Garmin surprised me, and others I assume 🙂, by releasing two new smartwatches: the Forerunner 570 (successor to the Forerunner 265) and 970 (replacing the Forerunner 965). The 570 is the latest mid-range option in the Forerunner series, featuring a bright touch display and fresh color options that break from Garmin’s usual palette. But don’t let the playful colors fool you – this is a serious smartwatch built for runners, triathletes, and sports enthusiasts who need reliable training data for competitions. It boasts an extensive list of activity profiles for tracking sports, excellent triathlon coaching, and Garmin’s latest heart rate sensor. Still, is this enough to make it a great companion for its intended audience? Are there any downsides you should consider before buying? After ten days of testing, I have answers to both questions:
Garmin Forerunner 570: Who is it good for?
This smartwatch is a great choice for:
- Runners and triathletes
- People looking for a smartwatch with great outdoor visibility
- Users who want a watch that can be connected to third-party fitness equipment
- People who want to keep an eye on their health and train hard
Pros and cons
Here are the things I like about the Garmin Forerunner 570:
- Superb AMOLED display with excellent outdoor visibility
- Equipped with Garmin’s latest optical heart rate sensor
- Good-looking color options
- Includes free coaching for triathlons
- Adds new data for sleep tracking
- Good battery life
- New software tweaks that improve the user experience
As for downsides:
- Missing ECG functionality
- No offline maps
- Inaccurate heart rate readings during some activities
- Only one preinstalled watch face
Verdict
The Garmin Forerunner 570 is a smartwatch designed for runners, triathletes, and data-driven fitness enthusiasts. It stands out thanks to its bright, responsive AMOLED display, its light weight, its good battery life, and its comprehensive health and sport tracking features. It even offers free triathlon coaching and in-depth sleep analysis, now including details about your skin temperature and breathing changes. However, there are some downsides, like the lack of electrocardiograms (ECGs), which are increasingly common in smartwatches at a similar price point, and the absence of offline maps, which would benefit the intended audience of this smartwatch. If you don’t require these features and are looking for a smart companion to monitor your health and prepare for sports competitions, the Garmin Forerunner 570 could be exactly what you need.
Unboxing the Garmin Forerunner 570
The Garmin Forerunner 570 launch was completely unexpected, so I was very curious when I received the smartwatch delivery. The Forerunner 570 comes in a traditional gray cardboard box, featuring a picture of the device, the model name, and the usual Garmin branding on the front cover.
Unboxing the Garmin Forerunner 570
When you open the box, you find only a few items: the smartwatch itself with a protective sticker on its display, Garmin’s proprietary USB-C charging cable, the user manual, and the standard safety information.
This all you get
In typical Garmin fashion, the unboxing experience for the Forerunner 570 is quite simple. The package includes only the essentials you need to start using the smartwatch. Before trying it, charge the device using any USB-C smartphone charger along with the included cable. After you set it up and connect it to your Garmin account, be sure to check your inbox for a discount code that allows you to purchase additional watch bands at a reduced price.
Design and hardware specifications
Design-wise, the Garmin Forerunner 570 looks like a smartwatch made for runners. It has an aluminum bezel, a bright AMOLED display, and a silicone strap. It’s also available in two sizes (47 mm and 42 mm) and several colors, pictured below, from left to right:
- Indigo Aluminum with Translucent Imperial Purple/Indigo Band – 47 mm
- Amp Yellow Aluminum with Translucent Whitestone/Turquoise Band – 47 mm
- Slate Gray Aluminum with Translucent Black/Black Band – 47 mm and 42 mm
- Raspberry Aluminum with Translucent Bone/Mango Band – 42 mm
- Cloud Blue Aluminum with Translucent Whitestone/Cloud Blue Band – 42 mm
I like the color options available for this smartwatch. They feel fresh, different from what competitors offer, and adequate for the intended audience. I hope that Garmin will keep using this approach in their upcoming models. 🙂
The color options for Garmin Forerunner 570
Image source: Garmin
An interesting fact is that the 42 mm version weighs 42 grams, while the 47 mm version weighs 47 grams WITH the strap, which is excellent for comfort. Except for their size and weight, the only difference between the two versions is their battery capacity. Unfortunately, Garmin doesn’t make this information public. It only mentions that the battery on the 42 mm version lasts up to ten days in normal use, while the 47 mm version lasts up to eleven days.
On the left margin of the Garmin Forerunner 570, you find three buttons labeled discreetly on the edge of the display. It’s important to read those labels to learn what they do, especially if you haven’t used a Garmin Forerunner smartwatch before.
There are three buttons on the left margin
On the right side, there are two more physical buttons. They’re the most important when interacting with the smartwatch, as they’re used to turn on the display, select items, and go back to the previous screen.
And another two buttons on the right margin
When you look at the back of the smartwatch, you notice the Garmin Elevate Gen5 optical heart rate sensor and the charging port. Unfortunately, Garmin has made an uninspired choice regarding its heart rate monitoring: it doesn’t offer an ECG feature, even though its sensor can record electrocardiograms. This choice may frustrate some users as ECG has become a standard feature on many smartwatches with similar pricing, including cheaper ones like the Garmin Venu 3 and 3S.
The smartwatch has the Elevate Gen5 optical heart rate sensor
Since I’ve mentioned sensors, the Garmin Forerunner 570 includes multi-band GPS, a barometric altimeter, a compass, a gyroscope, an accelerometer, a thermometer, and an ambient light sensor. It’s an extensive list of sensors that should allow this smartwatch to offer a thorough health monitoring experience.
Even though it has five physical buttons, the Forerunner 570 also features a color touchscreen, protected by Corning Gorilla Glass 3 for enhanced durability. The display’s resolution is 454 x 454 pixels, and its physical size is 1.4 inches. Garmin says it’s their brightest AMOLED display to date, but unfortunately, it doesn’t communicate its peak brightness in nits, as other companies do.
The display is bright
The bottom bezel of the Garmin Forerunner 570 features a speaker that can be used to listen to music or phone calls on your smartwatch. A microphone is also included, but its positioning is unclear. Unfortunately, the Forerunner 570 doesn’t feature eSIM support, so you must have your smartphone nearby to take calls or send and receive text messages.
There’s a speaker hidden on the bottom bezel
This smartwatch offers 8 GB of storage for offline music listening and supports NFC payments via Garmin Pay. For connectivity, it provides Bluetooth, Wi-Fi (limited to the 2.4 GHz band), and ANT+ for linking third-party fitness devices to your smartwatch. The Garmin Forerunner 570 can also integrate with popular voice assistants like Siri, Google Assistant, and Bixby, and it is compatible with Android and iOS devices.
The Garmin Forerunner 570 is an attractive smartwatch designed for runners and outdoor enthusiasts. It boasts good build quality and is suitable for swimming, thanks to its 5 ATM water resistance rating. When used outdoors, the AMOLED display is bright, colorful, and easy to read. Additionally, the inclusion of the latest Garmin Elevate Gen5 optical heart rate sensor is a valuable feature. However, it’s disappointing that it lacks ECG functionality, despite the sensor’s ability to provide it. If you need even more detailed specifications, visit the official product page: Garmin Forerunner 570.
Setting up and using the Garmin Forerunner 570
There are two things that I immediately appreciated about the Garmin Forerunner 570: its bright display, which is a pleasure to use, both indoors and outdoors, and its light weight. Despite its size, this smartwatch is very comfortable to wear, including during sleep. Navigating the Forerunner 570 is straightforward, despite having five physical buttons, which some users might find confusing. Most of the time, you won’t need all these buttons because there is a touchscreen display that’s easy to use. However, the buttons can be helpful during workouts, allowing you to interact with the smartwatch when your hands are wet and the touchscreen is unresponsive. They’re also useful in competitive situations, or when it’s raining and using the display becomes difficult.
The buttons can be helpful when you have sweaty hands or it’s raining
To use the Forerunner 570, you must set it up with the help of the Connect app, which is available for free for both Android and iOS. The process is the same as for other Garmin smartwatches. It involves pairing the smartwatch to your smartphone, giving it the necessary permissions, setting your sleep schedule, editing your goals, and going through a tutorial on navigating the smartwatch. This last bit is important, as you get five physical buttons on this device. Knowing what they do is going to make your user experience easier. Once you’re done with the basics, you’re asked to set up features like Music, Garmin Pay, Safety, and the Voice Assistant.
There are many features for you to set up
Garmin’s Connect app is highly data-driven and filled with detailed reports for each of the data sets tracked by your smartwatch. The app is split into tabs, and Home is where you spend most of your time. Here, you can access details about your latest workouts, view your health data, and check out your Sleep Coach recommendations.
Garmin Connect shares a lot of data
The tabs at the bottom of the app and the tiles with data displayed can be personalized to only show what interests you. On the software side of things, there are a few changes introduced by the Garmin Forerunner 570. One new feature is the Evening report, which aims to complement the existing Morning report. In it, you get information about your next alarm, a summary of today’s activities, what workouts are scheduled for tomorrow, how much sleep you need tonight, and other details that can be customized.
Here’s the Evening report
The user interface feels smoother and organized slightly better, so that it’s closer to what you get from premium models like the Fenix 8. A small feature that I appreciated is the ability to pause a workout and quickly resume it later. While this may not seem like much, it does improve the user experience, and smartwatches from other brands lack this ability.
The addition of a speaker and microphone allows you to answer calls from your smartwatch if your smartphone is nearby. You can also install services like Spotify, Deezer, or Amazon Music and listen to your favorite music while working out. Unfortunately, the call quality isn’t great, so it’s a good idea to take them only in quiet environments. When you’re walking on busy city streets with traffic nearby, you’ll have difficulty speaking with others through the smartwatch.
You can take calls on the Garmin Forerunner 570
The Garmin Forerunner 570 comes with only one preinstalled watch face. While it looks good and can be customized to display the data you want, it’s disappointing that there’s only one watch face available by default on this device. Other brands offer multiple watch faces with their smartwatches, and Garmin should do the same. Although you can access additional watch faces through the Connect IQ app store, many of them require an extra payment. Sad to say, it can be challenging to find free, attractive watch faces for this smartwatch. Hopefully, the situation will improve in the coming months.
You get only one watch face preinstalled
Before I go into detail about the health and sport tracking features of this smartwatch, I want to talk about battery life. Garmin says that the 47mm version that I’m using should last up to eleven days of typical use, with the Pulse Ox tracking turned off. I always turn this feature on during sleep, because it can help identify health issues that may become problematic over time. With Pulse Ox tracking switched on, the Garmin Forerunner 570 lasted six days and twenty hours. I measured the charging speed using a Samsung 45-watt smartphone charger. In just 20 minutes, the Forerunner 570’s battery went up to 32%. A full charge took 81 minutes.
How fast the Garmin Forerunner 570 charges
I’ve tested the Garmin Forerunner 570 for ten days before finalizing this review. Except for a few minor bugs and issues like having just one preinstalled watch face, I appreciated my time with this device. Its AMOLED display is bright and easy to see, even outdoors; its battery life is good, and its health and tracking features are useful.
Health tracking with the Garmin Forerunner 570
The Garmin Forerunner 570 is equipped with a variety of sensors that monitor key health metrics, both automatically and on demand. To conserve battery, Garmin turned off the automatic measurement of blood oxygen levels (Pulse Ox). If you want to track your health comprehensively, I recommend enabling this feature during sleep, even though it does reduce battery life. Luckily, this isn’t an issue for this smartwatch, not even with all its features turned on. Garmin Forerunner 570 monitors your heart rate throughout the day, during sleep, and while you work out. It also tracks heart rate variability (HRV), in addition to continuously recording your stress levels and respiratory rate.
Some of the health data tracked by Garmin Forerunner 570
Garmin has made a few upgrades to its sleep tracking, which now keeps an eye on how your breathing changes while you sleep. This means that when you wake up, you get a ton of info, like a sleep score, an evaluation of how well you slept, how long you were out, and how much time you spent in each sleep stage. You’ll also see how your average skin temperature changed during the night and how steady your heart rate was (HRV). It’s a detailed set of data that can be helpful for anyone who loves to track everything about their body.
The sleep analysis includes more data than ever
One of the best health-focused features of the Forerunner 570 is how Garmin puts all your health data to work. It crunches the numbers it gathers to give you insightful metrics like your Body Battery and Training Readiness. Each morning, you wake up with a Body Battery score – a number that reflects how much energy you’ve recharged overnight. The score lowers during the day, depending on how much you’ve drained from stress, workouts, or daily demands. These metrics are helpful for managing your well-being and deciding whether today’s the day to push harder at the gym, power through extra work, or just call it a “blanket burrito” kind of day. If your Body Battery says 20, maybe it’s not the best time to run a marathon… unless it’s a Netflix marathon or a reading one – you know, the kind where the heaviest thing you lift is a paperback and your only cardio is flipping pages.
The Body Battery is a useful metric
Is all this health data accurate, though? While I don’t have medical equipment to compare it to, I made several simultaneous measurements using the Garmin Forerunner 570 and a professional pulse oximeter with a medical certification valid in the European Union. I noticed that when it comes to the Pulse Ox measurements, the Forerunner 570 tends to underestimate the percentage of oxygen I have in my blood. Oftentimes, the pulse oximeter said that I had the oxygen level at 98% or 99%, and the smartwatch said it was around 95% or 96%. While measuring the heart rate, there were minor differences when I was sitting idle, and many times, the two devices agreed with one another.
Comparing the Garmin Forerunner 570 with a pulse oximeter
However, while I was working out, I noticed something strange. I was concurrently testing a smartwatch from another brand and wearing both smartwatches during physical activities. Throughout several strength workouts, the Garmin Forerunner 570 initially reported a high heart rate for the first few minutes, even though I wasn’t engaging in an activity that justified it. The other smartwatch reported a much lower heart rate. So, I decided to include the pulse oximeter in the mix to see which of the two smartwatches was reporting more accurate numbers. To my surprise, the Garmin Forerunner 570 was the one reporting incorrect heart rate readings, significantly higher than reality. It did this consistently during strength training, but less so while I was riding on a stationary bike. I’m unsure what’s happening, but I believe Garmin should investigate and address these bugs in future firmware updates.
These are inaccurate heart rate readings
One last feature I want to highlight is that this smartwatch includes health tracking tools specifically for women. These tools focus on menstrual cycle and pregnancy tracking, as well as exercise and nutrition education. Since I’m a man, I can’t test these features or comment on their effectiveness.
From a sensor standpoint, the Garmin Forerunner 570 is packed with all the latest tech to monitor your overall health. Its sleep tracking, in particular, offers more detailed insights than previous Garmin models. However, despite having the sensor capable of recording electrocardiograms (ECGs), this smartwatch currently lacks this feature. And while its heart rate tracking performs well in most situations, it tends to be inaccurate during strength training sessions. Maybe this smartwatch gets nervous around dumbbells.🙂
Sports tracking with Garmin Forerunner 570
The Garmin Forerunner 570 is designed for runners and multisport athletes. This is reflected in both its design and product name, as well as the variety of tracking profiles it includes. The smartwatch can be used to track 74 different activities, including multisport activities like triathlons, duathlons, and pool triathlons.
Garmin Forerunner 570 is excellent for sports tracking
Many are going to appreciate the addition of structured multisport workouts and features like Running Dynamics, which measure ground contact time, vertical oscillation, stride length, running power, and other useful metrics. Garmin Forerunner 570 also includes free coaching for triathlons, alongside other sports like running and cycling. And if this isn’t enough for you, you can create custom workouts, including multisport ones. How’s this for a professional training plan?
You get free coaching for triathlons and custom multisport workouts
I would have loved to take the Garmin Forerunner 570 out running, but my medical condition doesn’t allow me to do that for another couple of months. Therefore, I stuck to the activities that my doctor recommended: pilates, outdoor walks, strength training, and indoor and outdoor cycling. As you can imagine, this smartwatch is more than I need now. I appreciate the level of integration with third-party fitness equipment and the ability to edit workouts to add data such as weights or distances for improved calculations. This is something that few other smartwatch brands offer, and it makes Garmin stand out in a crowded market.
Tracking a cycling session with the Garmin Forerunner 570
When I used it outdoors, I noticed that the Garmin Forerunner 570 requires a few seconds more than other smartwatches to lock its GPS location. Luckily, its GPS tracking is accurate. At the end of each workout, you get a detailed map of where you went and tons of stats, which vary depending on the type of activity that you’ve tracked.
You get a lot of data at the end of a workout
One controversial feature of the Garmin Forerunner 570 is that while it allows users to create courses for upcoming races and import them into their smartwatch for training and competition, it does not provide any maps. They’re available only on the more expensive Garmin Forerunner 970, which was launched at the same time. This may disappoint some users who feel that this feature should have been included.
While it’s not perfect, the Garmin Forerunner 570 is a capable smartwatch that caters to the needs of most people who are into running, triathlons, and other multisport activities. Where it shines the most is in the addition of new coaching plans and the ability to create custom multisport workouts.
Do you like the Garmin Forerunner 570?
That’s it for my review of the Garmin Forerunner 570. I hope you found it useful and that it helped you decide whether this smartwatch is a good fit for you. If you’ve used the Forerunner 570 or you’re currently wearing one, I’d love to read your thoughts on this device. Does it meet your expectations? Are there features you enjoy or quirks that frustrate you? Share your experience in the comments below and help others make an informed decision. After all, real-life feedback is more accurate than a heart rate sensor during strength training. 🙂
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