# Wednesday, December 18, 2024
# notes on the garmin instinct 2 solar
tl;dr: These are incomplete notes on the Garmin Instinct 2 Solar, after a
year and a half of regular wear. The Instinct 2 is a smartwatch, first
released in 2022, that focuses on activity tracking and fitness. It has 5
buttons and a monochrome non-touch display. In many ways it feels like one of
the digital watches of yore with a bunch of sensors added. Unexpectedly, I
find a ton of utility in this device, and on the whole like it more than not.
In line with expectations, I have major qualms about privacy, openness, and
software quality. Also I’d like better documentation. If you work at Garmin,
I have some thoughts.
# background & motivations
I’m in my mid-40s and have had some health scares. I work a remote desk job,
so sitting at computers is slowly destroying my body and mind. I don’t “train”
much, but I do go on walks and bike rides, and spend a fair amount of time
outdoors. I like watches and I wear them regularly, but I’ve been very
resistant to the idea of a smartwatch in the full-on-networked-wrist-computer
sense. Before the Garmin, I usually wore a Casio G-Shock (chonky old-school
digital) or a Seiko 5 (a basic self-winding mechanical) any time I left the
house.
I wanted to try measuring things like steps, sleep, and heart rate. For those
purposes, I care more about relative magnitude and direction than absolute
accuracy in numbers: Are things getting better or worse? Is something really
anomalous, and does it seem like I’m getting dangerously worn down? How does
measured sleep and movement line up with subjective well-being?
I’m leery of scorekeeping, metrics, and the quantified self. On the other
hand, I once owned a bike computer that told me whether I was going faster or
slower than my average. Paying attention to that made me a much faster rider.
I wanted to experiment with similar feedback loops.
A couple of people I know had a Garmin and liked it. From reviews and forums,
it seemed like it would mostly work as a standalone watch without pairing to
the mobile app. A friend with a technical background had some luck pulling
data off of the watch and said there was free tooling that could at least do
limited things with it.
# the watch
The Instinct 2 comes in multiple variants: 40mm, 45mm, and 50mm sizes, as well
as standard and solar editions. There are a handful of color options (mostly
gray or white). I got the 45mm solar one. I paid $450 in February of 2023,
but it now lists for $400 and it seems like you can get one for $300 or so on
sale.
I wrote some initial impressions after getting it:
- It seems well built.
- Button interface isn’t as honed as a Casio product, but also not that bad.
- Face looks decent.
- Garmin Connect is kind of terrible, wants a scary amount of permissions,
wraps a whole SaaS with a login. I installed and registered an account,
almost immediately uninstalled.
- Step counting seems wildly exaggerated.
- Heart rate’s interesting; very hard to know how accurate.
- You can get at files via USB. I tried opening an activity track with
GPXSee, it works decently well. More detailed stuff… Well, I’m not
sure.
The rest of this document is broken into somewhat arbitrary sections.
# case design, fit, appearance, etc.
It’s likely you have seen this watch in the wild. (If you know anyone who
casually runs marathons or has a favorite Linux distribution, check their
wrist.) It’s like a lot of models of mid-tier crossover sport utility
vehicles: Unless you own one, you probably haven’t noticed it. On the scale
of ugly digital watches, this barely registers. The overall vibe here is
“utilitarian in a cargo pants or mildly-uncool running shoes kind of way”.
It’s a bit like something Casio would have made before exaggerated versions of
the G-Shock became a streetware / fashion / collectible thing, but larger, more
rounded, and less 1980s. I bought this at an REI, and it very much looks like
I bought it at an REI.
This is, to be clear, a chonker of a watch. It’s big enough to make my Casio
GW-5600J feel streamlined. My kitchen scale says it weighs 51.5 grams (with
its current strap), which is actually a touch less than the G-Shock or the
Seiko 5, but it’s certainly noticeable on a wrist.
Giant watches are the norm now, so there’s nothing unusual about the size.
That said, I still don’t love it. It gets stuck under shirt sleeves and jacket
cuffs, and occasionally caught on stuff in the environment. If I were doing it
over, I might get the 40mm version even at the expense of some battery life.
The band is silicone rubber, stretchy and fairly robust, but it won’t do well
with some chemical exposures (more about that in a later section).
There’s an optical sensor on the back that has to make contact with the wrist
for (at least) heart rate and pulse oximetry, so it won’t take a standard NATO
strap replacement. That said, the spring bars on the default strap are
extremely beefy and so far I haven’t managed to pop it off my wrist.
I tend to wear other watches loosely enough for them to move a bit on my wrist,
and I think I’m often wearing this one looser than it really wants for the
heart rate sensor to work optimally. It’s not the most comfortable watch I’ve
ever worn, but I’ve gotten used to it enough that I wear it for large parts of
the day and usually go to bed with it on.
# display
The display is monochrome, readable in direct sunlight, and has enough
resolution to display little graphs for various sensors. It compares pretty
favorably to classic LCD watch faces. This is almost exactly what I want out
of this kind of device. Highly readable, not visually distracting.
The watch faces can be customized, both at the level of choosing an overall
layout and by selecting individual widgets to display on them. For a rough
idea of information density, my current watch face is set to show heart rate
with a little graph, local time with seconds, date, step count, time in UTC,
and local sunrise/sunset times.
{a picture could go here}
There’s a backlight that can either be activated with the upper left button, or
set to turn on with a gesture (tilting your wrist to look at the watch,
essentially). After years of G-Shock use, I expected to prefer the gesture
thing, but it’s aggressive about activating and I kept accidentally lighting it
up in darkened rooms.
# power
The battery life on this thing is a pleasant surprise. It will frequently
report remaining life around a month after a fresh charge. In practice, I wind
up charging it every couple of weeks, although it’d be a lot more often if I
were routinely recording GPS tracks or using the pulse ox feature.
I really like the idea of the solar charging. I’m not sure how much
difference it makes in practice, although it seems like if you were stuck
off-grid and put the watch in low-power mode, you could keep it limping along
for quite a while. This is one of those things that I look for in just about
any class of battery-powered watch despite knowing that it constrains the
search space in fairly limiting ways. It just seems neat.
Both charging and data transfer are done with a USB cable that plugs into a
connector with 4 exposed pins on the back of the case. I haven’t found a name
for this, but Garmin apparently uses it on quite a few devices. Replacement
cables from Garmin seem expensive, although you can get third-party ones that
are reported to work fine. As a general rule I’m mad about weird proprietary
connectors, but the physical design here is at least defensible on a watch
that’s already plenty big and bound to get wet. Based on other wearables I’ve
seen lately, this is an area where there ought to be a standard.
{a picture could go here}
# durability
Things I do that seem well within the designed uses of this watch:
- Wear during most daily activities
- Bike, hike, run, snowshoe, etc.
- Tube and wade in a creek
- Camp
- Garden
- Cook
Things I don’t usually do that might affect its life:
- Wear it into the shower
- Wear it while painting, staining, sanding, etc.
- Go swimming (I don’t swim, if I did maybe I’d keep the watch on)
- Work for a living (I touch computers most days; fixing cars or building
houses or farming would subject any watch-like object to a lot more
violence)
Things I have done that I fully expected to kill the watch:
- Spill half a gallon of gasoline on it
- Wear it for ~9 days continuously at Burning Man, and during a bunch of
associated prep work and cleanup
- Press quite a few gallons of apple cider from scratch
After the gasoline, the original band developed something of an unpleasant,
tacky, returning-to-goo texture and nothing I tried would get the strong gas
odor out of it. (Additionally, one of the buttons seems more likely to trigger
accidentally now, so I can imagine that a seal or something there was affected.
I’m not aware of any changes to sensor behavior, but it’s possible that
something took damage.)
I tried to order a replacement band directly from Garmin (40 bucks) and they
repeatedly canceled my order for no obvious reason, so I wound up buying a
handful of aftermarket ones from strapsco.com. These were cheap, but the
quality isn’t great. Their “Endurance Strap for Garmin Instinct”
does approximate the original, with rougher details and slightly worse
materials.
I should be careful to note that taking it to the burn hasn’t killed it yet.
Playa dust has an ability to stain, clog, infiltrate, and corrode that’s hard
to fully convey, and sometimes things will seem fine only to fail months later.
I haven’t actively set out to destroy this watch, but I also didn’t expect it
to survive this long. Again, I’m pleasantly surprised.
# sensors
There are a bunch of functions on here, including at least:
- Heartrate
- Sleep tracking
- Thermometer
- Barometer
- Altimeter (via the barometer)
- “Storm detection” (barometer again)
- Compass
- Step tracking
- Pulse ox
- GPS, GLONASS, Galileo
- Solar intensity
Of these, the heartrate, sleep, and step counters feel like the most day-to-day
interesting. Step count seemed high to me at first, but seems mostly in-line
with reality after regular use. It can be thrown off by motions that aren’t
actually walking, but seems at least directionally correct.
I’m not really sure what to do with the temperature value. I have a sense of
what ambient air temperature means, and likewise for internal body temperature,
but this sits somewhere awkwardly in between and thus doesn’t feel like it
connects to much.
The storm alerts have become a running joke in my household. Occasionally one
will fire due to an actual change in the weather, but most of the time it’s an
indicator that we’re driving up or down a mountain or have taken an elevator.
The pulse ox is fiddly, and sometimes reads lower than I’d expect. I haven’t
checked it against a dedicated device, let alone a known-good medical-grade
one, but I have my suspicions about its utility.
The GPS (and related systems) need a clear view of the sky, but work acceptably
well for recording a track or a point. This isn’t a standalone navigation
system in the vein of a dedicated GPS or Google Maps on your phone, but it can
record pretty good data for later use and has a basic display for tracks that
could be useful in a pinch.
# compass failures
I had never gotten the standalone compass to give me an accurate reading in
the field, despite repeated attempts at calibration that sometimes seemed to
succeed. Maybe, I thought, I’m holding it wrong.
Eventually I found a long thread on the Garmin forums about the
compass being unreliable because the springbars holding the strap on are
sometimes magnetized.
That seems like a pretty basic design flaw. I’d be a lot more impressed if
Garmin fully owned up to it instead of deflecting and implying user error, but
I have to give them some credit: They mailed me a new set of springbars,
apparently unmagnetized, and the compass now seems to work. I still don’t
really trust it, given the failure mode, but at least I know what it is.
# software
# on-device interface
This took a little while to get used to. The controls aren’t placed where I
expected them after decades of Timex and Casio digitals. Although there are
conventions used throughout, there’s a strong feeling of modality to some of
the basic features that has to be learned, and there’s a “single quick press”
navigation layer as vs. a long press to access things like settings, activity
recording, and timers that wasn’t super clear at first.
These are minor complaints. A bigger problem is that the whole thing leans a
little too hard on menu diving, and tucks basic features like setting the time
manually behind a weird number of clicks (hold middle left button with the
embossed “MENU” until you get a menu, click down until you hit “System”, click
into “Time”, change “Set Time” to manual, change “Time”). Sometimes, as when
recording a new activity, you just have to wait for the current mode to take
effect. You get used to this stuff, and I’m grateful for how much is
accessible directly on the watch, but at least some of the menus could be
streamlined or combined. A few should clearly be first-class functions in the
main interface.
With all that out of the way, this is good software. It does an admirable job
providing snapshot visualizations of recent sensor data. It’s discoverable,
feature-rich, easy to customize, and can be used without pairing the watch to a
phone.
It feels like someone at Garmin had my Luddite-ass use case in mind.
(There are even some real grace notes: The little carousel menu thing for some
of the utility features, the cheerful “morning report” with its platitudes
about going out and seizing the day that I initially hated but have grown to
feel a certain affection for. The moon phase and sunrise/sunset times.)
# mobile apps, etc.
I’ve used other Garmin hardware, so I knew this was not likely to be a strong
point. As it turns out, you probably need multiple apps to access everything
the watch offers. On an Android device I think that means: Garmin Connect
for health monitoring data, Garmin Explore for maps, and Garmin Connect IQ™
Store for installing new apps or watch faces. Don’t hold me to that, though:
The whole situation is deeply confusing and there’s overlap between what
different apps offer.
The Garmin apps I’ve tried are unified in their mediocrity, and sometimes basic
features like syncing data with the watch just seem to lock up. The main
thing about the software, though, is that I absolutely do not trust it. I
don’t want my location data and health info stored on yet another
poorly-secured corporate cloud, I’m not looking for social features, and I’m
trying not to add more vendor lock-in to my daily life. I think you can
nominally keep data on-device, but the way the apps require account
creation and a log-in, and how they’re clearly pushing a sharing-by-default
agenda — well, that’s enough for me.
# gadgetbridge as an alternative
I did try Garmin Connect for about a month out of curiosity. There were three
things I wound up missing when I uninstalled it:
- The “find my phone” feature. A godsend. I bet I’ve used this twice a week
since noticing it.
- Messaging alerts. I didn’t think I’d care about this at all, but it saves
so many direct interactions with the phone.
- Automatic setting of the time (when it works). You wouldn’t think this
would stand out as a problem, but see above re: menu diving.
I am thus forced to admit that a watch-shaped object as a sidecar device for a
phone has useful properties.
So, I guess the actually-maintained, local-only FOSS thing for this is
Gadgetbridge. I had to install it via F-Droid. I won’t oversell this. It is
the kind of hobbyist project that you probably expect. It contains some jank,
it definitely doesn’t do everything, and installation requires that you trust a
different third party. That said, it took care of my desired features. Phone
finding and time setting actually seem to work better than with the official
apps.
# data syncing
You can plug this thing into a USB port, mount it as a drive, and pull data off
in file formats that are at least somewhat documented. This feels like the bare
minimum, but it’s better than nothing and does at least a little to future-proof
using this for data collection, route mapping, etc.
People have built tooling around Garmin’s formats, albeit not with the features
of the official apps. See for example GPXSee.
I haven’t really gone down this particular rabbithole yet. It might or might
not reward the effort.
# some implications of this device
In no particular order:
- Yeah, ok, so watch-shaped wrist computers are useful.
- It feels like a safe bet there are going to be more and more smartwatches.
It’s less clear whether this kind of watch-shaped wrist computer will
remain widely available, or if it’s a temporary aberration.
- Insurance companies have got to be just losing their minds over the
possibilities for doing evil shit with data like this.
- Having this linked to a phone is useful. Unfortunately, it also means having
one more bluetooth gadget to be tracked by basically all of the
other phones in the world.
- This feels pretty durable, and I’m impressed at how it’s held up. But is it
repairable when it breaks? Will it last a decade or more? I have my doubts.
The amount of watch hardware going into landfills by now must be pretty
staggering.
# notes for garmin
You’re so very close on this one, and I think by extension probably other
chunks of your ecosystem.
The watch itself is Pretty Good, and as a system it almost respects the
agency of a user who doesn’t want a trust relationship with your telemetry and
databases. Why not offer a product that fully and deliberately respects that
user?
“Trust us!” is the default posture of any entity in the position of hoovering
up and retaining user data. As consumers of self-surveillance devices that
phone home to corporate servers, we’re meant to assume both benevolence (or
at least a lack of active malice) and competence. Nothing in the history of
our experience with companies who run databases supports either of those
assumptions. No company is (or stays, over time) good enough in an ethical
sense to avoid doing malign things with user data. No company is (or stays,
over time) good enough in a technical sense to avoid having data stolen.
What if you provided local-first tools for working with the data, opened up the
code, supported more community efforts, tried harder to define stable APIs and
data formats?
I won’t belabor the point.
tags: garmin, technical, watches
p1k3 /
2024 /
12 /
18