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Watches and wearables · Garmin

Garmin 6

11owners with an opinion
50%of verdicts positive
4/5positive/negative since 2024
4.5 yrslongest happy owner
1happy after 3+ years

Praised for reliability and battery; criticized for software.

What owners wrote

Likes itOwned 4.5 yearsStill going
Sorry, hard disagree with everything you've said here. I have a Fenix 6, I've worn it every day for the last 4.5 years. Its a brilliant smartwatch. I have multiple apps from Garmin's IQ store on it. Battery lasts between one and two weeks, thats including recording multiple activities each week, while using it to play music to my bluetooth headphones.
Doesn’t like itOwned 3 years
my Garmin Fenix 6 used to survive with 21 days of display always one but lowest brightness, if I didn't use any GPS. Now, after 3 years it is somehow down to 10 days. No chance of debugging where it comes from as I haven't changed anything on my side.
Doesn’t like it
Over the years I have had Garmin Fenix 3HR, 6, Instinct, 7 Pro, Apple Watch 8, SE3 and now I have S11. The last one I must admit was an impulse buy. I realized that marketing works really well selling people the idea that all that collected data is actually important and may improve your life in a meaningful way. In fact, the formula is simple: eat clean, move, sleep well, do blood tests twice a year to ensure you don’t have deficiencies. It’s that simple. You don’t need your every heart beat to be recorded or your sleep tracked. You wake up and you already know if you slept well. I even consider health tracking wearables doing more harm as they distract people from what is important giving them a false sense of comfort if they managed to close all the rings. One a side note, I tried CGM out of curiosity and seeing how your body (and this is quite individual) reacts on various food, how high glucose spikes you can get from only a handful of blueberries has had a tremendous effect on my diet. Controlling glucose levels has helped sleep better, recover faster, lose some weight and overall have more energy. Wearing CGM for only one month has had more impact on my life than years of wearing various health trackers.
Doesn’t like it
The problem is that 30 hours slowly becomes far less over time with software bloat and battery degradation. What I hated when I had a watch with a tiny batter like this is that if I wanted both sleep tracking AND the ability to track my morning workout, I absolutely had to remember to charge before bed. If I forgot, I'd wake up with a dead or almost dead watch and have to delay my workout. I went though a number of android wear smart watches ~10 years ago and had the same problem with all of them. I absolutely loved my Garmin 940M. I had it for years with hardly any battery degradation and it typically gave me 70-80% of the advertised battery life for many years until it was accidentally physically destroyed (caught the watch on a heavy backpack I was taking off, which ripped off the watch pin anchor from the case). The Fenix 6 I have now is not nearly so good. It advertises 2 weeks of battery and I'm at 53% after only 4 days or so. I blame this partially on their crappy iOS support where you cannot filter apps out, so every #$%#$%^ slack message I get buzzes my watch. I had a Pixel phone when I had the 945, where you can filter out garbage notifications. This is really Garmin's fault, since apparently Coros and Pebble can filter notifications on iOS. I'll switch to one of those when this Garmin dies unless they fix their iOS support.
Likes it
It matches my lived experience. My body battery and stress often starts declining for no apparent reason and then 12-24 hours later I feel the symptoms of an illness. Similarly, when in a tough training block, HRV is a great tool to gauge how hard I ought to be able to go: I've tried to push through and just do a tough workout anyways when it's out of range, but failed to complete the workout in good form, or felt superficially crappy but had good training readiness according to the watch and was able to do better than expected. The same holds true in the other direction, I don't log into Connect or scroll through the multitudinous widgets of data often enough to really keep tabs on this stuff, and when I get sick or feel good or bomb a workout or succeed at a workout when I felt off, the metrics consistently back up the actual results. Personally, I've been thinking about jumping ship to a Coros Apex 4 if my battered Fenix 6 ever gives up the ghost - Garmin's prices are insane these days. At $270, this is cheap enough in comparison to a $1200 Fenix 8 Pro to take the chance. I could buy this and a $480 Apex 4, and then decide I didn't like either of them and go back to a used Forerunner 955, before spending as much as a new top-end Garmin.
Likes it
I use the white screen backlight "flashlight" on my Fenix 6 every day for getting out of the bedroom without waking my wife in the morning. It's good enough to do that, not nearly bright enough to be useful for taking the dog out at night or fixing stuff around the house, for those tasks I'd use the screen backlight to search for my headlamp in my backpack and then use that! The only change I'd want from the new watches would be the emergency satellite messenger that the new Fenix 8 Pros have. The feature isn't as good as my dedicated InReach Mini 2, but like the flashlight it would be always on my wrist. However, the new watches are $1300 luxury items now, that's not the price of a fitness watch: it feels like they're no longer marketing to my tax bracket.
Likes it
Lot of hate on Garmin sleep tracking in this thread, but I love it. Maybe it is not super accurate, but it was eye-opening for me to see how the score changes for the worse even with a little bit of alcohol. I am way more careful with when and how much I drink since I've started wearing a Fenix 6 few years back
Likes it
I get notifications for text messages, phone calls, and emails on my VivoActive 6. There are also good apps; for instance, the built-in (free) golf app is great. Battery lasts over a week, too. So far, I'm pretty happy with it and don't feel the need to get an Apple Watch which requires charging every day.
Neutral
Are you sure about that? I have a Garmin Fenix 6 and the Connect app on Android. While it's true that all data is stored locally on the watch and it doesn't need to be tethered to a phone to work, I'm pretty sure that syncing the watch to the Connect app does require the Connect app to be connected to the server. I have experienced this multiple times, after completing a hike in a remote area and I try to sync the Hike Activity to Connect it fails due to not having a cellular connection despite the watch being connected to the phone via Bluetooth.
Likes it
Yeah, they're not the most stylish. I've had several different Android Wear smart watches, and an MS Band before those. In every case, the battery life went from bad to worse after a year or two (like 1-2 days, to less than a day). Because of this, battery life is my number one criteria. And why I won't get an Apple watch. I had a 645M for years. Its lower end than the Fenix, and has a smaller battery. I had mine for over 4 years, and never noticed any substantial battery degradation. I upgraded to the Fenix 6 after I broke the watch case (broke the tip off the thing that holds the band pin in place) when it caught on my very heavy backpack. It looks like there is now a newer Fenix 7 with longer (28 day) battery life. And they have solar editions that get up to 37 days (or 1+ years in battery saver mode).
Recommends itHasn’t owned it
Any of these: * Garmin (required to adhere to GDPR) * Empatica E4 (required to adhere to GDPR) (for more advanced use) * Microsoft Band 2 (open source API on Github) * Suunto (required to adhere to GDPR) Personally, the Garmin Fenix 6 or Garmin Enduro (if the new Enduro gets good reviews) are the ones I would recommend for general use. Apple may do various appealing things, but they are not obligated to adhere to GDPR. The app creators for the Apple Watch are certainly not required to adhere to GDPR. Ironically, the ones that adhere to strict privacy regulations tend to have more solid technology. These technologies have been utilized for impressive research in journal articles.