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Garmin Instinct Crossover leaks on the company’s own website

A new watch due to see the light of day soon has appeared on the Garmin website in Taiwan. Instinct Crossover will be a new take on Garmin’s outdoor sports watch concept. This will be the first hybrid in the Instinct range.

Such watches are not everyone’s cup of tea. They attempt to offer the best of both worlds by combining analog elements with smartwatch elements. For example, this might be a pair of mechanical hands on top of a digital display.

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We actually knew Garmin had such a device in the works due to a local retailer listing from the start of the year. That mentioned a device called Instinct Analog – so clearly a hybrid watch. It seems we are finally going to see this, but under the name Instinct Crossover. Same device, different name.


Garmin Instinct Crossover – likely specs

Few actual details were known about the upcoming device until this leak appeared on Garmin’s website in Taiwan. The entry has been pulled now from the site but can still be found if you go to the internet archive.

We had a detailed look through the listing before it dissapeared. This reveals there will be three devices in the range:

  • Garmin Instinct Crossover – Black;
  • Garmin Instinct Crossover – Solar Graphite; and
  • Garmin Instinct Crossover – Solar Tactical Edition.

As far as specs, these devices don’t seem to be very different from Garmin Instinct 2. We couldn’t see any missing functionality so you will be getting a fully featured equivalent of the current range.

The novelty is a pair of luminescent, mechanical hands on top of the MIP watch face. They come with shock-resistant, auto-calibration smarts. We’re guessing the hands automatically move out of the way for most use cases. But that’s just our guess.

The tiny display which appears in the right-hand corner of Instinct 2 is not there any more. Garmin probably felt it would be confusing to have two digital displays and a pair of mechanical hands on top of this. Which makes sense. The display is still monochrome and it retains the 176 x 176 pixel resolution. It size looks to be 1.2 inches.

The actual dimensions of the watch come in at 45 x 45 x 16.2 mm and weight at 65 grams. Which makes Instinct Crossover a bit thicker and heavier than Instinct 2 (which comes in at 14.5mm and 52 grams respectively).

The watch will offer twice the memory – so 64MB. Another improvement is to do with battery life. In certain configurations, you get more of it.

Like the latest crop of Garmin watches, Instinct Crossover supports multi-GNSS (GPS, GLONASS, Galileo) for more precise position tracking in challenging environments. You will also get all the new recovery stats and features that first appeared with the Forerunner 255 and 955 watches (Morning Report, Running Power, Training Readiness, etc).

Strategic Functions seem to be new. They include something called Night Vision Mode which switches the screen between day and night viewing. Stealth Mode will switch off GPS and wireless communication making you undetectable. There’s a Kill Switch which deletes all the data from the watch. Not sure why that would be useful. The final Strategic Function is Double-grid Coordinates which provides latitude and longitude references.

Interestingly, something called a Physical Fitness Index also appears under running functions. Perhaps this might be a new metric that Garmin will introduce to other watches. It is listed in addition to Vo2Max.

Only a few days ago the FCC registered a Garmin hybrid watch. This is typically one of the last steps before the device can be sold in the US. Presumably, we should see Instinct Crossover in the days or weeks ahead. Most probably by mid-November as it would not make sense releasing a new watch once we are into the holiday sales period.

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Ivan Jovin

Ivan has been a tech journalist for over 7 years now, covering all kinds of technology issues. He is the guy who gets to dive deep into the latest wearable tech news.

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