Garmin is a brand well-known for its professional smartwatches designed for athletes. However, they are not popular for selling affordable smartwatches. With Garmin Forerunner 165 and Garmin Forerunner 165 Music, the company is trying to shake things up. The new models bring many specialized features from their expensive Forerunner lineup at lower prices that many can afford. Does this sound appealing to you? Luckily, I received for testing the Garmin Forerunner 165 Music, and here’s how it performed:

Garmin Forerunner 165 Music: Who is it good for?

The Garmin Forerunner 165 Music is a great choice for:

• Runners, athletes, and triathletes
• People who own other health and fitness equipment that can be interconnected using the ANT+ protocol
• Those who want a good running smartwatch at a reasonable price

Pros and cons

Here are the things I like about the Garmin Forerunner 165 Music:

• Beautiful, bright AMOLED display
• Lightweight, easy to wear for long periods
• Fast and accurate GPS connectivity
• Onboard music storage
• Good price for a specialized running watch

There are a few downsides as well:

• Decent battery life, but not as good as advertised
• It lacks tracking for some sports, as well as multi-sport profiles
• The materials used in its construction don’t feel as durable as those from more expensive watches

Verdict

Garmin Forerunner 165 Music is a niche device with a clear audience in mind: athletes, people who participate in triathlons, and those who take running seriously. While it lacks a triathlon activity profile, it does meet the needs of triathletes, so don’t discount it for this oversight. The screen of the Garmin Forerunner 165 Music is bright and easy to see, including when running outdoors under direct sunlight. While its design could be more elegant, the materials used to manufacture this watch make it light and easy to wear. And, most of all, its price is friendly too. If you like this smartwatch but don’t need the onboard music capabilities, you can save even more money by purchasing the Garmin Forerunner 165 instead of the Garmin Forerunner 165 Music. That sounds good, doesn’t it? 🙂

Unboxing the Garmin Forerunner 165 Music

The Garmin Forerunner 165 Music is packaged in a gray cardboard box. The company name is printed on the top cover, alongside a picture of the device and its product name. The company also advertises the watch’s AMOLED display and GPS tracking capabilities for running activities.

Garmin Forerunner 165 Music comes in a gray cardboard box

When you open the box, you find the Forerunner 165 Music watch inside further protection packaging, alongside its proprietary USB-C charging cable, quick setup guide, and safety and product information leaflet.

Everything you find inside the box

Unboxing the Garmin Forerunner 165 Music smartwatch doesn’t take long. Before you set up the watch, charge it, install the Garmin Connect app on your smartphone, and then create and sign in with a Garmin account. You’ll need it to get started with using the Garmin Forerunner 165 Music. It is also a good idea to read the quick setup guide and see what the buttons on the watch do. There are five of them, and someone who is used to smartwatches from other brands will need to learn how to operate them.

Design and hardware specifications

As I mentioned in the introduction, there are two Forerunner 165 versions available: Garmin Forerunner 165 Music with 4 GB of storage space available for listening to music, and Forerunner 165, which has the same characteristics, minus the music listening capability and Wi-Fi connectivity. The first is more expensive, with a recommended price of $299, while the second costs $249.

As you can see in my pictures, I received in testing the more expensive version: Garmin Forerunner 165 Music. It has a sporty look, as you would expect from a smartwatch for tracking running and other physical activities. The watch itself is 43 x 43 x 11.6 mm (1.69 x 1.69 x 0.45 inches) in size, and it fits wrists with a circumference of 126 - 203 mm (4.9 - 7.9 inches).

Garmin Forerunner 165 Music fits wrists with a circumference of 126 - 203 mm

The strap is made from silicone, while the watch’s bezel is made of fiber-reinforced polymer. While the bezel could have been made from more durable materials, it has the benefit of being very light. The Garmin Forerunner 165 Music weighs just 39 grams or 1.37 ounces with the strap included, making it very comfortable to wear, even for longer periods. An important positive is that the watch is compatible with standard 20 mm wide, quick-release bands, making it easy to replace the straps when needed. You don’t have to buy them exclusively from Garmin.🙂

This watch uses 20 mm quick-release bands

On the bottom of the watch, you find Gamin’s Elevate V4 optical heart rate sensor, which lacks the ECG functionality from the newer V5 sensor, alongside the charging port. The smartwatch also has a barometric altimeter (used to determine changes in elevation and weather patterns), a blood oxygen saturation monitor, a compass, an accelerometer, a thermometer, and an ambient light sensor, as well as support for all the common positioning systems: GPS, Glonass, and Galileo. Be aware that the Garmin Forerunner 165 Music can’t use multi-band connections to these GPS systems. It connects to them on a single frequency, which could lower its GPS tracking accuracy compared to more expensive Garmin Forerunner smartwatches that provide multi-band GPS connectivity.

The sensors on the Garmin Forerunner 165 Music

The screen is 1.2 inches or 30.4 mm in diameter, and it has a beautiful AMOLED panel with a resolution of 390 x 390 pixels and a maximum brightness of 800 nits. Unfortunately, Gorilla Glass protection is missing. You get it only if you opt for a more expensive model, like the Garmin Forerunner 265.

Do you like the AMOLED display?

The Garmin Forerunner 165 Music offers Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and ANT+ connectivity, making it a good companion for other health and fitness devices like the Garmin HRM-Fit I reviewed recently. The battery on this smartwatch is made of lithium-ion, and the company brags about it lasting up to 11 days. However, Garmin does not mention the battery capacity.

The Power Manager on the Garmin Forerunner 165 Music

The Garmin Forerunner 165 Music is rated to withstand 5 ATM of pressure when swimming at a depth of up to 50 meters. Therefore, it should resist splashes, rain or snow, showering, swimming, diving into water, and snorkeling up to 50 meters deep.

The Garmin Forerunner 165 Music is available in four colors: Mist Gray/Whitestone, Turquoise/Aqua, Berry/Lilac, and Black/Slate Gray. They are pictured below. Unfortunately, the more affordable “non-music” version, the Garmin Forerunner 165, is available only in Black/Slate Gray and Mist Gray/Whitestone.

The colors available for Garmin Forerunner 165 Music

As you can see, I am reviewing the Mist Gray/Whitestone color version. I’m not very fond of this color, and I would have preferred any other color from those available. There’s too much plastic for my taste, and having five physical buttons is confusing for someone new to Garmin and its Forerunner series.

The Garmin Forerunner 165 Music looks like it was designed for wearing during sports activities but not for everyday use. It’s not a great fit for the office or when attending fancy events. In those situations, you may want something more elegant.

Garmin Forerunner 165 Music is designed for sports activities

NOTE: For even more technical specifications and a detailed list of all its features, go to this page: Garmin Forerunner 165 Music.

Setting up and using the Garmin Forerunner 165 Music

Setting up the Garmin Forerunner 165 Music starts with installing the Garmin Connect app for Android and iOS. In the app, you connect to your Garmin account and pair the watch with your phone.

Pairing the watch with the phone

After the smartwatch is paired with your smartphone and Garmin Connect, it’s recommended to go through several personalization steps: set your sleep schedule, add music to your watch, set up Wi-Fi, enable and configure the safety features, and choose the emergency contacts your watch gets in touch with in case of accidents. Another feature you can and should set up is Garmin Pay to make payments with your smartwatch.

Adding the watch to Garmin Connect

If you are new to Garmin’s ecosystem, you will find the Connect app quite complicated, with many options and menus. I suggest you familiarize yourself with all its menus, reports, and configuration options. Don’t hesitate to check for software updates and install them when available. They fix bugs and improve performance and the overall user experience. You should also choose how you want the different health metrics to be tracked and how often.

Using Garming Connect takes a bit of learning time

Unlike many smartwatches on the market, the Garmin Forerunner 165 Music has a total of five physical buttons. That’s a lot, and if you are new to the company’s Forerunner series, using them can be a challenging experience especially when you want to save a workout and have not read the user manual. Even though these buttons have some labels printed next to them, it is a great idea to read the user manual, learn what they do, and try them out before you go out for a run. 🙂

Using the physical buttons is not always intuitive

While I enjoyed wearing the Garmin Forerunner 165 Music thanks to its lightness, I didn’t enjoy its looks. First of all, this device has too much plastic for my taste, and even the watch faces look like they were made for people who are into running. Yes, you have several watch faces on it, and some are reasonably elegant. You can also install more from the Connect IQ Store app, but even so, I feel this watch lacks elegance. Design-wise, the Garmin Forerunner 165 Music is appealing only for sportspeople, and is not the best choice for the office or when attending social events where style is important.

There are many sports watch faces available

Its smartwatch features are typical of Garmin devices: you get app notifications that can be turned on and off, and you can reject calls from the watch or reject them and send predefined text messages as a reply. However, when you accept calls from the watch, you need to have your phone around to talk to people because there’s no microphone or speaker available on the Garmin Forerunner 165 Music.

You can accept or reject calls from the watch

As its name suggests, the Garmin Forerunner 165 Music allows you to play music without your smartphone. The watch is compatible with Spotify, Deezer, and Amazon Music. However, to listen to music, you first need to download the appropriate app on the watch, set it up, and then download the playlist you want. Before running without your phone, pair your Bluetooth headphones with the Garmin Forerunner 165 Music. This process takes some time, and you sometimes come across errors. I had to try it twice before everything was set up correctly. I used the Spotify app on the Garmin Forerunner 165 Music and while it worked reasonably well, I found it lacking in options and with a spartan design. When you listen to a playlist, you can skip to the next or previous track, set the volume, turn on Shuffle, and Repeat. It’s not much, but it works.

Listening to music on your watch

However, if you are OK with taking your smartphone with you while running, you don’t need to buy the Garmin Forerunner 165 Music. Instead, you should opt for the cheaper Garmin Forerunner 165 and save fifty bucks.

Regarding battery life, the company advertises up to eleven days of use in what they call “smartwatch” mode. This mode has the pulse oxygen monitoring turned off completely. When setting it to measure the SpO2 levels during sleep, my autonomy was about 5 days and a half. During this time, I also tracked a few physical activities: a yoga session, a 3 km run, a two-hour hike, and several walking sessions. According to Garmin, if you enable GPS-Only tracking on the Garmin Forerunner 165 Music, the battery will last up to 19 hours. If you listen to music during GPS tracking, the autonomy decreases to 7 hours.

When the battery reaches 10%, the watch asks you to enable the battery saver, which should help it last another 24 hours, with most of its sensors and features turned off and the watch face set to low power. However, those 24 hours are an optimistic estimate. The watch battery will likely last another 10 to 12 hours.

Enabling Battery Saver prolongs battery life

The battery saver dims the screen and disables the Pulse OX and Wrist Heart Rate sensors, as well as features like Wi-Fi, Phone, and Music.

The Garmin Forerunner 165 Music is charged using the cable inside the box. You plug one end into the watch’s charging port and the other into a USB charger. The company says that a depleted battery charges in up to two hours. However, in my testing, when using a 45W Samsung charger, the Garmin Forerunner 165 Music battery charged from 2% to 100% in 62 minutes. In 30 minutes, it went from 2% to 50%.

Charging the Garmin Forerunner 165 Music

The Garmin Forerunner 165 Music is a pleasant companion if you are passionate about running. It is comfortable to wear, its features are useful, and the battery life is decent, even though not as great as advertised. Next, let’s see how well it works as a health tracker.

Health tracking with the Garmin Forerunner 165 Music

The Garmin Forerunner 165 Music has the health tracking features you expect, except for the capability of recording an electrocardiogram (ECG). However, this model does not focus on complete health tracking, and ECG is available on more expensive Garmin watches. Here’s what you get though:

Sleep tracking accurately detects when you fall asleep and when you wake up. However, Garmin seems less accurate in tracking the actual stages you go through. On the upside, it does give you a sleep score and an evaluation of how restorative your sleep was. I also like that the Garmin Forerunner 165 Music detects your naps during the day and displays information about their length, timing, and health impact. 🙂

This watch features nap detection

Heart rate tracking is available and measured throughout your day automatically. This data seems pretty accurate and is especially useful when working out. The heart rate is then complemented with Heart Rate Variability (HRV) measurements used to calculate your stress score, body battery, and respiration rate. HRV data also makes your sleep tracking more accurate.

The heart rate data is quite useful

Garmin Forerunner 165 Music can monitor your blood oxygen level, too. However, automatic Pulse Ox measurements are turned off. You can make manual Health Snapshots whenever you want or enable this tracking during sleep or the whole day. Keep in mind that this measurement consumes a lot of battery. Even so, the weather remains pretty cold in my country (Romania), and I caught a cold while testing the watch. Therefore, I wanted the Pulse Ox metric to be tracked during sleep. As you can see in the screenshot below, the smartwatch detected that my blood oxygen levels dropped during sleep, which wasn’t great at all.

Pulse Ox measured during sleep

Another health metric the Garmin Forerunner 165 Music tracks is your respiration rate, which tells you how many breaths per minute you take. This data is useful in evaluating your sleep quality and general stress level. If your sleep quality metrics are low and your respiration rate is erratic, you should visit a doctor and discuss these issues.

The respiration rate

Garmin Forerunner 165 Music calculates your stress level too, and gives you a score in real-time, as well as a daily average and statistics. I found these evaluations quite accurate, and Garmin’s recommendations were useful in lowering my stress and improving the quality of each day.

Garmin Forerunner 165 Music measures your stress levels too

The Morning Report remains one of my favorite features on Garmin smartwatches. You see it on the Garmin Forerunner 165 Music when you wake up. It gives you a useful overview of how much you slept, your sleep score, how your body’s battery has replenished, how ready your body is for a new workout, the blood oxygen levels during sleep, your heart rate’s variability, and other useful details, including a daily weather forecast.

Here's the Morning Report

One feature lacking from Garmin Forerunner 165 Music is logging your daily water intake. Other smartwatches have the Hydration feature, but this one doesn’t, and it is a bit frustrating. Luckily, you can still use the Garmin Connect app for this purpose. However, you must always open the app on your smartphone and add how much water you drank. You can’t do it straight from the watch like you can on other Garmin smartwatches.

Water logging is not available on the watch

Women’s health tracking is also available and works the same way as it does on other Garmin smartwatches. It shares useful information and recommendations for each menstrual phase and a well-done log system for recording how you feel and what goes on with your body. Pregnancy tracking is also included.

Although the Forerunner 165 Music doesn’t have the latest heart rate tracking sensor and as many health-tracking features as Garmin’s more expensive smartwatches, it is a useful companion for those who want to monitor the basics of their health and well-being.

Sports tracking with Garmin Forerunner 165 Music

As its name implies, Garmin Forerunner 165 Music is a smartwatch dedicated to runners so I took it for a run too. I was happy to see how fast this watch locks the GPS connection and how accurate the tracking was, even if it doesn’t offer dual-frequency GPS connectivity like the more expensive Garmin smartwatches.

Garmin Forerunner 165 Music connects to GPS very fast

After each workout, you see the training effect and the recovery time needed before going to your next hard workout.🙂 For runners, Garmin also offers running dynamics data, including your cadence and power. This data is useful for people who want to become professional athletes or sports enthusiasts preparing for a marathon. However, Garmin Forerunner 165 Music doesn’t have support for triathlons or other multi-sport competitions. You must opt for the more expensive Garmin Forerunner 265 if you want that.

See the training effect on your watch

For reasons known only to its manufacturer, the Garmin Forerunner 165 Music also lacks tracking profiles for popular sports like skiing and snowboarding. There’s also no profile for lifestyle activities like dancing. If you’re curious, here are all the profiles available on this watch: Bike, Bike Indoor, Breathwork, Cardio, Elliptical, Floor Climb, HIIT, Hike, Indoor Track, Open Water Swim, Padel, Pickleball, Pilates, Pool Swim, Run, Stair Stepper, Strength, Tennis, Track Run, Trail Run, Treadmill, Ultra Run, Virtual Run, Walk, Walk Indoor, and Yoga.

Some of the activities that can be tracked with Garmin Forerunner 165 Music

As always, the coaching tools available on Garmin’s platform are very useful. The Garmin Forerunner 165 Music shares daily suggested workouts that are automatically generated based on your training goals. You also get access to structured workouts created by coaches who collaborate with Garmin.🙂 No matter what your goals are, Garmin’s platform is helpful and doesn’t involve any extra costs, as is the case with smartwatches from other vendors.

The coaching platform is great

I used the Garmin Forerunner 165 Music to track the following activities: walking, running, hiking, yoga, and pilates. First of all, I was very happy with the GPS speed and accuracy and the plethora of reports I got after each activity. The Garmin Forerunner 165 Music will be a good companion if you are a data-driven person.

Tracking a hiking activity

Even though Garmin has a confusing way of adding and removing sports tracking profiles on its smartwatches, the Garmin Forerunner 165 Music is a great all-rounder for people who are into running and other physically intense activities. The watch delivers fast and accurate GPS tracking, plenty of training data, and coaching plans to help you improve and reach your goals.

Do you like the Garmin Forerunner 165 Music?

I hope you found this review helpful and that you now know whether the Garmin Forerunner 165 Music is a good fit for your specific needs. Before closing this browser tab, I’m curious to learn what you think: Do you like the Garmin Forerunner 165 Music, or do you prefer the standard model, which is less expensive but doesn’t have offline music listening capabilities? Comment below and let me know.