In summary
The Garmin Forerunner 165 is an affordable, all-round sports watch and smartwatch with particularly good sports and health features. This entry-level model now also features an OLED display, while battery life is still around six days. The downsides are the lack of a triathlon mode and the moderate scratch resistance of the display.
Garmin’s popular Forerunner sports watch and smartwatch series has a new entry-level model: the Forerunner 165. This “entry-level athlete” watch is available for around €250. That makes it significantly less expensive than the Forerunner 265, which costs around €450, and the Forerunner 965 we reviewed earlier, which costs just under €600.
The cheaper Forerunner now also has an OLED display and while the watch doesn’t have all the features of its bigger siblings, on paper it’s an excellent sports watch and smartwatch. As the name suggests, Forerunners are primarily intended as sports watches for runners, but you can also do more with the Forerunner 165. In addition to a host of other sports profiles, the watch provides comprehensive insights into your athletic progress, and offers general health features such as heart rate, steps, sleep, stress and recovery. Smart features, as we’ve come to expect from Garmin, are somewhat limited, but the watch can of course display notifications and supports contactless payments. The Forerunner 165 Music variant also offers the option to download music from Spotify, among others, and play it offline via a Bluetooth headset. And unlike more comprehensive smartwatches, such as those from Google, Samsung and Apple, Garmin watches can boast long battery life.
We were excited about the Forerunner 965, it’s time to see if we can be as excited about the much cheaper Forerunner 165 as we are.
Applicants have been decoded.
If you switch to the Forerunner series on Garmin.com, you’ll get a huge amount of Seventeen different models Foot. An overwhelming display that at first glance appears to have little consistency, but appearances are deceiving, because there is logic to the model numbers.
Watches have a three-digit product code that always ends in a 5. The first digit indicates how advanced the watch is; the 965 is the current top-of-the-line model, the 265 has slightly fewer features, and the Forerunner 165 we’re discussing here is currently the entry-level model. In the past, entry-level models have sometimes had a type number below 100, such as the Forerunner 45 and 55. Thus, Garmin could have also released a Forerunner 65, but that model has not been announced. The second digit, a 6 in the case of the 165 we tested, indicates the generation. The Forerunner 265’s predecessors were the 255 and 245.
Garmin doesn’t renew every model. For example, the 645 and 745 never received a direct successor, while the 165 is the first model in the “100 series.” This makes it difficult to compare watches from different generations, especially as Garmin continues to add new features. For example, the Forerunner 265 has more and newer features than the older Forerunner 645. And while the latter is from a higher series, the Forerunner 265 is actually a more advanced watch in all respects. Last year, Garmin introduced the x65 generation of Forerunners, which is the latest model.