Garmin Forerunner 165: OLED for less | Expert Reviews

The Forerunner 165 is a watch I hoped would arrive one day. It’s the first moderately affordable watch in the runner-focused Forerunner series with an OLED screen.

Sure, the Forerunner 265 was meant to be a more approachable wearable, too. But at £429? It’s way above the budgets of most runners I know. By dropping down to match the pricing of the 44mm Apple Watch SE, Garmin finally has an OLED running watch you could reasonably call affordable.

The key, though, is that Garmin has reached this level while packing in 90% of what people love about their £1,000+ wearables.

For example, the Forerunner 165 will feed you suggested running workouts each day, in addition to the customisable workouts you can build yourself. The watch doesn’t have the full-on watch maps the Forerunner 965 has, but you do get to see a “breadcrumb” trail and it will guide you around any routes you plan on your phone. And as the Forerunner 165 has a compass, it doesn’t have to rely on GPS movement to tell you which way you’re facing. The result being you feel like you own a much more serious watch than you would with a Garmin Venu 2 or Vivoactive 5. It’s the real deal.

Buttons help too. While the Forerunner 165 has a touchscreen, by default you press the side buttons to start, pause and stop workouts. One of the buttons even has “run” embossed into its surface: all the possible headaches of accidental touchscreen swipes that prematurely end a tracked run disappear.

The Forerunner 165 does not have the very latest hardware inside, but we’ve tested it alongside the once incredibly pricey Fenix 7 Sapphire Solar and the results were very similar. Tracked runs typically showed under a 1% distance disparity. And during one 10km session, the two watches were almost comically similar. The Forerunner 165 recorded 10.01km, while the Fenix 7 Sapphire Solar recorded 10km exactly.

It’s the GPS where this Forerunner 165 theoretically falls behind, as it doesn’t have multi band GPS, but for the most part, it’s absolutely fine. I’ll cover whether you should care about this in the next section.

The Forerunner 165 also uses Garmin’s last-generation Elevate heart rate sensor, just like the Forerunner 265. It misses out on a quartet of outer green LEDs seen in the Epix 2 Pro that fire during tracked exercise, to give the sensors more light with which to work. Despite this, heart rate tracking ability is still excellent.

Indeed, it’s among the best-performing watches for heart rate tracking available at the price. Its stability was actually much better than the Fenix 7 Sapphire Solar I used for some comparisons, which displayed some strange phantom +40bpm spikes during the first couple of tracked runs.

Part of this could be down to the wrist fit, which is another Forerunner 165 strength. This watch is nothing too special to look at, beyond the OLED colour pop, but its prosaic plastic build and petite 42mm face lead to low weight, great comfort and a snug fit.

It’s easier to wear a Forerunner 165 24/7 than a Garmin Enduro or Fenix 7 Pro as a result. And unlike a Coros Pace 3 or Suunto watch, there’s a significant lifestyle appeal here too.

The Forerunner 165 handles phone notifications well; it gives you a Morning Report when you wake up which sets you up for the day nicely. The sharp OLED screen adds appeal to the idea of swapping watch faces every now and then. There are 16 watch faces baked-in, but countless more are available from the Connect IQ app store.

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