Garmin Instinct Crossover watch specifications
While the Garmin Instinct Crossover offers a good basic sports tracking experience, it does not offer the perfect pairing of smartwatch and analog design which is rare from Garmin.
Key features
Analog and digital display
Bull pulse measurements
Step-by-step navigation and navigation
Introduction
Garmin Instinct Crossover is a smartwatch that combines analog and digital watch movements to give you the best of both worlds of timekeeping.
After later landing from the Garmin Instinct 2 in 2022, Crossover essentially offers the same distinctive and durable design and feature set that makes it an alternative to a more expensive outdoor watch than the higher-priced Garmin Fenix 7 range.
This means you get something that can track running, riding, swimming, and hiking and also helps you better navigate your way to the next big adventure place. It also packs smart things like payments and access to Garmin's Connect IQ store to enhance its capabilities as an outdoor tracking companion. All this while saving battery life for weeks and possibly months, depending on how you use it.
It comes at a higher price than Instinct 2, does Crossover do enough to justify paying more and does analog gambling pay off? Here's our point.
Design & Display
Comes in solar and non-solar models
Analog clock
45mm option case only
Water resistant up to 100 meters
The Instinct Crossover is basically the same watch as the 45mm version of the Instinct 2, although it comes in thickness and heavier in comparison. You still get the same frame polymer case that holds some extra weight to contribute to overall weight gain. It's still not a heavy watch in any way out of the imagination and it's comfortable to wear during workouts and it's certainly lighter than wearing it to sleep than something like the Fenix 7.
There is no touchscreen, so it goes to a set of five physical buttons scattered around the case that surrounds a 0.9-inch ×-0.9-inch reflective screen with a set of illuminated analog hands designed to dynamically move when you need to clearly read something on the screen. That's at least the theory, but in practice, analog hands seem like an inappropriate addition here. Yes, they get out of the way when you need to better read what's on the screen, but that spoils the experience of navigating and using watch faces when notifications are untidy above and below those hands.
Garmin uses a standard silicone strap with a diameter of 22mm, which is of the QuickFit type and this means that it is easier to remove and swap it into a new belt. The attached belt is quite good from the point of view of comfort and safety. As a package, it matches the Instinct 2 waterproof rating, giving you something safe to submin in water up to 100 meters deep.
Like the Instinct 2, Garmin offers a crossover in both solar and non-solar options, a swap in Power Glass for the chemically enhanced display in the regular version, which always raises the price as well as the battery life you expect.
Software features and smartwatches
Works with Android and iOS
Garmin Pay
Connect access to IQ
No music player
Instinct Crossover gets the same level as smartwatch style features as Instinct 2, which means you don't get everything Garmin has to offer in this section, but there's enough to make it a pretty dependable watch when you're not following workouts.
It's compatible with Android phones and iPhones, and the companion app experience for Garmin Connect is very consistent across both platforms. On the watch, you can view notifications, access music playback controls, take advantage of Garmin Pay if you have a compatible bank, and you can download apps, data fields, widgets, and watch faces from the Connect IQ store.
The big difference here is the hands and how they should get out of the way to allow you to view notifications or use these music controls. The hands will move to 3 and 9 to allow you to see information above and below the center, but if you want to swap watch faces, you can never appreciate the good faces because those hands sit above them.
There aren't actually any analog-specific features here other than the promise of fine timekeeping, but that's not something that gets much excitement.
Fitness Tracking
Tracking and navigation routing
Pulse OX and Heart Rate Monitor
Daily workout suggestions and recovery counselor
Crossover is Instinct 2 at heart, so you can expect pretty much the same features that will allow you to use it to track your outdoor adventures, indoor workout time, and keep you safer when you're off the adventure. It works as a fitness and sleep tracker and you can see insights like fitness age and VO2 Max ratings to get a better sense of your current fitness level.
If you're obsessing over Crossover, you'll probably get it for its outdoor tracking potential and the good news is that it's very powerful on this front. In terms of accuracy, the GPS connection is well installed against another Garmin watch in the more accurate multi-band GPS mode that Crossover lacks. However, heart rate performance was not clean, and even in workouts at a steady pace, it scored much higher maximum readings compared to the chest belt for heart rate monitoring. The main takeaway here will be grabbing the chest belt and pairing it if you care about heart rate data.
While you don't get the full map support you get on the more expensive Garmin watches, you get the ability to upload tracks to Crossover and have point-to-point navigation and simpler navigation similar to a navigation path along with useful modes like Back to Starts. This is part of the crossover experience where those hands feel more like a hindrance than an aid, even if they're taken out of the way.
Elsewhere, features like pool swimming tracking, indoor workout tracking like rowing were generally very good and many of the features you find in other Garmins actually work in a similar way. The suggested daily workouts need some time to align with your workout history, and continuous heart rate monitoring is fairly reliable overall while sleep monitoring has good days and days in terms of determining sleep duration. The built-in Pulse Ox sensor provides some additional sleep health data but at the expense of battery life as in other Garmin watches you pack.
You basically get the same watch as the Instinct 2 with the addition of those analog hands that feel more annoying than actually useful.
Battery life
Up to 28 days battery life
GPS battery life up to 25 hours
Up to 40 days in Explore Mode
In typical Garmin's style, the Instinct Crossover is a watch capable of running for weeks rather than days, and it all depends on how and what it uses on a regular basis.
In smartwatch mode in general, you get the same 28 days as Instinct 2. It is able to last up to 71 days in basic battery saving mode and you can get a GPS battery life of between 25 and 111 hours depending on the sampling rate of that GPS.
In general, with regular use of GPS tracking, notifications enabled and features such as continuous heart rate monitoring and sleep tracking during use, Instinct Crossover tends to last for a strong week with the ability to last longer. We've seen a daily reduction overall of almost 5%, and an hour of GPS usage has seen the battery drop to around 7-8%.
The crossover comes in a solar version of course and that will give you a big battery boost, if you use it in the kind of conditions that can enable that boost. So the battery life of a smartwatch of 28 days can become 70 days and the best GPS resolution mode will range from 25 to 31 hours. It all depends entirely on keeping that watch exposed to sufficient outside sunlight, which is not the easiest thing you can do in cold and cloudy United Kingdom.
