Garmin reveals high-end smartwatches for explorers with deep pockets

Garmin has just announced a pair of new smartwatches intended for explorers and extreme fitness enthusiasts. However, these are high-end gadgets with high-end specs and, accordingly, high-end price tags.

First up, the Epix Pro series. The main draw of these watches is that they ship with a bright and crisp AMOLED display, a design choice Garmin has begun to fully embrace, providing a vivid picture without drawing too much battery life. There’s also a built-in flashlight with multiple intensities and a strobe mode, a red-only visual display option for darker conditions and plenty of advanced fitness features.

To that end, the Epix Pro series includes “dozens” of new, preloaded activities like soccer, basketball, horseback riding, racquet sports and plenty more. The fitness trackers now offer endurance scores and hill scores for advanced metrics. Runners and walkers will also receive notifications regarding points of interest along the route. There are new weather map overlays to view local environmental conditions and upgraded shading for making it easier to understand elevations within topographic maps. The Epix Pro line is available now and launches in three sizes (42mm, 47mm and 51mm.) Prices start at $900.

The Fenix 7 Pro series is for serious explorers, with solar charging, a powerful LED flashlight, mapping upgrades and a red safety light, all of which are intended to provide greater awareness when training in the dark, like a ninja. The heart rate sensor also got a significant boost, with new optical sensors and sport-specific algorithms that track your pulse rate across a diverse array of activities. There's no ECG app, however, so you'll have to look elsewhere if that's a primary concern.

The new endurance score feature measures how easy it is to engage in prolonged physical activities, combining V02 sensors, hill scores and previous training data. Just like the Epix Pro, the Fenix 7 boasts an updated mapping system with weather overlays, points of interest and improvements to topographic maps. There’s also new preloaded activities like whitewater rafting and motocross. The Fenix 7 Pro is available in multiple sizes and designs, starting at $800.

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