Tech: Garmin Forerunner 965 smartwatch review

For my marathon training up to this point, I had been tracking my runs with my Apple Watch Series 8.  It worked well overall (the GPS and heart rate monitor were really accurate), but it required constant charging, and the darn thing just broke after only 18 months of use.

So, I bit the bullet and ponied up for a Garmin Forerunner 965, a smartwatch that's almost twice as expensive as an Apple Watch Series 9. Is the Garmin worth the coin?

The Forerunner series is Garmin's line of running-focused watches, and the 965 is the most advanced model in the bunch. Its main selling point is a large 1.4" AMOLED display that makes the MIPS displays of older Garmin smartwatches look like middle school graphing calculators.  The brightness, pixel density, and color range of the 965 trump every GPS watch out there, save for smartphone-style Apple and Samsung watches.  The nicer display does mean a slight hit to battery life, but the Forerunner 965 still lasts me about 8 to 10 days between charges, including many hours of running with both the GPS and Bluetooth music playback on.  It was nice to wear a watch that I didn't have to charge every single day just to use.

The big drawback to the 965 is that aside from tracking your runs, the watch really doesn't do all that much.  It's not trying to be a smartphone on your wrist, so there's no apps for browsing the Internet, checking your bank account balance, or pulling up an airline ticket.  And paradoxically, if you don't need some of the Garmin-specific bells and whistles the Forerunner provides (full featured navigation, Spotify integration, and contactless credit card payments), there are running watches like the Coros Pace 3 that do the same thing but cost several hundreds of dollars less.

All that said, I am happy with the Forerunner 965 so far, and would recommend it to any amateur athlete looking to quantify their fun.