If you own a fitness tracker, shouldn’t you be able to leave your phone behind when you work out? Yes, but many fitness trackers still need to be tethered to phones for features like GPS and music. Not this one. Garmin’s Forerunner 645 Music, is a lightweight yet powerful smartwatch designed to cut you free from a phone entirely. Featuring built-in GPS, active heart-rate monitoring, contactless payments, and native music compatibility (a Garmin first), the Forerunner 645 Music looks every bit the part of a dynamic fitness tracker on paper. We decided to put the wearable through its paces to see just how well it performs in practice – and if it’s a true competitor to Fitbit and Apple. Like most fitness trackers, Garmin’s Forerunner 645 Music comes packaged with only the wearable itself, a charging cable, and an instruction manual. With a partial charge, our watch took roughly 30 minutes to fully charge out of the box, and typically only required an hour to charge it up when it drained a...
Offline music playback; Extensive fitness tracking capabilities; Doesn’t require a tethered smartphone for its full features; 5- to 7-day battery life;
Expensive; Buckle showed wear and tear after two weeks;