Garmin has shown off a new version of its popular Instinct smartwatch on Garmin.com, and this time, it’s especially targeted at gamers. While most smartwatches come packed with features designed for running, hiking, and biking, the Garmin Instinct Esports Edition comes with perfect features for gaming and streaming.
What Is the Garmin Instinct Esports Edition?
The main selling point of the Garmin Instinct Esports Edition is the gaming features. After all, if you buy a watch with Esports Edition in the name, it better come with tracking modes designed for hardcore game sessions. As such, Garmin offers a dedicated esports activity function that can track and analyze heart rate and stress during gaming sessions.
Outside of the immediate information, the Garmin Instinct Esports Edition can offer a long-term trend analysis, which could help high-level gamers improve their skills. After all, if you know in which situations you need to calm down, you can improve focus there over the long haul.
Those tracking features can be useful for just about anyone who plays competitive games, but Garmin is also introducing a new tool called STR3AMUP (yes, that’s how the company spelled it). With it, streamers can actually incorporate their biometric data into their broadcasts. This is actually really cool, as it not only lets viewers experience what the streamer is playing, but it provides a glimpse into how they’re actually feeling.
Outside of the gaming-specific features, this watch comes with all the original Garmin Instinct smartwatch’s tracking and features. That means it’ll track heart rate, sleep, stress, and Body Battery Energy (which is a mixture of various metrics).
Dan Bartel, Garmin vice president of sales, spoke about the value of this data for gamers, saying: ”
Players can also use Instinct’s data to make adjustments in their daily lives, whether it be altering sleep patterns or activity levels, which can result in increased cognitive and physical performance during play.
Another thing that makes the Garmin Instinct Esports Edition worth a look is the battery life. The company says that it will get up to 80 hours of battery life in esports mode and up to 14 days in smartwatch mode, which is quite nice if you plan to use it to track your sleep.
When Can You Buy the Garmin Instinct Esports Edition?
Garmin actually made its new gaming smartwatch available right now from Garmin.com, so you don’t have to wait to snag one. It retails for $299.99, which is right around what we’d expect from a smartwatch with this sort of feature set.