I chose the Garmin Fenix 9 Pro as the best health and fitness gadget of the year in our awards — here’s why
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The Garmin Fenix 9 Pro is Garmin’s latest — and greatest — watch. The Fenix series always occupies a flagship position in Garmin’s lineup: while the company does make more expensive watches, most of those are specialist pieces of gear, such as the Tactix for soldiers, the Descent for professional divers, and the Marq series as an ultra-premium option for fashion-forward Garmin users.
The Garmin Fenix series is its top-tier ‘generalist’ watch, and considering it only comes out once every few years, anticipation is always high. Fortunately, the Fenix 9 Pro lives up to the hype, and is my Fitness Devices of the Year at the TechRadar Product of the Year Awards 2026.
It’s a powerhouse of a watch, from construction and performance, and has coped with every test we have thrown at it, from hikes in Chamonix, to comparison tests against the Apple Watch Ultra 4 and an electrical heart rate monitor, the Frontier X2.
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Let’s start with construction. The Fenix 9 Pro’s entire case is now made of titanium, rather than a titanium bezel and fiber-reinforced polymer (that’s plastic, to you and me) elsewhere.
It’s thinner, and the lack of visible screws (aside from the back plate) make for a refined, sleek aesthetic. The display is sapphire crystal as standard, too, protecting the super-bright AMOLED touchscreen display, with the usual MIP Power Glass solar charging options as an additional extra.
The construction makes for an amazing watch, and these upgrades make the Fenix 9 Pro really feel just that, Pro — more like a Marq. I’m wearing the 43mm version, and it really doesn’t feel like an ultra-chunky Fenix. In fact, it feels far more like wearing an upmarket metal dive watch.
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This sealed unit design necessitated a redesign in the buttons, according to Garmin’s promotional material, in order to make sure it remained waterproof up to 40m deep, but Garmin cracked it and the watch retains Garmin’s distinctive five-button design.
It’s even revamped the LED light, with an introduction of a third green option to add to its black and red tones. The green light offers improved visibility compared to the red option, without sacrificing your night-eyes.
Software-wise, the UX is familiar to Garmin watch users, as everything is innately customizable, from the widget stack to workout views to watch faces. New features include Garmin Epic, which allows you to string several workouts together into one mega-event, such as multiple ski runs over one long weekend, for example. You can start it from the watch, and view or share it in the app. Rucking also got a useful redesign, while Maps has been updated to provide an angled POV option.
In our performance test, I was expecting accuracy — after all, the Garmin Fenix 9 Pro retains Garmin’s Elevate V5 heart rate sensor array from previous years — but I wasn’t expecting it to cleave so close to the heart rate monitor and the Apple Watch Ultra 4 (which Apple claims is the most accurate wearable to date) during my test workouts.
Rerouting course directions has proven to be responsive and speedy, while the battery performs as described, lasting for a week, and the watch is comfortable to wear during sleep, workouts and every day.
There wasn’t really any doubt that the Garmin Fenix 9 Pro was going to be a good watch, or even a great one. Like the Apple Watch Ultra 4, it builds on everything Garmin has done before to create a worthy successor to the ever-popular Fenix line. When the Fenix 10 comes out in a few years, this one will come down in price just like the Fenix 8 before it, and we’ll see far more adopters take it on and have fun with it.
I suppose I could have chosen something like the cheap Google Fitbit Air, the Garmin Cirqa, or the Apple Watch Ultra 4 to be our Fitness Device of the Year. But when I thought about what was going to dominate my limited wrist real estate if I sign up for a race, there was only ever going to be a handful of options, and the 43mm Garmin Fenix 9 Pro was first on the list.
It’s smart enough not to look out of place in the office, it’s got everything I need for training, it’s got all the complications I need from the Connect IQ score, like Spotify and Komoot, and a week-long battery life (sorry Apple) that cinches it for me over the Ultra 4.
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