Garmin has announced the Approach S72, its new golf flagship, and the novelty is not in the screen or the bezel: it is in what the watch measures while you play. The device comes in two sizes, 43 mm and 47 mm, with an AMOLED display, titanium bezel, sapphire lens and a ComfortFit fabric band, and Garmin is putting it on sale from $799.99. The promise is that the watch will not stop at telling you how far the flag is, but will help you understand why you play the way you do.
What the Approach S72 measures in your swing
The feature that changes daily use the most is swing measurement taken directly from the wrist, with no sensors on the club. Garmin says the watch records hand speed, backswing length and wrist rotation, among other data, so players can lean on numbers rather than just feel. On top of that comes an activity profile specifically for the driving range: besides analysing the player’s tendencies, sessions are logged in the Garmin Connect app and count towards their fitness goals.
On the biometric side, the Approach S72 includes real-time heart rate and lets you look back at how it changed during a completed round. Garmin stresses that it is not a medical device and that its metrics cannot be used to diagnose or monitor any health condition.
Green reading and help on every shot
To sharpen your aim, Garmin adds a green-reading feature that shows which way the putt will break and the average slope percentage on selected courses, provided an active Garmin Golf membership is in place. There are also putting analytics — speed bias, direction bias, make rate and others — and aerial views of the hole with real imagery to help you decide where to lay up. Green reading, the analytics and the aerial views all require that membership, so it is worth keeping in mind before counting on them.
A watch that works off the course too
What brings this model closest to everyday life is the jump in connectivity. It is Garmin’s first golf watch with a speaker and microphone, which lets you make and take calls and perform basic tasks by voice. It also adds a built-in flashlight with white and red light intensities, handy for finding gear in the bag or lighting up a dark area. On battery life, the larger watch promises up to 20 hours on the course and up to 16 days with GPS turned off.
Away from the green it keeps the brand’s high-end health features: wrist-based heart rate, stress tracking, Body Battery, advanced sleep monitoring and preloaded activity profiles. It follows the same line of body sensors that Garmin has been reinforcing with moves such as its acquisition of Moxy Monitor and its bet on muscle fatigue.
Who it is for
The Approach S72 is not a cheap watch: it starts at $799.99 and many of the most useful golf features sit behind the Garmin Golf subscription. If you play often and want data on your swing and your round, it makes sense. If what you want is an everyday wearable with occasional GPS, the price and the membership dependency weigh more than what it adds. Anyone hoping for a successor to the MARQ Golfer line — as TechRadar has hinted — still does not have one here.
