# 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.
# table of contents
# 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.
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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.