- The Garmin Instinct 3 Tactical Edition has just landed
- It starts at $499.99 / £429.99 / around AU$895
- It boasts a metal-reinforced bezel, ballistic solutions and the usual Tactical Edition features
Whether you’re in the military, you lead tough wilderness expeditions, or you just love tacti-cool gear with features named things like ‘Stealth Mode’, you’re in luck: Garmin has unveiled the Garmin Instinct 3 Tactical Edition.
Arriving in two sizes and two screen options, the 45mm solar charging model with a low-power MIP display starts at $499.99 / £429.99 / around AU$895 (Australian pricing TBC). The 50mm model with a brighter AMOLED display costs $599.99 / £499.99 / around AU$1,040.
Design-wise, there’s a metal-reinforced bezel to add additional durability compared with the slender metal accents of the baseline Garmin Instinct 3. The watches come in a cool black colorway without the neon options of the standard watch, and they get the new rucking activity, although this is being added to Garmin’s latest crop of watches anyway via a software update.
The other new features are very James Bond: Night Vision Goggle (NVG) mode dims the display to levels “functional to the primary user” but “nearly invisible” to others. For Yours Eyes Only, you might say. A Kill Switch allows the user to perform a factory reset on the watch quickly, wiping GPS and health data.
An Applied Ballistics solver, which requires an additional fee to unlock, tells you elevation and wind information and how it might affect your gun and bullet profiles. A bit like one of the best golf watches, but for shooting instead of trying to chip your way out of a sandtrap.
Otherwise, it’s got all the features of the original Garmin Instinct 3, such as heart rate monitoring, sophisticated GPS information, loads of unique workout profiles, an LED torch, basic directional software, TracBack to prevent users getting lost, and the Race Calendar feature to tailor training plans to your next endurance event.
Should you get the Tactical Edition?
The Garmin Instinct 3 Tactical Edition is, for the most part, aimed at people who can make use out of the extra features. Ballistics information might be useful for hunters, for example, while the Kill Switch is good for the very privacy-conscious or those in the military.
However, the vast majority of people could save a little cash and get the standard Instinct 3 and get the same performance, especially now rucking has been added to more of the best Garmin watches.
If you think you can get some use out of the Night Vision Goggle mode, terrific – but this is a specialty model for specialty users.
