I’m liking this compact sports watch

Garmin seems to think the Lily 2 Active exclusively appeals to women. It’s one of the smaller sports watches, with a diameter of 38 millimetres. Although other models may only be a few millimetres bigger, their overall appearance is often too chunky for my taste. My wrists aren’t unusually slim, but I’m not a fan of big, chunky watches – neither for sports nor for everyday use. So I was all the more pleased that this watch fits my wrist. 17.5 centimetres is the maximum circumference for the strap supplied.

Comfy to wear

Weighing just 29 grammes, the Lily 2 Active’s very comfortable to wear and I hardly notice it. The silicone strap supplied is on the slim side but sturdy nonetheless. Its classic fastener’s easy to open and close, but doesn’t come open accidentally. Changing the strap doesn’t require any tools as long as it’s under 14 millimetres wide.

The case and bezel of the Lily are made of anodised aluminium and they look simple and elegant. The watch is water-resistant to 5 ATM, making it suitable for swimming. The LCD only displays 16 shades of grey and, at 240 × 201 pixels, doesn’t completely fill the round screen. In spite of this, the contents are usually easy to read. There’s a touch-sensitive area used for operating the watch at the bottom edge. The Gorilla Glass 3 is designed to prevent scratches on the display.

Not always intuitive to use

Garmin has gone for a mix of touchscreen and two buttons on the housing to operate the Lily 2 Active. The top button is for accessing the quick selection of sports, but only if your starting point is the start screen. When tracking is on, it serves as a start and stop button. The lower button’s for going back in the menus. When the watch is tracking, you can use it to set lap markers.

If you press both buttons at the same time, the top button will take you to quick settings for Garmin Pay, sleep mode or stopwatch. The bottom button will take you to the settings, the alarm and also to the stopwatch as well as a selection of display designs.

The touchscreen is for navigating the pre-installed apps by swiping to the right or left. Depending on the app, you can delve deeper by tapping, although the sometimes narrow menu items are more suitable for small fingers. The watch also responds to touch below the touchscreen. In that area, however, tapping only switches between the data displayed on some dials or takes you back one step in menus.

I did get used to using the Lily 2 Active, but I’m still not really happy with the controls. The steps don’t always correspond to my logic.

Notifications and payment don’t make a smartwatch

The Lily 2 Active focuses on sports and health tracking, but it’s not a fully fledged smartwatch. This means you can’t install additional apps. However, the watch displays all notifications from your smartphone, although I soon restricted these in the Garmin app. You can use Garmin Pay to pay with the watch, provided your bank’s one of the cooperation partners.

You can also control the music playback on your smartphone, check the weather forecast or find your smartphone using the Lily 2 Active. The latter is possible because the watch makes your phone ring.

Covers what you’d expect

The Lily 2 Active may be small, but I wasn’t missing any tracking functions that are relevant to me. The watch has built-in GPS, counts steps, detects various types of sport, measures pulse and blood oxygen and monitors sleep. Garmin’s Move IQ automatically recognises activities such as walking or cycling and logs them. But if you want to record an activity in more detail, you’ll still have to start it manually. The list of sports to choose from is very long and there are also coaching options.

You can view the data in the Garmin app. There’s a separate view for almost every sub-item. Garmin also calculates things like fitness age or body battery. The latter tells you how much strength’s left in your body. However, I was surprised to receive pointers that I’d had an exhausting day when I was actually working from home a lot and not moving much.

The Lily 2 Active’s memory can store up to 14 days of activity data and seven activities including time data. As a rule, however, you should synchronise it with the app on your smartphone to prevent the memory from filling up fast.

One week without recharging

According to Garmin, the battery of the Lily 2 Active should last up to nine days. When GPS is active, the battery life’s reduced to nine hours – which should be enough for most activities. My watch lost nine per cent of its battery when GPS was on for 45 minutes. Extrapolate that and this should give me a GPS runtime of just over eight hours.

Without GPS, the Lily consumes about five per cent of my battery in 24 hours. Theoretically, this results in a runtime that’s about twice as long as specified by Garmin. Doing the maths with a mixed calculation of occasional GPS use (approx. 30 minutes per day), that equals a runtime time of one week with the watch.

The Lily 2 Active comes with a USB-C cable with a proprietary Garmin charging clip for charging. It fits any power supply unit with a USB-C socket or, alternatively, a notebook. Unfortunately, hardly any wearable available has satisfied my wish of a USB-C as a charging port. It’s likely that the space required for this is simply too much.