Backside Line
There’s a motive this can be a bestselling GPS watch. The Garmin Forerunner 165 has all the weather of a dearer watch with out the premium value. Out of all of Garmin’s choices, it has the most effective steadiness of value and efficiency, making it an important look ahead to these simply moving into the world of health monitoring. It’s a dependable and correct tracker and has shortly change into one in all our favourite GPS watches.
The Forerunner 165 encompasses a 1.2-inch show with an amazingly vibrant AMOLED display. This high-performance show is nice for analyzing exercises, displaying messages, and growing the readability of small textual content. Nevertheless, this high-powered display leads to a middle-of-the-pack battery life. With a said battery lifetime of 11 days in smartwatch mode and 19 hours of GPS recording, it’s lower than different watches of comparable dimension and value. Nevertheless, for a each day health tracker, that is greater than sufficient battery life for recording actions and recharging each few days.
How We Examined
From the paths to backcountry powder to simply checking notifications all through the day, we put each GPS watch by its paces in all types of circumstances to see the place every one shines.
Over a pair months, we’ve utterly drained every watch’s battery repeatedly to essentially perceive what you’ll get out of it, tracked our routes throughout totally different landscapes to verify how correct the GPS really is, and saved them strapped to our wrists for hours on finish to ensure they’re comfy and user-friendly. We personal and use all this gear ourselves day in and time out, so our critiques come from real expertise, not simply fast testing classes.
Fast Specs
Garmin Forerunner 165
Greatest Show GPS Watch
CleverHiker Score:
4.5/5.0
Worth:
$250
Avg. Battery Life:
11 days smartwatch / 19 hours GPS
Weight:
40g
Show Dimension:
1.2″
Execs
- Excessive-quality show
- Nice health metrics
- Correct GPS
- Comfy
- Constructed-in sensible capabilities and coaching plans
Cons
- Fewer exercise sorts
- AMOLED show lowers life
Accuracy
Whereas the Forerunner 165 doesn’t have dual-frequency GPS, its monitoring continues to be distinctive, and now we have bother discovering any hiccups after we use it. When testing on our known-distance loop, it ranged from a couple of hundredths of a mile brief to some hundredths lengthy, which isn’t sufficient for us to query its accuracy.
Whereas utilizing the watch in several terrains, we solely discover some monitor wobbling in very dense tree cowl. We respect that we are able to simply select the extent of satellite tv for pc connectivity. This could both enhance accuracy or enhance battery life. The choices embrace completely off, GPS solely, all methods, and UltraTrac. We usually use GPS solely or UltrTac for the most effective mix of accuracy and battery efficiency.
Battery Life
The Forerunner 165 offers a said GPS battery lifetime of 19 hours and a smartwatch lifetime of 11 days. In comparison with our lineup, that is proper concerning the center of the highway.
Whereas that is sufficient for each day use and health monitoring, it’s not sufficient for lengthy endurance occasions, multi-day journeys, or lengthy intervals between fees. The battery saver mode helps limit the GPS knowledge to enhance battery life, and we lengthen the battery life by turning on don’t disturb and switch down the backlight. Even nonetheless, it’s a bit decrease than others available on the market for the same value.
Consolation & Wearability
Weighing in at 40 grams, the Forerunner 165 is light-weight and hardly noticeable on the wrist.
The watch has 5 buttons: begin, again, up, down, and lightweight. These are among the lowest profile buttons of any watch we’ve examined, and we love how out of the best way they’re. We by no means by accident bump them and barely use the auto lock.
The general dimension is small at 43mm large (1.69 inches) whereas sustaining a decent 1.2” show dimension. The Forerunner 165 doesn’t get in the best way or catch on backpack straps or cuffs. We love its low profile and barely rounded edge, retaining it out of the best way and modern.
Options
The Forerunner 165 is a devoted operating and sports activities watch with many options good for each day use. Options like step depend, coronary heart fee, and sleep scores assist quantify your day, and a number of exercise sorts report and show particular metrics for every sport. Nevertheless, we discovered that the Forerunner 165 lacks many exercise varieties of frequent backcountry adventures like backcountry snowboarding, climbing, and cross-country snowboarding.
The watch is extremely customizable with the Garmin app, and customers should buy third-party widgets or sync different free choices. It additionally has some options present in smartwatches, like a pockets, discover my telephone, security alerts, and music. Route navigation, back-to-start route following, and breadcrumb mapping are all nice options that make the Forerunner 165 trail-ready.
Ease of Use
Garmin isn’t new to this sport, and it reveals with its easy-to-use interface. The Garmin Forerunner 165’s AMOLED is extraordinarily vibrant and is without doubt one of the strongest and easy-to-read of any we examined. The touchscreen capabilities easily even when sporting gloves or when the display is moist.
For those who favor to make use of the 5 navigation buttons as an alternative, merely disable the touchscreen. The watch shortly acquires satellites and the exercise screens are straightforward to navigate to show totally different capabilities. The Forerunner 165 is an approachable and user-friendly watch with a transparent emphasis on usability.
Ought to You Purchase the Garmin Forerunner 165 GPS Watch?
The Forerunner 165 is a robust GPS watch at a value beneath its opponents. It’s a wonderful budget-priced choice with sufficient options that may impress die-hard well being metric geeks.
Whereas its battery life is insufficient for recording full-day adventures, it prioritizes a extremely vibrant display. The 1.2-inch show is the most effective in its class due to its AMOLED know-how. You might end up charging this watch extra typically, and it’s most at house as a each day health tracker for shorter-duration actions.
With loads of options for each backcountry navigation and each day smartwatch use, the Forerunner 165 is one other spectacular choice from Garmin that balances an reasonably priced value with excessive efficiency.
What Different Watches Ought to You Think about?
Right here’s extra of our favourite choices from our full GPS watch gear information:
Garmin Vivoactive 5 Evaluation: Nearly similar in battery life, the Vivoactive 5 is barely smaller and lighter for these with smaller wrists.
Coros Tempo 3 Evaluation: Barely cheaper and with an extended battery life than the Forerunner 165, the Tempo 3 is a good entry-level watch.
Garmin Intuition 2 Photo voltaic Evaluation: With among the greatest battery lifetime of any Garmin product, the Intuition 2 Photo voltaic can monitor actions for days at a time.
