Garmin Instinct Esports smartwatch Edition

Image via Garmin

Garmin Instinct Esport: A new smartwatch for a different audience

Feast your eyes on the Garmin Instinct Esports edition.

Garmin Instinct Esports smartwatch Edition

Image via Garmin

Every week we see more and more smartwatches promising to make us fitter and more organised. Garmin now released a product to an altogether different audience.

Introducing the Garmin Instinct Esport Edition

Special edition of an existing edition

Believe it, or not many of the world’s top esports organisations are investing more and more resources into keeping their top esport athletes fitter. Overall it’s fairly well accepted that healthy bodies help every other facet of your performance.

The Garmin Instinct Esport is a special edition of an existing model; the focus is still mainly on it being a great fitness watch. It does have a few additional features baked in to help professional esports athletes and streamers alike.

The Garmin Instinct Esport edition uses Bluetooth to sync with a PC streaming tool called “STR3AMUP!”.

A smartwatch for gamers

The unfortunately-named tool is probably a big hint that the team at Garmin are far more in tune with all things sports and fitness than they are with gaming and esports.

That said, at least they’ve acknowledged that gamers exist and have wrists that deserve functional wearables too.

Once the watch is linked with the STR3AMUP! app, gamers will be able to monitor heart rate, stress and body-battery-energy-level-data in realtime on their streams.

This will give streamers playing through horror games like Phasmophobia and Amnesia the opportunity to let their viewers in on just how taxing the game has been on them physically and mentally.

Watch: Garmin Instinct Esports Edition introduction

While the feature is a bit gimmicky, it’s an indication of more ways in which we can use technology to add online experiences like streaming. The Garmin Instinct Esport edition isn’t the first smartwatch to acknowledge gamers though.

Apple included VR gaming as a sports profile some time back to allow its users to track the calories burnt while playing physically taxing games like BoxVR and Beatsabre in VR.

The Garmin Instinct Esports edition includes an esports activity profile which will similarly measure your heart rate and stress level during gaming sessions.

You can then sync your data from your watch to the Garmin Connect app. Use it to keep track of your heart rate and stress levels during gaming sessions.

Price and availability

I’m sure we’ll see more manufacturers tapping into the esports and gaming market in the future with more features geared specifically at improving gamers fitness and gaming performance.

Apart from the esports additions, you get all the usual Garmin goodness; such as sleep monitoring, phone notifications and more than 30 sports apps and profiles to help you track all exercise or sports modes.

The Garmin Instinct Esport edition is retailing for $299.99 in the US. That would be approximately R4900; however, we’d need to wait until Garmin releases a price point for the South African market.

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