I test a lot of smartwatches and sports watches and if there’s one thing I’d improve about almost all of them, it’s the battery life, because who would ever say no to more battery life?
However, one watch that it’s hard to fault on this front is the Garmin Instinct 3, and in particular the 50mm solar model of the watch, which can last indefinitely on a charge in sunny conditions.
That exact model is currently reduced ahead of the Prime Day sales, with the Garmin Instinct 3 Solar 50mm dropping to $399 on Amazon, just a couple of dollars more than the lowest price I’ve ever seen it.
I tested the 45mm AMOLED version of the Garmin Instinct 3 myself, and even that impressed me with its battery life, lasting a week on a charge when running every day.
The 50mm Instinct 3 Solar model in the sale has a memory-in-pixel display, which boosts battery life, and also has solar panels on the watch face.
Spend three hours a day outside in sunny conditions and these panels will harvest enough energy from the sun for the Instinct 3 Solar to last indefinitely in watch mode.
Even if you fire up the GPS regularly to track outdoor activities, you’ll still get incredible battery life from the Instinct 3 Solar, which offers up to 260 hours of GPS tracking in sunny conditions.
The Instinct 3 Solar doesn’t just offer battery life either. It’s a rugged sports watch tested to military standards that tracks pretty much any kind of activity in great detail, and provides useful training analysis to help you get fitter.
It’s a fairly new watch too, having launched at the start of 2025, so it’s not one I necessarily expected to be in sales already. If you need a watch that can handle some truly epic adventures, this deal is well worth considering.