Garmin has just announced a new smartwatch: the Garmin Lily. While most of the company’s range of wearables are tailored towards athletes, adventurers, or simply users who want access to Garmin’s extensive range of fitness and navigation features, the Lily is the company’s attempt to offer a model specifically for women. In fact, Garmin says that the Lily is designed “by women, for women”, with a design that has been inspired by classic jewellery.
Putting aside the gendered branding of the wearable, the Lily comes with a bunch of functionality—just like all of Garmin’s smartwatches. But is this worth its rather steep price tag? Here’s what you need to know.
Price and availability
The Garmin Lily is available in two variants: a Sports Edition and a Classic Edition. The main difference between the two is the watch case and band materials, with Sports Edition using an aluminium body and a silicone band, and the pricier Classic Edition using a stainless steel body and a leather band.
The Sports Edition is available in White with Cream Gold, Deep Orchid with Midnight Orchid, and Light Sand with Rose Gold. Meanwhile, colourways for the Classic Edition include Paloma with Dark Bronze, Black with Cream Gold, and White with Light Gold.
Both variants are available on Lazada, Shopee, the AECO e-store, and authorised Garmin retailers. Meanwhile, official pricing in Malaysia is as follows:
Garmin Lily (Classic) – RM1,150
Garmin Lily (Sport) – RM920
Garmin Lily specs and features
As mentioned above, one of the selling-points of the Garmin Lily is its petite size, with the 34mm watch case being Garmin’s smallest ever smartwatch body. It’s worth noting that the smartwatch uses a a touchscreen LCD monochromatic display—which turns off when it’s not in use. This is similar to the Garmin Vivomove 3, and from personal experience, it’s a rather underwhelming display to have.
As for the internals, the Garmin Lily comes with a lot of the fitness features and sensors that you’d expect from the company. This includes step tracking, workouts, sleep tracking, stress monitoring, menstrual tracking, and blood oxygen saturation measurements. Garmin also says that this is the first fitness wearable to come quipped with a pregnancy tracking app—although you should note that this is a feature that is also available via OTA update on some of the company’s other models.
Battery life is slightly disappointing, however. You’ll get up to five days on a single charge, but considering how this is a monochromatic display, I’d have hoped for a couple more days—at least. Additionally, Garmin has also skipped out on a couple of things with the Lily: it doesn’t have built-in GPS, offline music, or even Garmin Pay. Built-in GPS, in particular, is important, and the lack of it means that you’ll need to bring along a paired smartphone if you want to track your movements in the Garmin Connect app.
Perhaps it’s an issue of size, and the clear focus for Garmin here was to launch something that was small and dainty enough—well, enough for it to be marketed as a women-focused smartwatch. At this price, however, it might be worth considering the Garmin Venu SQ instead, which comes with GPS, and even offline music playback for the Music Edition.
But if you’re looking for a small, simple smartwatch—with access to features like Garmin’s Body Battery, this might be worth a look.
