Garmin has carved out a niche within smartwatch royalty alongside the Apple, Google, and Samsung smartwatches that have risen up to dominate the market, buoyed by those tech titans’ monster budgets.
How? Garmin’s software, in particular, is just that good. Garmin’s app has come under fire recently for adding a subscription tier, but the free tier of Garmin service isn’t going anywhere.
If you do think you’ll check out that Garmin Connect+ subscription for extra goodies that come along with paying $7 per month (or $70 per year), then do it while you can get the hardware—the smartwatch—on a deal to offset the cost of your Connect+ test drive.
Both the Forerunner 165 and Forerunner 265S are on sale right now for about 22-23% off.
two watches on two deals
The Forerunner 165 packs a touchscreen AMOLED display into a common 43mm size. While that’s larger than your typical analog watch (although watch sizes have been ballooning over the past couple of years), it’s par for the course among smartwatches. You can squeeze up to 11 days of battery out of the Forerunner 165 in smartwatch mode and up to 19 hours in GPS mode.
The Forerunner 265S ups the battery life to as much as 15 days in smartwatch mode and 24 hours in GPS mode, and while it’s the same price as the Forerunner 265 (hint: no “S” in the name), it comes in a sleeker 42mm case compared to the regular model’s 46mm size.
Now 46mm is big, even for a smartwatch, and while you’ll barely notice the difference in size between the Forerunner 265S and the cheaper Forerunner 165, you will notice that it has more activity profiles for various types of workouts.
Keeping tabs on all the workouts that Garmin smartwatches have is made harder (pleasantly so) by the new workout categories Garmin is rumored to add. But if Garmin wants to keep adding workouts, I won’t complain. I just hope they don’t paywall more capabilities behind their $7-per-month (or $70-per-year) Garmin Connect+ subscription.
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