Garmin Forerunner® 965 Running Smartwatch, AMOLED Display, 010-02809-00

I had used Garmin for many many years before turning to Samsung for the watch 5 pro. I do think the Samsung is the better smartwatch. I can reply with voice or tiny keyboard on the Samsung. But honestly I didn’t use it nearly as much as I thought. Recently I really got onto hiking and SUP. I really needed the navigation on my wrist especially while sup on the river. If I drop my phone, it’s gone, so it’s nice to Navi on your wrist. I pulled the trigger on this watch and I’m shocked at what it can do. They thought of so much. I really appreciate the hotkeys they added. During activity the touchscreen is disabled. I assigned a hotkey and during activity, I can enable touchscreen, look around the map, look ahead if needed… Then disable the touchscreen and back to not working about water causing havoc on the watch touchscreen. Idk, that’s just an example, but I’m shocked by how Garmin just thought of everything. I went sup and had it almost only on the map screen for 3.5 hours and I was worried the battery would not make it…. It only drained 25%. That’s crazy for the whole screen to be lit up so long while navigating. This is an amazing watch. I learned my lesson, not going to leave Garmin again

I love this watch! I upgraded from a Forerunner 935 and the accuracy of the 965 is so much better.

I’m not a huge fan of the screen going dark, so I set it to always on. This, of course, shortens the battery life, but I don’t mind that too much.

What bothers me the most is I can’t see seconds all the time. I have to flick my wrist every 15 seconds or so to see the seconds come up. This doesn’t sound like much to many people, but if you have to check heart rates all day, that gets old super fast. They can show my HR all the time, why not seconds.

The sleep tracking is pretty good, but sometimes it gets confused about when I’m sleeping or not. One day I was just playing video games for most of the day. Chilling after a long hard run, you know how you do. Anyway, it thought I had gone to sleep. haha. And it doesn’t like it too well if I get up 2 or 3 times for an hour at a time in the night if I need to tend to a sick or injured animal. But for most regular nights, sleep tracking seems to work.

Other than that, not too much to complain about. It’s a nice watch and works well in my use cases for trail running and long distance horseback riding.

I was previously using the Garmin Forerunner 235 for the past 7 years & decided to upgrade. There are a ton more features, it doesn’t feel any heavier than my older 235, & wearing this daily / nightly gives great health data. Great battery & well worth the purchase price if you wear this watch on a daily basis.

My only gripe with this new watch is with the recommended daily workouts that Garmin puts out. If you start one of these workouts & have a pace faster than the recommended workout pace, it will constantly buzz/beep at you to slow down. I’d love a way to adjust the pace target for those recommended workouts, but it’s a really minor inconvenience in an otherwise fantastic watch.

Pretty quick learning curve to pick up 75% of the features that you’ll use on a daily basis. Lots of customization available to arrange the functions and data to your liking . The other 25% of features in there you’ll either not need, or can just dive into later! Beautiful colorful well-lit display. Lots of nice watch faces to scroll through depending on your mood and more are downloadable. Super battery life so far ! Wrist-based HR monitor is accurate when I compare it to the data from my chest strap. Only complaint is the crystal seems to be a magnet for scratches. Wish i would’ve purchased a screen protector because I already have a few small scratches. But really only visible if you’re LOOKING for them, otherwise love my new Garmin! It’s motivating me to fill it with workout data!

This watch does absolutely everything, the screen is beautiful, battery life is excellent and with only GPS tracking a few light activities, I was rewarded with 13 days of battery with it around 2% remaining, so quite simply put it has functioned exactly as expected. The watch body seems very light and comfortable – the silicone?? strap has perfect adjustability, and just feels “right”. I was surprised by little things, such as the “strength” activity tracking actually correctly detected when I was doing reps of various exercises, and you can track metrics like weight (and others) to review and inform progress, which you can correct/edit later if an error was made. Neato.

Some minor perturbances if I’m being picky – sometimes the heartrate monitor is sluggish, which is not the best when you’re trying to observe quick changes resulting from effort/output in your activity compared to HR recovery time for example. Also, sometimes when you’re twisting your wrist to have the screen wake, it doesn’t, and you have to repeat once or a couple times more. Doesn’t happen often, and if it bothered me enough and I didn’t mind whatever increased battery burn-rate that equates to, I would enable the screen always on. There’s more little improvements they can make, I can list a few more, but I’m sure they will update and patch a lot of this stuff throughout it’s support lifecycle.

All in all, such a solid product. Synced well with speed/cadence sensors, and other Garmin products like inReach Mini 2. It looks classy and is still pragmatic and functional. Doesn’t look boorish. Buy it, and you won’t regret it! Expensive, but what should something like this cost? It seems fair for what it does and is capable of.

I was so excited to receive this watch. Unfortunately, it had issues immediately. I called Garmin support 4 times for help. One call was very helpful, and solved my issue easily. The other calls did not go well. Two of the representatives continuously suggested the purchase of Apple products in order to find a solution. I am worried that this company can’t possibly compete when they can’t even identify their competition, nor can they retain a customer that came to them first. I can’t imagine suggesting my competition to a customer experiencing frustration. I had high expectations of Garmin as a superior alternative to the Apple product universe. This has been possibly the worst tech purchase that I have ever made, and one of the worst purchases of any product. So disappointed all around.