Garmin Epix (Gen 2)
The Garmin Epix Gen 2 was one of the first AMOLED touchscreen watches in Garmin's outdoor adventure range, delivering fitness tracking and data like a Fenix, but with a more vibrant touchscreen. It's a brilliant all-rounder.
It's safe to say I saw the Garmin Epix Gen 2 as something of a game-changer when it first launched. It delivered all the abilities and advantages of the premium Garmin Fenix range but did it with a bright, vibrant and color-rich display that we hadn't seen on any of the Fenix models before then. Finally, we had the best of both worlds: ultra fitness and outdoor activity tracking AND a punchy AMOLED touchscreen without sacrificing too much in the battery life department. I absolutely loved it when I tested it at launch, but - at $800 - it wasn't cheap. Now, as part of Amazon's Prime Big Deal Days event, you can snag one for just $550, and it's worth every cent.
With its stainless steel or titanium case, you're getting an incredibly sturdy watch - one with 100-metre water resistance to boot - with the option of a sapphire crystal display, plus the usual multi-band GPS tracking, up to 16 days of battery life and a minimum of 16GB storage.
Why was the switch to AMOLED a big deal?
The second generation Garmin Epix wasn't the first Garmin to feature an AMOLED screen (that was the Venu), but you could argue it was the first "proper" Garmin to have an AMOLED display. It was the first rugged smartwatch, primed and ready for all outdoor adventures, with high-end data and fitness tracking that had an AMOLED display, and I loved it when I tested it at launch.
For context, previous watches of a similar style from Garmin featured a transflective memory-in-pixel LCD panel. These screens are effectively fancy versions of what you'd have on classic digital watches in that you don't need a backlight to read them; they use the ambient light around you to light up the screen. This type of tech has its advantages in that you can see the time, all the time, and that they're actually better in bright daylight than in the dark. But there are inherent weaknesses.
Among them are color, brightness and contrast - compared to AMOLED - it just doesn't have those qualities. AMOLED is also sharper and animates more smoothly, making it more graphically rich and - in doing so - giving you a more detailed map on your wrist to lead you to your desired endpoint when you're stuck in the middle of nowhere.
So - to get that - plus touchscreen functionality on a watch built as sturdily as a Garmin Fenix, and with all the fitness and outdoor tracking abilities of that watch too was a big deal, and one that ensured that previous limitations and compromises that came with owning a Garmin smartwatch in the past were removed.