Garmin Fenix 6X Pro Solar Smartwatch Review – sport watch and offline satnav in one

The plastic case is covered by a metal plate at the back and framed by a DLC-coated titan bezel (DLC = diamond-like carbon). The bezel is fixed and irrelevant for operation. The solar-charging lens is installed between the display and a layer of DX-treated Corning Gorilla Glass.

The Fenix 6X Pro Solar comes with 32 GB of storage for additional apps and widgets that can be downloaded from Garmin’s IQ store, along with maps, and music. Given that the speaker can only be used for system sounds, such as the alarm clock or the metronome, listening to music will require you to connect Bluetooth headphones. Sound effects are optionally supported by vibration if so desired. Some Fenix models come with just 64 MB of storage space, which can be filled with apps, maps and golf course data - a special feature of Garmin watches - but no music.

Incoming phone calls can be rejected with a message or answered. The latter will require you to grab your smartphone, though.

At the Fenix 6X Pro’s core are its many sensors, among others a pulse oximeter for measuring blood oxygen saturation. It also supports three different location services: GPS, GLONASS, and Galileo.

In addition to technical documentation, a short 50 cm / 19.7 inch cable for charging and data transfers is included as well.

Garmin’s Fenix series lacks a touchscreen and features a transflective (semi-transparent) memory-in-pixel display instead, which turned out to be significantly dimmer than the OLED displays on other smartwatches. On the plus side it is very energy efficient and can be easily read in both direct sunlight as well as low-light situations thanks to a backlight.

The Fenix also lacks an ambient light sensor. However, this turned out to be less of a problem than expected. While LCD and OLED displays will require major brightness adjustments when going outside/inside, an MIP display only requires a backlight in very dark situations and will thus work great with a single preconfigured brightness level.

The Fenix 6 is operated via six sturdy buttons, which can be beneficial while working out. Start, stop, long-press for launching the music player, another press to skip the current song in case your headset controls are unavailable. All that can be easily done without looking at the watch, and even with the watch hidden underneath a sleeve or gloves.

However, only a few controls are available at the touch of two or three buttons. Others, such as adjusting display brightness, require a staggering 31 clicks in addition to the adjustment itself, plus a final long press in order to return. Once you get familiar with the menu you will still require at least 14 clicks of three different buttons.

Up to seven settings can be accessed via hotkeys such as a long press of a button or a combination of buttons. Among others these include brightness, which by the way did not show up in the control’s menu during the entire review period. As plentiful as the Fenix 6’s features are, they are complicated to use. Nevertheless, we highly recommend going down the 27-clicks-long road to assign your personal hotkeys.

Garmin’s smartphone app Garmin Connect offers different interfaces and features depending on the connected smartwatch. For example, when connecting to the Fenix 6X Pro Touch it displays options for playing golf, the pulse oximeter, or performance-based anaerobe thresholds that are unavailable with many other Garmin wearables.

The optional Garmin Connect IQ app is required for downloading additional watch faces, apps, and widgets. Garmin was one of the first manufacturers to not only support Deezer and Spotify but also Amazon Music. All three require an account and can be used offline after music has been downloaded over a Wi-Fi connection.

Uploading your own music onto your watch requires the Garmin Express application that is available for Windows and macOS.

Nevertheless, this feature was one of our favorite ones because you can also use the smartphone app to plan your route. While it turned out to be somewhat finicky and required restarting from scratch because adjusting or deleting a waypoint simply failed to work it was much more comfortable nevertheless.

Once set up, you can develop a pacing strategy called PacePro which includes altitude. Using the app, you can then send both your route and your PacePro pacing strategy to the watch and include the PacePro information in the highly customizable training display watch face. In addition to lag or lead for your route it will also show current as well as suggested pace for your current section.

In our test, we were not particularly satisfied with the splits determined based on altitude differences. However, the planning tool itself and the simplicity of use were excellent. It can be fine-tuned even further than we were able to during our test period.

Exercise statistics are saved onto the watch itself, and as expected of Garmin smartwatches they are quite extensive: