Garmin Forerunner® 965 Running Smartwatch

The battery life on this watch is absolutely insane compared to the apple watch. I exercise at least once a day and sometimes up to four times. The Garmin Forerunner® 965 lasted over 8 days night and day with 13 plus hours of swimming, cycling, running, and lifting workouts. I think I took it off on day 8 with 20 something percent battery left. it is also feels lighter than the apple watch 8. I had the apple watch 8 and Garmin Forerunner® 965 on at the same time for the 8 days, one on each wrist. The data the Garmin Forerunner® 965 has to view is also very impressive with a very nice display.

The only reason i didn’t keep the Garmin Forerunner® 965 was because it wouldn’t work with the apple activity for fitness, my apple watch can text, make calls, take photos with my phone, emails, ect. I think the Garmin Forerunner® 965 is a WAY better fitness watch with a CRAZY battery but it doesn’t have the conveniences i am now used to with the apple watch now.

If the Garmin Forerunner® 965 could do a couple things the apple watch could (text or work with the apple fitness tracking), I would 100% keep it. If i never had a apple watch and have always used Garmin or other smart watch this watch is an absolute beast. I was very impressed with the watch!

I moved to this watch from a Garmin Forerunner 955 Solar which I loved for the exercise/health tracking, sensors, and battery life *except* for the “sunlight-visible, transflective memory-in-pixel” screen which works great in bright sunlight and not so much everywhere else.

This watch brings forward everything you like about the functionality of the 955 and add replaces the funky “MIP” screen with AMOLED while still having such a great battery life that it puts to shame the Apple Watch and WearOS watches.

The only thing I wish Garmin would add to their watches is a utility to bring the settings forward from an older watch in a series (“Forerunner” or “Fenix”) to a newer watch in that same series. I’ve suggested this to them.

Altogether I am completely happy with this watch but expect to spend about a week fine tuning the display settings to get that longer battery life. I started with Always On and almost immediately moved away from that.

UPDATE (7/6): I received the watch on June 26th and immediately topped off the battery (it arrived with the battery in the mid-90’s). It’s July 6th (10 days later) and the battery is at 44% with an estimated duration of another 10 days. That’s 21 days of battery life. I’m very satisfied with that. This is why I’m never, ever tempted to order a WearOS, Samsung, or Apple watch.

BTW, like all Garmin watches, it works great with the (Android) Garmin Connect app and gives you access to more data analysis in the app than on the watch.

I am an avid runner and have always loved my Garmins. I had the Garmin Forerunner 745 for a while and had been looking to upgrade for a while, but was never satisfied with the upgrade. Until the Forerunner 965. It has all the features that I want as a runner, swimmer, hiker. The display is indeed amazing. I love the map feature as well which is a real upgrade from the 745. The battery life is incredible. I run 4-5 times per week for at least 45 minutes and swim once per week and the battery last almost 2 weeks. The only problem with that is that I can never remember where I left the charger cable 😉

I have the FR945 and this FR965
is better in every way. The most obvious is the screen. It is OLED, full color, bright, and responds to touch. Unlike the 945. But also:
The App is improved.
The accuracy of many recorded parameters is improved. Sleep is one example (it is better at detecting wake and sleep and types of sleep and it can record naps. And it gives a “morning report” of all sleep and other health paameters.
It charges very fast.
The screen is highly customizable.
The list of improvements goes on and on, even beyond what they advertise.

For a 600 $ watch it does not include a charger.
It has a C cable to the plug in the back of the watch. No plug to plug into outlet or into a usb device to chage.
They told me thats extra if i want that.

Unbelievable.

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.

If you’re going to buy a Garmin, spend the extra money for the FR965. This thing is a beast. The battery lasts forever. Like literally a month. It seems to be pretty accurate outdoors. The treadmill stuff takes some pretty significant calibration but I don’t mind that. It’s durable. I scratch watches up regularly and I’ve had this watch for nearly 6 months and the screen is still flawwless and I haven’t babied it at all.

My Garmin 965 arrived in a dented box which had clearly been opened and returned before I received it. The watch was missing the charging port cover which prevents salt water and sweat from the device. The box did not have the clear tape factory seal that Garmin told me should have been on the outer box. It had clearly been returned by someone else. I returned it the day after opening the package. I’ll buy it locally, tomorrow.
I’ve had great success with both the Garmin 910XT and 935, so I won’t be changing brands, just getting what I paid for.

I received my watch for Christmas and loved the functionality- no flaws there. Great for the triathlon training I’ve been doing. Today, though, I got home from the pool and noticed a huge crack in the display. Not a scratch- a crack. The watch has never been dropped, impacted, or misused. Garmin refuses to acknowledge it could be a manufacturing flaw, which is odd because I can think of no other explanation- these watches are put through the ringer by athletes doing far more intense activities than me, and this happened without me even noticing? If it’s not a manufacturing flaw/anomaly, I’m not interested in replacing it. Even if I did, they want $160 to do that (since it’s not covered under warranty) and for that much I’ll buy some new workout data apps for the Apple watch that I cheated on this with.

Update: After a few weeks with this watch I am disappointed in the Gorilla Glass. I don’t wear this watch full time. I don’t wear it to work, so it’s mostly nights and weekends when it’s on my wrist. In that short span of time, I managed to get two pretty significant scratches on the screen. It boggles my mind that my FR235 has endured years of abuse and the screen is still perfect. This watch costs 3x as much and is seemingly as delicate as the newly fallen snow. Make sure you order screen protectors because Gorilla Glass will still scratch, seemingly with some ease…

Flagship watch, $600 price tag and you can’t include a simple wall charger? I don’t think it’s our of line to say that the vast majority of consumer usb wall chargers are not female usb c. It’s almost like they’re trying to be like apple? Watch seems great it of the box, but this charging cord thing bugs me…. luckily, I had a usb c to usb adapter to charge it, otherwise, I’d be spending more money.