By Andrew Williams,Contributor
Copyright forbes
Garmin Instinct Crossover AMOLED
Garmin has announced its most advanced hybrid watch to date, the Garmin Instinct Crossover AMOLED.
Hybrid watches have been part of the Garmin line-up for the better part of a decade, in the Vivomove line. But the Garmin Instinct Crossover AMOLED marks the first that can be called a hardcore fitness and adventuring watch.
These wearables blend moving analog watch hands with a screen. In other series this arrangement is often used to hide a watch’s nerdier side when not in use, but the Instinct series has never concerned itself with hiding anything.
Like other Instinct models, the Garmin Instinct Crossover AMOLED is a bold, rugged and unashamed adventuring and outdoors watch no-one would mistake for a breezy lifestyle wearable.
It is also significantly more expensive than the established Instinct 3 AMOLED line. A $649.99 price makes the Instinct Crossover AMOLED $200 more than the 45mm Instinct 3 AMOLED. A Stealth edition with shooting and military features is available for $100 extra too.
One neat element of the Instinct Crossover AMOLED in particular is the way the watch face widgets can move slightly to avoid being obscured by the watch hands. Those hands also have glow in the dark elements, like a lot of standard watches.
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Garmin Instinct Crossover AMOLED Features
Outside of this, the Instinct Crossover AMOLED’s feature set appears similar to that of the Instinct 3 AMOLED.
It offers higher-end functions like dual-band GPS with SatIQ, an LED flashlight, 10ATM water resistance and a highly scratch-resistant Sapphire display cover.
Much like the Instinct 3 AMOLED, though, the Instinct Crossover AMOLED does not have on-watch maps. It’s one of the most expensive Garmin watches not to have this feature.
Battery life is also a little shorter than that of the non-Crossover variant, rated for 14 days of normal use, compared to 18 days in the Instinct 3 AMOLED. This would make sense if the battery capacity had to be cut down a little in order to make room for the watch capacity — Garmin does not release raw battery specs for its watches.
The Garmin Instinct Crossover AMOLED is available to order now.
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