One of the most popular gadget categories in the Black Friday deals, smartwatches and fitness watches – and Garmin in particular – usually offer some excellent discounts. Garmin offers a smorgasbord of different watches, but often they’re sporting truly baffling naming conventions that first-timers struggle to grapple with. What’s the difference, for example, between a Vivoactive and a Venu watch? A Forerunner 265 or a 955? An Instinct Solar and an Instinct Crossover?
With complicated naming conventions and numbering systems, it can be easy to get lost in the weeds, give up, and opt for one of the Black Friday Fitbit deals or Black Friday Apple Watch deals instead. But don’t be put off: the best Garmin watches are fantastic options for lovers of all things fitness, especially runners, cyclists, swimmers, hikers and other adventurers.
With long battery lives, excellent GPS performance and an array of fitness and recovery metrics, they’re generally a great choice – especially if you can bag yourself a discount in the Black Friday Garmin deals. But as mentioned above, it can be complicated for beginners to wade through all the Garmin watches and understand how they differ, and by extension understand whether a discount qualifies as a “good deal”.
Fortunately, we’re here to help. Below I’ve picked out three different watches at three different price points, along with a good idea of how they’ll be discounted over the Black Friday period.
1. Garmin Forerunner 55
The most recent cheap Garmin Forerunner model, the 165, came out this year and offers plenty for your money at $299.99 / £249.99 / AU$489.95. However, as it’s quite recent, we don’t believe we’ll see many discounts on this model just yet.
The Garmin Forerunner 55, on the other hand, frequently sees discounts due to its age: at full price it’s $199.99 / £179.99 / AU$329, but we believe it’s set to see a lowest-ever price. Even though it’s missing some of the advanced training tools and features the more expensive watches get, it’s perfect for beginner-to-intermediate level runners, cyclists and swimmers.
If you know someone training for their first 10K or half-marathon race, for example, this watch is the perfect get. A good Black Friday deal this watch would be around $129.99 / £120 / AU$250, and any lower would be a great buy. You’re essentially looking around the price of a Fitbit band.
Read our full Garmin Forerunner 55 review
2. Garmin Instinct 2
Another excellently-priced watch, the Garmin Instinct 2 a step up from the Forerunner 55 and is very well geared towards those who enjoy the great outdoors. It’s bigger, chunkier and has incredible GPS credentials, not to mention a longer battery life. It’s a terrific sports watch tailor-made for a life spent running, hiking, biking, surfing… any outdoor activity you care to mention. We gave it five stars in our official review, and even though it’s a two-year-old watch, our opinions have not changed.
When it first launched in February 2022, you could get the Garmin Instinct 2 for around $349.99 / £299.99 / AU$549, with a higher price for the Solar and Surf editions with specialized battery-lengthening and tide-prediction features, respectively.
However, it’s very frequently on offer, so much so that if you can find it for $200 / £180 / AU$300, you’ll have bagged yourself a great deal. Those are its lowest-ever official prices, so you can be confident that picking it up at that price means you’ll have got yourself an indispensable training tool at an excellent bargain price.
Read our full Garmin Instinct 2 review
3. Garmin Fenix 7
The Garmin Fenix range is the crème-de-la-crème of its adventure watches. They’re big, powerful watches with full-color map displays, advanced wellness tools like Garmin’s Training Readiness and Endurance scores, and the ability to follow courses (which you can create in-app) on the watch’s little screen, so you never get lost. Neat!
Now the Garmin Fenix 8 is out, the Fenix 7 is likely to receive very heavy discounts, even more so than it already has. You’ll see a lot of variation, because the Fenix 7 comes in three sizes: the smallest being labelled the Fenix 7S, and the largest being dubbed the Fenix 7X. The larger the watch, the more expensive it is.
At the time of launch the Fenix 7 started around $699.99 / £599.99 / AU$1,049. Based on the deals we’ve seen before, you can expect a good deal at around the $429.99 / £389.99 / AU$649 marks. At those prices or lower, you’ve got yourself an excellent watch deal.
Read our full Garmin Fenix 7 review
