Exercise and getting outdoors are a big part of how I keep my mental health vaguely in check. But at the back of my mind, I know I don’t make the best of this, for one reason. I head out one hundred percent of the time with the distraction-magnet known as a phone in my pocket or running belt.
But taking a hike with the new Garmin Marq Adventurer was the unlikely device that could change that.
Unlikely? The Marq Adventurer is a luxury health and activity watch, one whose £2199-and-up price tag doesn’t seem exactly the kind of thing you’d associate with mindfulness or cutting down on tech in your life. But nevertheless, that’s just what I found.
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A phone-shaped problem
My issue is that, like many of you I bet, I struggle to shake off the comfort blanket of streaming podcasts or music when I’m out in nature for a run or walk. And flat-out leaving the phone at home feels like a risk not worth taking.
Yes, this is obviously miles better than sitting at home scrolling through social media feeds. But I don’t get anything like that sense of clarifying mental unloading the (very) few times I’ve forced myself to head out and hear the sounds of, y’know, my actual surroundings for a bit.
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I have a few excuses. I live on my own, so would be doubly stuffed if, for whatever reason, I lock myself out of my home without any real means of communication, and I tend to get out during the working day a lot, so need to be on hand for any work emergencies.
The Garmin Marq Adventurer, like just a couple of other top-tier Garmin watches, blasts all those excuses away.
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Garmin Marq: Emergency comms
It is among the perilously few watches to have not only LTE “mobile” internet for phone-free but phone-like communication with other people, and satellite comms as a backup. This is on hand should your escapades be a little more adventurous than mine, extending beyond South London into places where even mobile signal doesn’t reach.
It’s a cut-down watch equivalent of one of Garmin’s standalone InReach satellite communicators, a standard choice for hardcore expeditions — and for the ratification of some Guinness World Record attempts where an adjudicator can’t simply tag along. We’re talking about trekking across deserts and up perilous mountains.
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A Marq could be a life-saver in the sense of letting you get in touch with someone if you left your keys at home. Or a literal life-saver, as Garmin actually runs an SOS service that can pass your details and location onto emergency services when necessary.
And the crucial part: the Garmin Marq is not a full smartwatch, another attention magnet that aspires to be a shrunk-down phone and basically needs daily charging. With lighter use, you should only need one charge most months.
These watches don’t cut you off from entertainment, as they have a class-leading 128GB storage you can use for podcasts, audiobooks and music — as well as maps. But I just know I wouldn’t use a Garmin Marq as a running-walking-hiking crutch the way I do with my phone.
It’s a dream watch or something. There’s just one problem. I can’t afford one.
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Garmin Marq: An expensive heritage
The Garmin Marq joins the Fenix 8 Pro and Fenix 9 Pro, the Quatix 8 Pro and D2 Mach 2 Pro as the few watches you can buy that let you sever that link with your phone — without feeling stranded. That these watches all cost a small fortune points to one issue of making a wearable a back-up comms device. The tech isn’t cheap to implement.
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And the Marq is the most desirable and ostentatious of the lot. This is the third generation in Garmin’s luxury line, a family that hasn’t been updated since 2022.
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Despite surely selling in relatively small numbers compared to a Fenix or Forerunner model, the Garmin Marq comes in one of six specific identities intended to bring the sense it’s reflecting the sort of person you are. Or the sort of hobby you’re into.
There’s the green bezel Golfer for — you guessed it — golf fans. The Adventurer watch I got to test on a hike feels like an all-rounder outdoors watch for folks who dream of globe-trotting expeditions, coming as it does with an Italian leather outer strap in the box. Indiana Jones edition, basically.
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All these watches have dive-ready water resistance, but the new-for-2026 sub-series Dive leans into the underwater theme with a Maritime blue ceramic bezel and 60-minute dive timer bezel markings, used in the software.
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For any sharp shooters, survivalists or all-round hard-nuts, there’s a military-themed Commander, with a surprisingly fetching Jacquard camo strap.
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The Athlete, which is the closest we get to a luxury-grade Garmin Forerunner, is relatively unassuming bar the bright green accents it shares with the last generation.
They don’t scream luxury to me, but Garmin must not have received too many user complaints or comments given these highlights return once again, having featured in the class of 2022.
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Or perhaps my favourite of the lot, despite me having absolutely nothing to do with the hobby it’s linked to, there’s the flight-ready Aviator. It has a simple white-on-black bezel. Dead classy — spoken like someone who was clearly never meant to wear, or certainly own, one of these watches.
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Design upgrades you don’t see elsewhere in the wider Garmin range include an (almost) all titanium casing, bar subtle polymer strips used to make room for the watch’s various comms antennas — they won’t work through metal.
The Adventurer and Commander also have intricately “micro knurled” outer buttons and the wider series is rich in shiny ceramic bezels. None of this stuff comes cheap, and the buttons’ inner workings are admirably over-engineered compared with the Garmin norm too.
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The Garmin Marq use inductive buttons just like the old Fenix 8 series, which introduced 40m dive-ready water resistance to the brand’s more mainstream watches. But it left them feeling kinda spongy or squelchy, so the Marq series uses a mechanical clicker as well as an inductive core, for satisfying tactile feedback without needing to cut a hole in the case for the button. That was the real advancement of the inductive button in the first place.
The result is incredibly satisfying button feedback, in a watch you can take a good way towards the centre of the earth — underwater at least.
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Does all this flash stuff make me want to save up for the multi-thousand-pound investment that is a Garmin Marq? No, but it does make me wish some of its other highlights, like LTE internet, would make it a little further down the Garmin range. At least as an option.
At a time when many of us are, or should, reconsider how much time we spend mindlessly scrolling on our phones or chipping away at our IQ talking to AI chatbots, the Garmin Marq is one of the few cogent arguments that one way out might actually be a little more tech, not less.
Here’s how the pricing of the six models breaks down:
The Garmin Marq range is available to order now.