These notes are in the context of me searching for a solar powered ABC watch with an accurate step counter.
My hope was that the Instinct Solar will be like the Casio solar powered watches where with normal exposure to natural and artificial light (indoors and outdoors) it will never run out of battery. Unfortunately that is not the case.
On the Garmin watch, the solar charging works only in direct sunlight. It does not charge at all indoors either from natural nor artificial lights and very little outdoors in overcast conditions. You really need clear skies and the watch facing the sun for it to do it's magic. With the heart rate sensor turned off and only the step counter and ABC sensors active, you still need 3 hours of charging in direct sunlight for the watch to never run out of battery.
The Instinct Solar has a few different watch faces with a maximum of four customizable data fields. No support for ConnecIQ unfortunately for me to create my own.
There's also the concern of the battery deteriorating over time. I observed that on my Garmin Fenix 3 watch. It started with 2 weeks of battery life when new and in less than 2 years it got to lasting only for about a week. Casio watches don't seem to have this issue since a 10 year old Pro Trek is still always charged (battery indicator shows "High") regardless of direct sunlight exposure.
Then there's the Casio G-Shock GBD-H1000 which is a solar powered GPS enabled running watch with ABC sensors that in theory should never run out of power as long as you don't use the GPS. The step counter on it however is so inaccurate that it's basically useless. Where Garmin watches count about 1k steps a day when i'm indoors and not leaving the house, the Casio counted ~ 10k steps! If only Garmin could license Casio's solar charging or Casio Garmin's step counter tech :)
