How Garmin Forerunner 965 stacks up against Apple Watch Ultra
Garmin is one of the premium smartwatch brand names in the Indian market. Its Forerunner series is known for its cutting-edge selection of GPS-based features, fitness-focused abilities, and reliability. The company has just announced the Forerunner 965, which aims to take on the likes of the Apple Watch Ultra in the high-end smartwatch segment. Here we compare both to find out which is better.
Apple Watch Ultra has sapphire glass protection
The Garmin Forerunner 965 sports a circular-shaped dial, titanium bezel, five push buttons, a 5ATM water resistance rating, and Corning's Gorilla Glass 3 DX protection. Apple's Watch Ultra has a squircle dial housed in a titanium case, a large crown, a customizable action button, 10ATM waterproof rating, and sapphire crystal glass. It is a tad heavier (61.3g v/s 53g) than Garmin's offering.
Apple Watch Ultra has 2,000-nits of high-brightness OLED panel
The Garmin Forerunner 965 has a 1.4-inch (454x454 pixels) circular AMOLED touch display. In comparison, the Apple Watch Ultra sports a 1.92-inch (410x502 pixels) Retina LTPO OLED touchscreen, with 2,000-nits of peak brightness. Both watches support always-on functionality as well. However, in terms of dimensions, the Garmin Forerunner 965 is more compact (47.2x47.2x13.2mm v/s 49x44x14.4mm) than the Apple Watch Ultra.
The wearables provide a bevy of health-monitoring features
The Garmin Forerunner 965 has multiple clock-based, running, and daily smart features. It is equipped with a range of sensors. The onboard health monitoring toolkit measures heart rate, blood oxygen, sleep, stress, hydration, women's health, and more. The Apple Watch Ultra offers heart rate and irregular rhythm notifications, sleep records, menstrual cycle tracking with ovulation estimates, SpO2 measurement, temperature detection, ECG, and more.
The watches are capable of sending alerts (with your location)
The Forerunner 965 comes with multiple safety features including Live Tracking, spectator messaging, and incident detection alert, which sends a message along with your live location. The Watch Ultra offers Emergency SOS, International emergency calling, Crash Detection, Fall Detection, Noise monitoring, and Backtrack that helps retrace your steps if you get lost. It packs an 88dB emergency siren which is audible up to 180m.
They support GPS and cellular connections
The Garmin Forerunner 965 and Apple Watch Ultra support Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, multi-band GPS, and LTE connectivity. Both wearables house 32GB of onboard storage for media, apps, and other data records. The former delivers up to 34 hours of battery life (in activity mode usage), whereas the flagship Apple smartwatch provides up to 36 hours of backup.
What is the cost of these smartwatches?
The Garmin Forerunner 965 is priced at Rs. 67,490 in India. It comes in Black, Amp Yellow, and Whitestone colorways. The Apple Watch Ultra costs Rs. 89,900. You can choose from multiple strap options as well.
Garmin Forerunner 965 v/s Apple Watch Ultra: Which is better?
Garmin offers a range of sports and fitness tracking features on its smartwatches. Though Garmin's app store is far more limited than Apple, the brand stands out because of its extensive expertise in GPS-based services. If you want a heavy-duty fitness-focused wearable, which offers extremely precise metrics along with multiple smartwatch features, consider the less expensive Garmin Forerunner 965 over Apple Watch Ultra.
