Garmin wants you to wear its Fenix 3 running watch to business meetings

Now comes decked out in silver, leather and rose gold, actually looks pretty wearable off the trails

Duncan Bell
By Duncan Bell
published

The Garmin Fenix 3 is a seriousrunning and fitness watchthat we rate very highly. It's also got a very manly rugged and chunky look that Garmin is now trying to play up with premium editions in silver and rose gold, with sapphire glass screens and leather straps. The results, aesthetically, are about as good as any smartwatch we've seen, at least for those prefer the more macho timepiece.

With email and text notfications, changeable watch faces, an easy to read screen, (limited) supply of apps and music controls, the Garmin Fenix 3 already ticked a number of key smartwatch boxes, and the new look, Garmin says, 'suits both the outdoors and the boardroom.'

And do you know what? It actually does.

With the full and fairly self-explanatory name of, Garmin Fenix 3 Sapphire Silver with Leather Band (a rose gold incarnation will also be available), this keeps all the usual GPS tracking, 100m water resistance and 50-hour battery life (20 hours with the GPS on) of its sportier sibling.

As a smartwatch, it's not going to challenge Apple Watch or its Android Wear rivals when it comes to voice control, sending as opposed to receiving messages, Google searches and the like, but the Fenix 3 does do the basics, and obviously rips its Apple and Android rivals a new one when it comes to its sporting and navigation abilities.

Pairing with a chest-strap heart rate monitor is also possible, adding a great deal of extra fitness functionality, and you can also use it as a remote control for your Garmin Virb action cam.

You could question whether a heavy, leather strap is as suited to cross-country running, mountaineering and ski-boarding (just a handful of the activities that the Fenix 3 is set up to track) as a plastic/silicone one, but it certainly looks the business.

I'll let you know as soon as one arrives if the feel of the new, swanked-up Fenixes matches the photography, but at £470 for the silver one (no pricing on the rose gold yet), I reckon Garmin could shift a fair few of these to thrusting, macho business types who double up as weekend outdoorsmen. Compatibility with both iPhone from 4S onwards and Android 4.3 phones from about the Galaxy S3 era onwards won't hurt, either.

CATEGORIES
Wearables
Duncan Bell
Duncan Bell

Duncan is the former lifestyle editor of T3 and has been writing about tech for almost 15 years. He has covered everything from smartphones to headphones, TV to AC and air fryers to the movies of James Bond and obscure anime. His current brief is everything to do with the home and kitchen, which is good because he is an excellent cook, if he says so himself. He also covers cycling and ebikes – like over-using italics, this is another passion of his. In his long and varied lifestyle-tech career he is one of the few people to have been a fitness editor despite being unfit and a cars editor for not one but two websites, despite being unable to drive. He also has about 400 vacuum cleaners, and is possibly the UK's leading expert on cordless vacuum cleaners, despite being decidedly messy. A cricket fan for over 30 years, he also recently become T3's cricket editor, writing about how to stream obscure T20 tournaments, and turning out some typically no-nonsense opinions on the world's top teams and players.

Before T3, Duncan was a music and film reviewer, worked for a magazine about gambling that employed a surprisingly large number of convicted criminals, and then a magazine called Bizarre that was essentially like a cross between Reddit and DeviantArt, before the invention of the internet. There was also a lengthy period where he essentially wrote all of T3 magazine every month for about 3 years. 

A broadcaster, raconteur and public speaker, Duncan used to be on telly loads, but an unfortunate incident put a stop to that, so he now largely contents himself with telling people, "I used to be on the TV, you know."


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