Polar Grit X

Price: £379
Weight: 64g
Best for: Trail running, hiking
Key attributes: Lightweight, komoot integration, excellent for trail running

Well-suited to hikers and trail runners, the Polar Grit X is, in our opinion, a great looking GPS watch. The screen has lovely clarity and it’s actually brighter and clearer than previous Polar models. You navigate using the touch screen and buttons on the sides. At 64g it’s pretty lightweight and it’s passed a bunch of military-level grades so you can be sure the outdoor durability is there. Its waterproof to 100m too.

Related: Best Trail Running Shoes

With 130 different sports modes, including activities like open water swimming, road cycling and mountain biking, this watch has a bunch of very useful features that help you plan, perform and analyse your exercise. You get altitude measurements, barometric readings, weather forecasts and of course basic stats such as distance and pace. The hill splits feature is nifty too, automatically breaking down your performance going uphill and downhill. The watch also advises you on what you should be drinking and eating after each exercise, like your own personal nutritionist. Integration with navigation app komoot also enables you to follow a route via breadcrumb trails.

Read our full Polar Grit X review

HONOR MagicWatch 2

Price: £100
Weight: 41g (excluding strap)
Best for: General fitness, outdoor activities
Key attributes: Superb price, fitness tracking

This is one of those watches that will help you with your daily life; whether that’s keeping on top of your diary, listening to music or, well, being on time for things, but it also has the added bonus of being an aid for your outdoor adventures and training as well. Whether you’re into hiking, trail running, snow sports or even open water swimming, there are a bunch of features here that will aid, record and ultimately improve your performance.

Fully waterproof with a 1.39-inch screen with crystal clear clarity, this superbly-priced watch has 15 different fitness modes covering outdoor activities like running, walking, hiking, climbing, trail running, cycling, open water swimming and then indoor, gym training stuff as well. With each one you get a bunch of useful data feedback along with professional advice – even with optional real-time voiceover guidance. When hiking, for example, you get accurate readings of your heart rate, pace, footsteps, altitude and the distance covered, as well as barometric readings so you can prepare for any bad weather on the way. If you lose your bearings, just flip on the compass mode to get back on track. All of this for £120 is a remarkable bargain.

Read our full Honor Magic Watch 2 review

COROS Vertix Icebreaker

Price: £600
Weight: 76g
Best for: Multi-sports, skiing
Key attributes: Powerful battery, excellent skiing mode, rugged design

Coros’ high-grade hardware, loaded with innovative tech, is designed with outdoor enthusiasts, mountain lovers, and all-round active lifestyle folk in mind. This watch is all about “attitude” and “altitude”, as the marketing spin suggests, and it certainly hits the spot for mountaineers who like to climb up high bits of rock. You get a built-in barometer, altimeter, compass and GPS / GLONASS satellite connection feature, as well as 24/7 blood oxygen monitoring with altitude acclimatisation assistance, and a 150-meter waterproof rating. Battery life is impressive: 45 days of regular use without using all the bells and whistles, 60 hours in full GPS mode, and 150 hours in UltraMax GPS mode. To follow a route you’ll need to download it as a GPX file onto your smartphone off another app like Strava or komoot. You then need to open it with the Coros app on your phone and you can then view it on the watch as a breadcumb trail once you’ve paired your two devices together. In terms of design, there’s a titanium bezel and cover, with high-grade fibre watch body, and sapphire glass with diamond-like coating –  which all ensures the Vertix Icebreaker is more than tough enough to handle itself in the world’s most extreme places.

Read our full Coros Vertix Icebreaker review

COROS APEX Pro

Price: £450
Weight: 59g
Best for: Training, racing and conquering multi-day challenges
Key attributes: Excellent battery life, vital health statistics including 24/7 blood oxygen monitoring, tough, lightweight and waterproof. 

The COROS APEX Pro is an outdoors watch built for adventure with some serious training skills to boot. With a set of sensors that matches Garmin’s Fenix range, it’s a tool built to help anyone who spends time working up a sweat in the mountains – whether that’s ski touring or trail running – prepare for, and conquer challenges. It packs a standout battery life with 40-hours of full GPS, extendable up to 100 hours in low-GPS mode. There’s built-in optical heart rate and 24/7 blood oxygen monitoring with Altitude Mode providing hourly acclimatisation evaluations. 

At 59g, it’s surprisingly lightweight on the wrist thanks to a lightweight, titanium alloy bezel that wraps a large, bright and crisp sapphire glass reinforced LCD touchscreen display. You also get 100 metres of waterproof protection and a huge selection of activity-specific workouts created by athletes and coaches as part of a library that lets you create more event or challenge-specific training sessions. It also comes in white, silver and black. 

Chosen for our Outdoor 100 2021/22. Read our full Coros Apex Pro review.

Suunto 9 Baro

Price: £540
Weight: 81g
Best for: Multi-sports, skiing
Key attributes: Powerful battery, heart rate monitor, 80 pre-installed sports modes

The Suunto 9 Baro represents the new flagship model in their range of sports watches. This smartwatch is packed full of features that make tracking and logging your days out while hiking, running, climbing, or whatever else you like to get up to in the outdoors, not only extremely easy, but also enjoyable. The battery life is certainly Suunto’s main selling feature for the 9. A single charge can last up to 120 hours in the ‘Ultra’ mode which keeps up GPS tracking but deactivates wrist heart rate tracking. In ‘Endurance’ mode, battery life is 40 hours with full wrist heart rate and GPS tracking. With 80 pre-installed sport modes that are able to track over 50 different values such as heart-rate, GPS location and many others, there doesn’t seem to be an outdoor sport that this watch wouldn’t be able to track and give you essential feedback on. Running watches don’t always offer to carry GPS tracking, whilst traditional hillwalking watches don’t house heart rate sensors. The Suunto 9 offers both in a pretty sleek form factor.

Read our full Suunto 9 Baro review

Casio Pro Trek WSD-F30

Price: £450
Weight: 83g
Best for: Hiking, trekking
Key attributes: Wear OS by Google integration, Viewranger maps and routes

Here’s a smartwatch that, as the name suggests, is designed for hikers. It helps trekkers to navigate through the countryside, understand the conditions they’re about to face and, well, to know the time (obviously). The key feature comes courtesy of Google’s Wear OS technology. With this watch you can download apps, and the Viewranger option enables you to view full Ordnance Survey map tiles – complete with contour lines and topographical features – on-the-go. Obviously it’s not as detailed as a navigation app on your phone, but the watch touchscreen does its job admirably. If Viewranger isn’t your thing, there’s also pre-loaded Google mapping as well as MapBox which presents OpenStreetMap in a way that is easy to interpret in terms of terrain variation. Aside from navigation, the watch is sturdy and robust with 50m waterproofing and three buttons that are glove-friendly. You also get a a compass, altimeter, air pressure reading, tide times and a screen that shows the sunrise and sunset times.

Read our full Casio Pro Trek WSD-F30 review

Honor Watch GS Pro

Price: £200
Weight: 46g (excluding strap)
Best for: Multi-sports, skiing
Key attributes: Powerful battery, excellent skiing mode, rugged design

THE GS Pro is a rugged, chunky smartwatch designed specifically for the intrepid outdoor adventurer. It’s an adventure watch and nothing else and that clarity of purpose is refreshing. For £200 you get a sharp AMOLED display, enhanced GPS capabilities including a ‘route back’ function with breadcrumb navigation, over 100 workout modes such as mountain climbing, hiking and skiing, and weather alerts. A headline stat is the 25-day battery life (up to 48 hours with GPS enabled) and for high-altitude mountaineers there’s in-built blood oxygen level monitoring. The skiing mode is particularly impressive too. It tracks slope gradient, altitude, average speed, biggest slope, average pace, altitude and so much more, giving skiers (or snowboarders) more info at their fingertips than ever before.

Read our full Honor Watch GS Pro review

Garmin Instinct Solar

Price: £320
Weight: 53g
Best for: Off-grid adventures, multi-day adventures
Key attributes: Solar charging, GPS tracking

In a new watch design from Garmin, the Instinct Solar is the first watch to be able to offer unlimited battery life when used in battery saver mode (providing you’re able to capture enough sun to provide charge, of course). You’ll also get some phenomenal battery life while using the full functionality of the watch. For instance, when used as a regular smartwatch, you’ll get up to 24 days, or 54 days with solar. With GPS tracking on, you’ll get up to 30 hours, or 38 hours with solar, and finally, in Expedition GPS tracking, it’ll see you through up to 28 days, or 68 days with solar. These times are all assuming all-day wear with 3 hours per day outside in 50,000 lux (bright) conditions.

The watch is equipped with a GPS device that makes use of GPS, GLONASS and Galileo system of satellites (standard from Garmin), meaning you’ll be able to track all of your activities including trail running, hiking, ski touring, among many others. On top of this, the Instinct Solar is also carrying a wrist-top heart rate monitor (chest heart rate sensor can also be purchased separately for accurate readings) and smartphone pairing, all tied together in a military standard casing that’ll withstand pressures equivalent to a depth of 100 metres.

Read the full Garmin Instinct Solar review

Elliot Brown Tyneham

Price: £845
Weight: 125g
Best for: Simplicity and all-day
Key attributes: Unbeatable toughness, stylish simplicity, impressive water resistance, pressure tested to 300m 

When many outdoor watches pack GPS, wrist altimeters and topographical maps, this classic and rugged automatic field watch might seem a little under-equipped – particularly when you consider that £845 price tag. But Elliot Brown’s trademark exceptional build quality, attention to detail and uniquely British design sensibility, makes the Tyenham a stand out for anyone seeking an adventure-proof wristwatch that’ll keep good time, without the distractions of temperamental tech and limited battery life.

The Tyneham’s go-anywhere, do-anything toughness comes from the combination of a fairly-compact, 41mm stainless-steel case and individually case-hardened bezel that delivers supreme scratch-resistance. Apparently six times harder than marine-grade stainless steel Plus an anti-reflective sapphire crystal screen that’s recessed, with a bevelled circumference to protect the edge from chipping. That houses a reliable, low-maintenance Miyota 9130 Japanese automatic movement, with a protective two-stage shock absorption system. It’s pressure-tested to 300m so also boasts impressive water resistance. And we’re big fans of having the indices, markers and hands being liberally coated with 8 hour SuperLuminova, for a soft but highly visible blue glow at night.

Chosen for our Outdoor 100 2021/22. Read our full Elliot Brown Tyneham review.

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