Garmin's new smartwatch can livestream esports gamers' biometric data to fans
Garmin makes some of the best sports smartwatches around, but now the company has turned to a demographic that does most of its training sitting down: professional esports athletes.
On Thursday, the company launched the Garmin Instinct Esports Edition, a special variant of its Garmin Instinct watch with several features aimed at gamers.
For example, the watch can analyze a player's heart rate and stress during play, and livestream this data to audiences, as well as provide long-term trend analysis.
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"With the Instinct Esports Edition, esports athletes can tap into that same technology to track and examine how their body responds to intense competition,” Dan Bartel, Garmin vice president of sales, said in a statement.
The cool thing about this watch is that the Garmin Instinct in its vanilla form is a very capable sport watch, with essentially all the same activity tracking features and sensors that Garmin's top sports watches have, including those in the far pricier Fenix series. The Instinct Esports Edition inherits all those features, with a dedicated esports mode on top.
Some of the features of Instinct Esports Edition include wrist-based heart rate monitoring, sleep monitoring, stress tracking, and energy monitoring (the feature uses heart rate, stress, and sleep data to determine the user's energy levels). Basic specs include a 0.9x0.9-inch monochrome display covered with chemically strengthened glass, a 10 ATM water resistance rating, and 16MB of memory.
Just like the original Instinct, the Instinct Esports Edition doesn't have a fancy color display and a thousand different watch faces; instead, it has a robust, almost old school look that will likely be pleasant to fans of Casio's G-Shock series of watches.
Visually, the Esports Edition is very similar to the original Instinct in black color, the main difference being red accents on the bezel and on the display itself.
Garmin Instinct Esports Edition is available now, with a suggested retail price of $299.99.
Topics Esports Gaming Smartwatches
Stan is a Senior Editor at Mashable, where he has worked since 2007. He's got more battery-powered gadgets and band t-shirts than you. He writes about the next groundbreaking thing. Typically, this is a phone, a coin, or a car. His ultimate goal is to know something about everything.
