and estimated battery life of 80 hours.
