This is an interesting watch for a lot of reasons. It looks similar to a phoenix xx pro solar, but garmin made a lot of changes under the covers, which is why they gave it a brand new name and all those changes allows the enduro to get some insane battery life. But that does come with a few compromises. So i’ve been testing the enduro out for the last few months, and if this gives you any indication of what i think about it well i’m, going to be kind of sad to eventually have to take it off. To make room on my wrist for the next watch, i have to review and i’ll explain why, in this video, but along with that, i’ll be going over all the new features, as well as how the enduro performed in the sports and fitness capacity, where i’ll be Going over gps accuracy, heart accuracy as well as altimeter accuracy for a bunch of different activities like cycling, running weight, training as well as swimming, and, if you’re interested in really in depth reviews of sports gadgets. Like this, i encourage you to subscribe and also turn on that little bell icon to get notified when new videos come out. So, even though the enduro looks nearly the same as the phoenix 6x pro solar garmin went with a brand new underlying platform with the new processor internals, which was designed to do one thing, get insanely good battery life and the phoenix expo solar is no slouch in The battery life department but garmin went ahead and doubled the smartwatch battery life on the enduro, with the ability to get up to 50 hours in smartwatch mode, which is basically not using it to record any outdoor activities and then up to 70 hours of gps.
Recording time what’s even crazier, though, is that that’s not including the solar charging. So if you add in some sun you’re able to get up to 65 days in smart watch mode and up to 80 hours of gps recording time – and i already have a pretty crazy in depth, video that i published, where i went over the battery life and Enduro and what you can expect in different scenarios like with and without solar, as well as pairing with external sensors i’ll, have that video linked down in the description below. But basically i was getting more battery life than what garmin even claims. So i think their battery life estimates are a little bit conservative and that is ultimately the reason why i like this watch so much where i was going three to four weeks easily without having to charge it using it for plenty of outdoor activities, and it was Kind of like the energizer bunny, where it just kept going and going and going watches that can get 10 to 14 days of battery life. Those are awesome, but every time i check to see how much battery life was left on the enduro. I was like that’s a lot, so garmin may be targeting ultra endurance athletes with this watch, but even if you’re not there’s a lot of peace of mind with that long battery life, just like the phoenix 6 expo solar, the enduro has what garmin calls power glass Technology, where you first have this little outer ring, which is 100 efficient in collecting solar power and then underneath the display there’s another panel that is 10 efficient and again i’ll.
Refer you to my battery life test video, where i went over all those details, but, in short, the solar charging doesn’t work. Great. The power glass is protected by gorilla glass, and this is another reason why i’ve liked this watch. So, even though it’s not sapphire, it has held up to all the things i like to do like mountain biking and rock climbing, and even with how careless i am, it basically looks brand new, oh and, if you’re, finding the information. This video useful just go ahead. Really quick and hit that, like button down below it’s, a small little thing that you can do that will help the video and the channel a lot quite a bit, and i appreciate it. So one of the compromises, though, with the enduro is that it’s, not necessarily a small watch coming out at 51 millimeters and for my 187 millimeter circumference wrist. I tend to prefer the midsize phoenix 6 models coming at 47 millimeters, but garmin did make up for that larger size by reducing the weight on the enduro. So the stainless steel version comes in at 71 grams and the titanium version comes with 61 grams, which is darn, darn light for a watch this size and that weight reduction is ultimately why i was perfectly okay wearing this watch, but that weight reduction does have another Benefit so larger and heavier watches they tend to bounce around on the wrist a bit more than lighter watches, which can have an effect on hardwood accuracy to get a good reading.
A watch needs to stay nice and secure and we’ll get into if the enduro is actually accurate for heart rate here in just one little bit, but another thing garmin did include with the enduro that is supposed to help. Keep the watch more secure. Is this ultrafit band, and i tell you what i like this band a lot: it’s super comfortable, it’s, nice and soft with a nice texture to it. It’S also stretchy, and it looks good and the velcro also has stayed nice and secure, and the hooks haven’t seemed to have lost any grip either and in terms of moisture. It will soak in some sweat since the fabric strap, but it does dry out really quickly and then maybe, most importantly, it hasn’t retained the smell of my toxic sweat over the last few months that i’ve used it for the new features on the enduro. I already went over all of those in some previous videos, so i don’t want to waste your time by repeating everything in this video, but the enduro does come with the new ultrarun profile for ultra distance events, where it now has a rest timer. So you can track your moving time versus your rest. Stops there’s also trail running vo2 max, which is basically a better algorithm that better takes into account varying terrain as well as enhancements to climb pro, which now shows additional information for descents and flats, which i think is great because before you did get the information about Your clients, but you kind of, had no idea about the distance to your next climb, so those enhancements are pretty nice to have, and what is also nice is that, if you’re a phoenix 6 owner, all those features are getting ported to your devices.
However, now it’s probably a good time to talk about the features that the enduro is missing versus the phoenix 6x pro solar and that’s gon na be music, wi, fi and maps, so the lack of music that may be a deal breaker for some, maybe not for Others, but the lack of maps is interesting, though, especially considering the target market for this watch. So if you are an ultra endurance athlete, the lack of maps is probably gon na be a bummer, but maps also do take a pretty big hit on battery life. So that’s, probably why garmin didn’t include that with the enduro, but the enduro still does include breadcrumb style navigation, which gives you a line and an arrow of which direction to go. One thing i noticed, though, is that although the enduro has basically the exact same interface of the phoenix 6., i noticed it was just slightly slower to respond like here. You can see it just takes a second or two to load up the activities and that may have something to do with that different processor inside the enduro. But i know the garmin has been making improvements, because i did just load up the latest public beta firmware and it does seem to have gotten rid of that lag, and things are just a lot. Snappier now for sleep tracking, i found the enduro to be a bit more accurate than some garments i’ve tested in the past. I think they’re dialing in their algorithm here, and i do really like the level of detail that provide and then for the pulse ox sensor, which measures your blood oxygen saturation levels.
Well, all wrist based spo2 sensors, aren’t medical grade and the figures are generally in the ballpark, but may not be quite as accurate as something like a fingertip spo2 sensor. Okay, so those are all the new features, but now let’s get into the really good stuff and that’s how the enduro performs in sports and fitness capacity and we’re going to start with gps accuracy and let’s. First take a look at some running so on this run. Here the total distance lined up really nicely even for being a run where i kind of went on all sorts of directions where i was purposely trying to make it hard for the gps, but it was good to go and then for cycling on this road ride. Things also looked really good. The total distance was spot on, and so was the elevation gain good stuff on this ride. Again, the total distance lined up and the total elevation was pretty close, but it was just a smidge higher than another device, as well as the strava corrected elevation figure in the center screenshot. I did have one mountain bike: ride where the distance was just a smidge off, but nothing earth shattering by any means and the elevation did line up nicely compared to the other devices and then on this mountain bike, ride good to go for total distance again and The elevation was close, but it was just off by just a little bit for the finer gps track accuracy here’s that run that we saw earlier and the enduro did pretty decent, in fact much better than the watch that’s in purple.
Where that one kind of had some issues at the beginning of the run and on a few corners, but for the enduro, this is pretty decent. Except for this one portion right here. Where funny enough, all the watches thought i was running straight through houses rather than on the street, but overall this was pretty good for road biking. Well, this ride. It was kind of stunningly perfect, so i’m, just gon na go ahead and just keep on browsing this map for a bit, because this was phenomenally accurate, there’s no drift, the enduro was even staying on the correct side of the road i mean this is so pretty It kind of makes me want to cry for mountain biking, which is probably one of the most challenging activities for gps from a high level. Things look great, but let’s take a look at these switchbacks here on the left. So there was one spot here where the enduro wandered a bit, and there was also this spot right here, but those were about the only sections that i could find where it was a little bit off. Overall, this was pretty good and i think the gps accuracy is pretty solid and really quick before we get into hardware accuracy. I also wanted to go over how well the enduro did at estimating distances running on a treadmill. Garmin seems to be getting even better with indoor running distance estimations and the enduro was very respectable here, with the distance on this treadmill run being off by only three one hundredths of a mile that’s, pretty impressive and what’s even more impressive, is that it stayed calibrated And quite accurate on subsequent runs for heart rate performance.
On this run, you can see that for the most part it was decent, but it did have a few spots where it spiked just slightly nothing earth shattering and it did get back in line pretty quickly. For indoor cycling overall pretty good, but we do see some spots where it wandered at the beginning. But after that it was pretty rock solid through these intervals here and then it held strong for this steady state section here. You’Ll notice, right here on this interval, though, that it was a few seconds behind, but after that it was pretty rock solid for the rest of the ride. Running and indoor cycling are generally pretty easy activities for a wrist based optical heart rate sensor, to get right. But now let’s move on to some more challenging activities like road biking outside which adds some variables, like vibrations and bumps in the road which can throw off these sort of sensors. And we can see that illustrated here where, for the most part, the heart rate resembles what was being collected on the external heart rate straps, but there’s just more spots, where it deviated like on this portion right here, where there were some quick changes in heart rate. It wasn’t quite as quick to react, and then here and here it was a bit slow to react in the sudden fallen heart rate. The average heart rate was still in line for the ride and there weren’t any drastic spikes or dips.
But there were a few more deviations than indoor cycling. Mountain biking gets even tougher for wristbands heart rate sensors, with the possibility of watches bouncing around on the wrist due to all the rough terrain. But this was awfully surprising to see from the enduro where this was not a terrible result at all for a wrist based heart rate sensor for mountain biking, again, a very usable average heart rate. But there were definitely some spots where it wandered off a bit. But for the most part, the enduro did get back in line pretty quickly, except for this one section right here, where it tracked low for a while, but now let’s get into one of the toughest activities for a risk based optical heart rate sensor, which is weight, Training and you can see that the enduro did get a bit lost on some portions of the workout like at the beginning. It was tracking high, but it did get back in line for a bit. But then there were some portions like here and here were tracked high in between sets and then here would had a rather large spike, which wasn’t so great and for the high intensity intervals at the end, it wasn’t incredibly quick to react and then for swimming. This is about what i typically see from a decent wrist based optical heart rate sensor in the water, where it tracks the trends pretty well, but it’s definitely not going to be quite spot on with a chest.
Heart rate strap that’s designed for swimming, although the enduro uses the same heart rate sensor, that’s found on a lot of other garmin devices, which i do think is pretty decent. I think some of those deviations is just due the fact that it’s a larger watch, but i do think that the lighter weight and the ultrafit band do help assist in getting better accuracy, because those results that we saw are still far better than what i’ve seen Out of similarly sized but heavier watches, and then for swim tracking, it tracks the total distance and laps just fine using its automatic lap detection. It provides all sorts of information like a breakdown of laps, stroke, type and rest periods and regarding rest periods. These were automatically detected using the auto rest timer function, and this also works well, where it takes just a second or two for an endura to recognize that you came to a stop on an interval and a rest, timer pops up, and what you’ll notice is that It automatically adjusts the interval time based on your actual movement and, as you can see here, it matched up with the interval nearly exactly to the phoenix 6 pro solar that i was using where i was manually tracking intervals using the lap button. And lastly, i did also take the enduro skiing and this is a pretty cool activity profile, where it’s able to use the altimeter to automatically detect when you’re ascending on the chair, lift and when you’re descending down the ski run.
And i just love being able to track the distance and speed on each run, as well as being able to see my total runs for the day and that transflected display is amazing in bright conditions like that. So the enduro really is all about that battery life, and i got so used to that battery life that i kind of made me forget about the lack of maps. It still provides nearly everything i need. It provides all the training feedback i need. It supports every sensor under the sun and it was very comfortable wear and i think that’s due to that lighter weight, as well as the ultrafit band anyhow. I hope this video helped. You weigh some of the considerations with the enduro and, if it did don’t be shy about hitting that like button down below and also subscribe to the channel for plenty more videos.f7j8MrA1z5c
