Garmin has made notable progress in a bunch of different areas of watch technology in recent years. There’s the new proliferation of satellite comms on its best Garmin watches, like the Garmin Fenix 9 Pro, along with some amazing stuff in dive-ready water resistance and titanium nano-molding cases. But the real tech trend of the last few years? OLED.
The first Garmin OLED watch was the Garmin Venu from 2019. Venu has always been used as an experimentation ground, a way to test which smartwatch features should be brought over to the other core lines. It’s an often under-appreciated trailblazer.
OLED adoption kicked into another gear in 2023 when the Garmin Forerunner 965 — perhaps the best all-round Garmin watch of that generation — introduced the tech to the Forerunner series. And that was just months after the arrival of the OLED Garmin Epix Gen 2 in late 2022. Since then there’s been no stopping OLED.
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MIP and Garmin were once ubiquitous
In 2026 it’s easy to forget just a few years ago, every major Garmin watch had a dull-but-practical MIP (memory-in-pixel) screen. Before OLED Forerunners, before generative AI, before a RAM crisis — 2022 was a simpler time in technology.
Now OLED is ubiquitous, whenever a major new line is announced I go to see if Garmin has finally cut the ties entirely and left MIP in the past. Crucially, though, it didn’t happen with the Fenix 9, meaning transflective displays are here to stay for at least a few years.
But what might make Garmin get rid of MIP?
MIP vs OLED
“There are definitely different things that are enabled for our customers if we stay with a transflective color MIP display. The most significant right now is battery life,” Garmin CEO Brad Trenkle told me.
“Take an Enduro-type product, having a product like that which can work off an MIP display versus an OLED with its inherently higher power drain because it’s emitting versus being reflective [has benefits].”
When you take an OLED watch outside, its screen brightness has to ramp up dramatically to compensate for ambient light. An MIP watch actually gets clearer, while doing nothing and barely using any power.
An OLED Fenix 9 Pro, as you can see above, can reach up to 3000 nits, which is always going to use a decent amount of power regardless of how many efficiencies you get out of the underlying OLED panel tech.
The power of Endurance
For the kind of Garmin user who has their watch for regular runs and bike rides near their home in the city or suburbs, it’s no big deal. But for actual adventurer types on multi-day hikes?
It’s not hard to see the continuing appeal of MIP, particularly when the ‘always-on’ display mode of OLED Garmin watches dramatically reduces battery life. Simply using your watch as an actual watch can be a surprisingly taxing endeavour, when outdoors on a sunny day.
That argument may not hold forever, though. “We do see that gap closing,” says Trenkle. “It’s closed a lot, which is why you’ve seen battery life on our OLED products continue to increase generation over generation. But that gap has not completely converged, and I think until it does, we definitely don’t think that MIP will completely go away.”
The process has already begun, though. Just look at the mid-tier Forerunner watches. There is no MIP option in any of the new or vaguely recent Forerunner watches, from the Garmin Forerunner 70 up to the 970. What we’ve ended up with is MIP being effectively wedded to solar charging, in specialist models like the Fenix 9 Pro Solar and Garmin Instinct 3 Solar, which allows for the alarmingly cool-sounding claim of up to “unlimited” battery life when the watch spends a decent amount of time outdoors in sunlight.
Where is the Solar OLED?
It leads me to wonder if the actual inflection point — when MIP gets nixed — might end up being not just when Garmin is even happier with OLED watch battery life, but when OLED can successfully be paired with solar charging. Because this has not happened yet.
My conclusion has always been that the in-screen solar charging tech the Fenix 9 Pro Solar uses is largely incompatible with OLED because it ends up effectively intercepting light to turn it into power. That’s going to have some impact on display image quality. So I asked Trenkle: is solar always going to ruin an OLED screen?
“From purpose of a thought experiment, not really,” says Trenkle.
“It depends upon the solar technology you use. Garmin has employed two different types of solar technology through the years. We’ve used amorphous silicon and crystalline silicon. Amorphous silicon, we call it transparent, but it’s almost like polarized sunglasses.”
This is the solar tech I was talking about earlier, the kind that sits over the display.
“You’re cutting etching very fine lines into amorphous silicon, and so that sits over the top of the organic material, which can obviously degrade.”
”But in some of our more recent products, we use crystalline silicon. That’s not a transparent silicon material, but we do essentially make the chapter ring solar. You get the ring around the outside, but nothing overlays the active area of the display.”
The future is opaque
Crystalline silicone is the stuff used in conventional solar panels. My favourite example of this in action (in a watch) is in the Garmin Instinct 3 Solar, where a relatively huge area around the screen is given over to this solar-charging surface. Trenkle appears to suggest this could be one entirely feasible way to bring solar charging to an OLED watch.
“It’s always finding the right technology to apply in the circumstance that we want, but in that case, you don’t get any degradation or loss, whether it’s reflectivity or [image quality]. Yes, it would be a way to counter that.”
This is far off a confirmation of a crystalline silicone solar-charging Garmin OLED watch. But, just as OLED’s own efficiency led to its wider uptake by Garmin, perhaps we’re just a solar charging efficiency bump away from this concept becoming a reality.
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Andrew Williams
