Whether you’re a sea pirate, a modern Viking, or just a dude who spends most of your days in the water, it’s probably a good idea to have gadgets that can actually complement your favorite activities. When it comes to multi-sport watches, we can’t imagine anything more suited than the Garmin Quatix 5.
Built for life in the water, the multi-sport smartwatch won’t just track performance data for watersports, the darn thing will help you navigate the seas, assist you during sail races, and even control your boat while you party on the deck. Granted, it won’t be able to do that all on its own, but when paired with a variety of accessories from Garmin’s lineup, it’s the veritable do-it-all wrist gadget to really turn the water into your veritable playground.
So what exactly can the Garmin Quatix 5 do?
1. Paddle sports
If you enjoy paddleboarding, kayaking, and canoeing, this sports watch comes with built-in profiles for tracking every single stroke and distance between strokes for each individual sport, as well as the abilit[y to create markers for every lap. We’re guessing you can use those same profiles for similar paddle-based watersports, too. That’s, of course, on top of more traditional stats tracking, including calories burned, intensity minutes, and more. If you’re water-skiing, you can also use it as a wrist-based speedometer, so you can see exactly how fast you’re going at any single time. That speedometer function will likely be useful for a lot of activities, provided you like getting roughly accurate speed readings.
2. Swimming
If you prefer challenging yourself without a paddle in the water, the Quatix 5 can track your swimming distance, pace, stroke count, stroke rate, stroke length, calories burned, and heart rate whether in the pool or in open waters. It can evaluate your efficiency in the water, too, all while coming with preloaded swim workouts for those days you need a little structure to your training.
3. Everyday Activity Tracking
With the integrated heart rate monitor and standard activity tracking sensors, Garmin’s water-focused sports watch can also play nice with landlubbers, as it can also track running and cycling metrics, complete with time and distance alerts, training programs, and even race prediction tools. If you’re familiar with Garmin, then you know they provide access to some of the more advanced monitoring stats (like vertical oscillation and ground contact) in the industry and that continues with this watch, although you will need to pair additional Garmin devices to take advantage of some of them.
4. Mountain Sports
For mountain sports enthusiasts, the watch comes with preloaded profiles for hiking, climbing, skiing, snowboarding, and tactical exploration, with multiple navigation functions (creating routes, showing you the way back to the starting point, marking with bread crumbs, and more) to make sure you can safely make your way around the trails. With GPS/GLONASS, a barometric altimeter, and a thermometer, this thing should serve as a seriously useful information hub for all your mountain adventures.
5. Boating
From providing tidal data for any place in the world to predicting weather changes based on air pressure trends, the Quatix 5 is already a handy tool for seafarers. What helps it truly stand out, though, are the built-in profiles for boating, sailing, and fishing, which lets you map out your full run in the water. There are also racing assistance modes to help you more efficiently navigate the oceans. When paired with a compatible Garmin Marine equipment (e.g. chartplotters), it can receive real-time boat data and even control the boat’s autopilot systems without being at the helm. For boats that use StereoActive and similar Ant-enable sound systems, the watch can also control the onboard entertainment, so you can quickly switch playlists in the middle of a yacht party. Other boating features include an anchor alarm (warns users of drift) and an anchor rope calculator. Seriously, this thing is a veritable James Bond toy.
6. Fishing
Unfortunately, fishing isn’t a big feature for the watch. While it does come with a hunting/fishing calendar, a competition timer, and a manual entry fish catch log, the offerings are quite barebones on that end. The rest of its water-based features, however, such as tidal data, should also figure helpful to folks who spend their days angling in lakes and oceans anywhere in the planet.
7. Golf
While it won’t have extensive map data like dedicated golf sports watches, the Quatix 5 does lend itself useful in the fairway, too, with its ability to measure shot distance and yardage, as well as record game stats. It’s even compatible with Garmin’s TruSwing golf club sensor if you like to use that to record your swing mechanics during play.
8. Smartwatch
More than a GPS sportswatch, the Quatix 5 is actually a pretty functional smartwatch. No, it doesn’t have the depth nor breadth of features of Apple Watch and Android Wear devices, but it does have some nifty tricks most people should find useful. When paired with a phone, for instance, it can receive notifications and messages, as well as share your live data to your social network followers in real time. They also have a calendar, weather updates, music controls, and downloadable content (watch faces, apps, and widgets) via Connect IQ. These aren’t throwaway apps, either, as they have offerings from Uber (you can track your ride from your watch), Samsung (you can control your connected home devices), and more, along with games and plenty of activity-tracking apps.
Like we said, it does a lot.
As for the watch itself, it sports marine-grade construction that’s water-resistant to 100 meters, with a fiber-reinforced polymer case and a stainless steel bezel that should see it survive whatever elements the water can throw its way. That pairing, by the way, houses a 1.2-inch round MIP display with a 240 x 240 resolution, which boasts perfect visibility in the brightest daylight conditions, along with an integrated battery that lasts just 24 hours with the GPS on but goes up to two weeks without it.
The Garmin Quatix 5 is available in standard and Sapphire versions. The former combines a glass crystal and a silicone band for a sporty look, while the latter takes on a more elegant trim by pairing a sapphire crystal with a stainless steel band. Price is $599.99 for the standard and $849.99 for the Sapphire.