The most desirable material to use in fitness watch construction right now is titanium. It’s found across the best Garmin watches like the Fenix 9 Pro and recently, the Garmin Marq Generation 3 . But, as it turns out, the more of it you use, the more technical hurdles you face. Let’s start off with why titanium alloys are such a good fit for watches, though. It’s pretty simple; titanium is typically lighter and stronger than aluminium and a whole lot lighter than stainless steel, which is often used in watches for its ability to weather well over the years. Stainless steel used to be a mainstay of Garmin’s premium line-up, but it clearly doesn’t cut it anymore. It’s not even an option in the Garmin Fenix 9 range. Having used plenty of titanium, plastic and stainless steel Garmins over the years, I get it. The more weight a watch carries, the more it picks up momentum as you perform an exercise like running. It makes for worse comfort, and leads to the watch moving around on your wrist more — which is bad news for heart rate reliability. The Fenix 9 titanium problem
(Image credit: Garmin) One part you might find a bit of a head-scratcher, though, is why even titanium watches like the Garmin Fenix 9 base model still have part-plastic bodies, despite costing $999 and up. Its entire sidewall is polymer, a super-tough reinforced plastic formulation, with the bezel and backplate as titanium elements. You need to upgrade to the Fenix 9 Pro — or even further to the Marq Generation 3 — to get a full metal jacket. Garmin COO Brad Trenkle explained to me the difficulties in making this happen, which also helps to explain why these watches cost quite so much money. “There are incredible benefits you can get from having a titanium case, but the all-metal case means radio signals can’t get out,” says Trenkle. In a Garmin watch this means anything that needs to transmit out of the casing, like Bluetooth, LTE, Satellite, ANT+, NFC, Wi-Fi. No signals out or in makes a connected smartwatch pretty useless. The solution? You don’t use an all-metal case, but make the plastic parts that let the signal through as subtle, as minimal, as possible. But this in itself required some special processes. “To get radio signals out, you have got to have a polymer in there. You add the polymer, you have to add multiple gaskets,” says Trenkle. “You add multiple gaskets you get thickness, and then suddenly you’re wearing a tuna can on your wrist. And nobody wants to wear a tuna can on their wrist. We had that with Forerunner 201 years ago. We don’t need to go back there.” The Forerunner 201 was released in 2003, and is widely considered the first GPS-enabled runners’ watch. Yes, even though it does look a bit like a pager stuck to a watch strap. Rubbery gaskets are required in a Garmin watch because, of course, water resistance is fundamental to series like the Garmin Fenix 9…
