i personally don't find smart watches interesting or really that useful (to me). I tried out a samsung watch for a while and had fun making my own watch faces but that's about it. Charging it every few days was a pain. I ended up going back to my trusty Casio F-91W. Super thin, 8-10 year battery life, alarm and stopwatch built in. Not much more I need from a device on my wrist.
Um... you realize that Garmin has an expedition mode where your battery can go for a month?? I was just in Peru climbing mountains and exploring jungles and I did two weeks without my charge cable.
Hell, the instinct solar never needs to be plugged in.
The Fenix 7 solar can pull like an additional 25-30% of it's daily energy from the sun and that's on top of a 2 week battery life for normal operations.
The Xiaomi Mi Band 8 and Huawei Band 8 are rather nice watches that do essentially the same thing as the very expensive smart watches for about $40 and they last about 2 weeks
Didn't mean to get you so riled up, was just expressing an opinion. If you like your Garmin that's awesome I'm happy for you! Most of the cool features you talk about i can get from my smart phone so I don't need that in a watch, but it sounds like we live very different lives and what I need in a wrist watch is not what you need
I have the forerunner 965 and it's so much better than I thought it would be. Unless Garmin make some horrendous decisions I'll stick with their watches in future.