Review: Garmin raises luxury stakes with Fenix Chronos sportswatch

Garmin’s Fenix Chronos is just about as fashionable as sportwatches can get.

Garmin Fenix Chronos multisport watch.

Apple may have injected fashion into modern wearables with the Watch but there’s a bevy of rivals now looking to beat the tech giant on the luxury front. Garmin has raised the stakes on that front with the latest version of its Fenix sportswatch. With a price tag north of $1400, the Fenix Chronos is just about as fashionable as sportwatches can get.

You could mistake the Chronos for a regular watch with its default analog watchface and old-fashioned tachymeter around the rim. The five push buttons around the edge — three on the left and two on the right — operate like a traditional multi-function watch: up, down, back, a light, and the start-stop button, which lets you select an activity, and then begin and end it.

Garmin has taken the core of Chronos’s predecessor the Fenix 3 HR and put it in a beautiful new body, but that’s about it. There is no move to adopt something like the ingenious digital crown on Apple Watch and the equally ingenious rotating bezel on Samsung’s Gear S2. The display is not touch sensitive.

Made from titanium or grade 316L stainless steel, it is a large, imposing piece of wearable kit. You can opt for a brushed ­titanium casing with a titanium band; brushed steel casing with a stainless steel band, or steel casing with a vintage leather band. All units have sapphire crystal glass.

As with Apple Watch you can quickly slip on a silicon band before a sweat-inducing long run or strenuous exercise. The leather band would be the only one that really needs protecting from sweat. You get a silicon band in the kit.

I’ve been trialling the titanium model. The watch face is large, 30.5mm for the display and 48mm when you include the tachymeter rim. I wonder how suitable this size is for women? It’s lighter than the steel model.

The tachymeter rim is a relic because the watch itself offers accurate speed measurements based on time and in-built GPS. The tachymeter could be an app inside the phone. This is a high-end watch for executives who want their timepiece to look premium and flash when they’re dressed in a suit, but with advanced tracking capability.

Fitness first

The real guts of the Chronos is its fitness functionality which we’ve looked at before. Just as with the Fenix 3 HR, you get a watch that monitors an amazing range of sports. As I rotate through the activity options there’s bike, bike indoor, pool swim, open water, SUP (stand up paddle boarding), row, row indoor, triathlon, golf, cross-country skiing, ski/board, climb, hike, trail run, run, and run indoor.

Garmin offers three features that distinguish its fitness devices from its competitors. Like high-end Fenix 3 watches, the Chronos is waterproof to 100m. That’s way deeper than the 30m limit of recreational scuba divers, at levels where you would experience oxygen toxicity.

In indoor pools it uses the accelerometer to measure laps and tracks the movement of your arms to measure strokes. It measures rowing and indoor rowing strokes the same way.

And you can take it skiing. It will display the time of your current run, the distance, the drop in metres, your maximum and average speeds.

Then there’s the in-built GPS. This is common with high-end Fitbit devices offering in-built GPS. But don’t expect many phone-branded smartwatches to have in-built GPS. They shy away from it as it soaks up battery juice. Instead they offer GPS tracking through a paired smartphone.

Garmin puts its in-built GPS to some novel use. Suppose you get lost while hiking, the Chronos doesn’t display your location on Google Maps. Having recorded your every movement, it will let you retrace your steps back exactly the way you came from a previous known point. There’s also a find phone function that uses GPS to keep track of the most recent location it successfully paired with your smartphone. So if you lose your phone, you can go back to the last known location.

Solid battery life

The third feature is battery life. Garmin says you can get up to a week’s battery life in smartwatch mode and that means you can keep this watch on your wrist at night to measure sleep. On tracking mode the battery life is pretty good as well: up to 13 hours in GPS mode and up to 25 hours in UltraTrac mode. You get detailed activity metrics through the Garmin Connect smartphone app and there’s an in-built heart rate monitor and the Chronos can display emails, text messages and alerts.

Garmin Connect also includes apps and they’re mostly alternate watch faces. But there are a few fun ones. One tells you what animal your activity pace matches. Another equates the calories in beer to your energy output.

The Fenix Chronos is packaged in a distinctive wooden box that in a bygone era could have housed longish premium Cuban cigars. The box adds to the aura of quality.

Personally I prefer lighter devices such as the Fenix 3 HR and activity trackers that store music and stream it to Bluetooth headset. The Chronos is amiss on both those fronts, but if you are a fan of the premium look and have the cash to splash around, this is a comprehensive activity tracker with a sharp sense of style.

Rating: 8/10
Price: $1399, $1499, $1999.