Alpenglow

The same mountain, all day long. Alpenglow changes its landscape as your day passes: golden light at dawn, clear blue at midday, deep red at dusk, and a moonlit ridge at night.

The artwork sits in the top half of the dial and falls away into true black, so the time stays the easiest thing on the watch to read.

ON THE DIAL

• A mountain scene that follows sunrise, daylight, sunset and night
• A large two-tone clock, with optional seconds while your wrist is raised
• The date on the left and a battery gauge on the right
• Four data fields with a glyph and a value
• A progress bar toward a daily goal, with the percentage beside it
• An optional progress ring around the whole perimeter, tracking a second goal
• A second metric under the bar
• An optional two-line motto across the sky

WHAT YOU CAN CHANGE

• Which scene shows: follow the day, or pin one of the four
• How the scene is scheduled: real sunrise and sunset, or hours you set
• Accent colour: Alpine Orange, Ember, Glacier Blue or Snow
• Text size: standard, large or largest. It sets the date, the battery percentage, the data fields and the lower metric, and leaves the clock alone. The data fields take as much of it as the row has room for, so choosing two fields instead of four is what gives them the biggest numbers
• How many data fields: four, two or none
• Which metric sits in each field
• Which goal the progress bar tracks, or off
• Which goal the perimeter ring tracks, or off. Steps around the rim and Body Battery across the bar is a common pairing. Turning the ring on pulls the data fields and the lower row inward to make room for it
• The metric under the bar
• Seconds, date, battery and motto, each on or off
• 12 or 24 hour time, following the watch by default

METRICS AVAILABLE IN ANY FIELD

Steps, heart rate, elevation, calories, distance, floors climbed, watch battery, Body Battery, stress, active minutes, sunrise, sunset, notifications, temperature, move bar.

Elevation comes from the barometric altimeter, so it reads on watches that have one and shows dashes on watches that do not. Body Battery needs a watch that computes it. Garmin does not publish Training Readiness, Recovery Time or Sleep Score to third-party watch faces, so those are not offered; Body Battery and stress are the readings that exist.

PRESS AND HOLD

Hold any data field, the date, the battery or the lower metric to open the Garmin app behind it: hold heart rate for the heart rate screen, hold steps for steps. Fields whose metric has no app of its own do nothing, by design.

ALWAYS ON

On always-on the artwork is put away and the dial goes to pure black with a small, dim clock that moves every minute. That is what protects the panel from burn-in and keeps the watch inside Garmin's always-on power budget. Raise your wrist and the full scene comes straight back.

NO CONNECTION NEEDED

Alpenglow never makes a network request. Real sunrise and sunset times use the position fix your watch already holds, and if there is no fix it falls back to the hours you set. Everything on the dial works with the phone in a drawer.

DEVICES

Round AMOLED watches: fenix 8, fenix 9, fenix E, epix, Venu 2, Venu 3, Venu 4, Forerunner 165, 170, 265, 570, 965, 970, Vivoactive 5, Vivoactive 6, Instinct 3 AMOLED, MARQ 2, Descent Mk3, D2 Mach and Approach S70.

Also the transflective screens: fenix 7, 7S and 7X including the Pro and no-wifi variants, and the solar fenix 8 in 47mm and 51mm. Those panels show 64 colours, so the scenes are dithered for them and the palette is authored to suit. They gain something the AMOLED watches cannot have: because the screen stays lit, the seconds keep ticking even in low power.

SETTINGS

Garmin Connect . your watch . Connect IQ Apps . Alpenglow . Settings