At this point, smartwatches have become an integral part of our daily wardrobe. It has become a necessity to step out of the house with a small computer on your wrist, promising us everything from instant text notifications to hands-free calling to increased awareness of vital statistics like heart rate.
However, not all smartwatches are created equal, and some models are more advanced than others. Some models are best for light everyday use, while others are more rugged. Some are better suited to men’s needs and wrist sizes, while women are looking for watches with smaller profiles and more accurate feminine health tracking. The Lily 2 is a small, stylish watch with a powerful tracking app to help her meet these needs.
Garmin Lilly 2
The Garmin Lily 2 is stylish and functional. With beautiful lens designs and easily interchangeable bands, this watch is perfect for smartwatch owners who want their watches to be less conspicuous. It expands on the previous generation’s workout options and won’t slow you down with short battery life.
- It doesn’t scream “Hey, look! I’m a smartwatch!”
- Automatically set goals to match recent activity levels.
- Water resistant for showering and swimming
- It depends on your phone’s GPS.
- The charger is weird
Price, availability and specifications
The Garmin Lily 2 is priced at $250 and is available through several online retailers, including Garmin and Amazon. Scheels and Best Buy also sell Garmin’s latest smartwatch for women. Pricing may vary based on color choice and face size. Select versions are currently $50 off at Scheels and Amazon.
What are the good features of the Garmin Lily 2?
It is beautifully designed and thoughtfully functional.
The Lily 2 is a beautiful watch. The design impressions on the lens faces are subtle and beautiful without being overly obtrusive or visually obstructive when looking at the screen. It is available in six variants – all in different colors, two silicone bands, two leather bands, and two nylon bands – each with a unique lens design.
With its dim, colorless display, the Lily 2 is an excellent smartwatch for women who don’t want their watch to be overtly smart.
Battery life is excellent. Garmin says the Lily 2’s battery lasts for five days before needing a charge; I don’t like letting my smartwatch dip below 20% battery, so I pop the Lily 2 on the charger at the end of every fourth day. I tested the watch’s 5 ATM water resistance rating in the shower and swimming, and it came out flawless.
I went into the Lily 2 testing completely unfamiliar with Garmin’s approach to health and wellness. The “close your rings” culture of Apple Watches had become ingrained in me; my friends and I held each other accountable for closing rings daily to a cult-like degree. (One of us proudly sent a photo of closed rings from her hospital bed; another time, a group chat reminded everyone to close their rings, which ended with a friend responding within moments that she was closing hers.) get it done! (It was her wedding day.)
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It took using the Lily 2 for me to realize how rigorous this goal is. The Apple Watch face lets you change your calorie/step/exercise goals as often as you want, but the numbers stay the same until you manually update them again. The Lily 2, on the other hand, sets unique goals based on your recent sleep, stress, and activity levels (the time frame isn’t indicated, but my goals changed slightly each day).
This automatic goal setting feature is optional, but I quickly liked it. Any woman who goes through different phases of her monthly cycle can certainly appreciate the value of a watch that detects and responds appropriately to your low energy levels.
Furthermore, the Garmin app is largely neutral in terms of what information is prioritized in home reading (health versus fitness and exercise only). Sure, you can configure Garmin and Apple’s tracking apps to make fitness-related content more or less prominent. However, not having your daily progress (or lack thereof) immediately displayed in live rings was refreshing.
One of my favorite features is Garmin’s “Body Battery” stats, which pulls together data like your sleep quality, stress levels, and recent activity to assign you an estimated “Battery Level” out of 100. I found it to be mostly accurate, and I appreciate the feature’s encouragement to rest when my battery is running low and move when it’s high. This makes the Lily 2 an excellent watch for women who want to be more in tune with their overall health but aren’t looking to become exercise machines.
By making a few adjustments to the Garmin Connect app home screen, you can choose to see your blood oxygen levels, current menstrual cycle stage, heart rate, stress levels, sleep quality, and body battery. If this information is unimportant or annoying, you can choose not to see any exercise, steps, or calorie data on the home screen.
What’s bad about the Garmin Lily 2?
No GPS for outdoor exercise tracking without a phone
The Lily 2 lacks GPS connectivity, which is its biggest downside. I prefer working out at the gym to running outdoors, so keeping my phone handy while I’m lifting isn’t a big deal. However, I’m a long-distance hiker and enjoy daily walks, and it’s disappointing that I couldn’t rely on the Lily 2 to track my route without the help of a smartphone, both from a fitness and safety perspective.
I hope smartwatches will establish a more widespread standard for charging. The Lily 2 uses a weird charger that you can never replace if you forget your charger on vacation, for example, and only have a store in the hotel lobby. (The Garmin Venu series of smartwatches uses a completely different charger, for example.)
The watch’s wake button gives a small tactile nudge when touched, but on a handful of occasions, it took me an annoying two or three presses of the button for it to register my touch and respond. Like any other smartwatch, the Lily 2 uses a screen-to-wake feature, which keeps the screen dimmed until it registers arm movement. But if your arm is positioned in a way that dims the Lily 2’s face, and you want to tap the face to take a quick look at it, the watch won’t respond.
I learned this while sitting with a sleeping cat wrapped around my watch arm. Rather than commit the cardinal sin of disturbing the cat, I just wanted to tap the idle watch and read the time, but the Lily 2 didn’t notice at all and refused to wake up until I moved my arm—much to the dismay of my sleepy cat.
Should you buy it?
For casual or indoor exercise
There are better smartwatches for professional athletes, even under the Garmin umbrella. The Lily 2 lacks advanced features like GPS, continuous ECG readings, and a metric that indicates how ready you are for a workout. Garmin calls this metric “training readiness” and calculates it using data like your sleep score, stress, recovery time from your last workout, and other training stats.
Garmin brings training readiness and multi-band GPS to a single women’s watch, the Forerunner 265S. These sports-related strengths, combined with other attractive features missing from the Lily 2 like Garmin Pay, an AMOLED display, and onboard music storage, make the $450 Forerunner 265S what I’d recommend for women with tough fitness goals, like marathon training or competitive weightlifting. You can even opt into daily workout suggestions with the Forerunner.
For the same price as the Forerunner, the Venu 3 also supports Garmin Pay, local music storage, and voice control over calls and texts. However, you’ll miss out on the Training Readiness feature, so the Venu 3S could be a solid option for women with cardiovascular issues who want to monitor their condition throughout the day.
If you’re looking for optional continuous ECG readings, the Garmin Venu 3S is your choice. Of course, if diving is part of your workout, you’ll want to look at Garmin’s higher-quality dive-ready watches.
Don’t like any of these options, including the Lily 2? There are plenty of fitness tracking options beyond watches to explore.
So, is the Lily 2 right for everyone? Well, if you, like me, enjoy walking and running but find the idea of sucking nutrients out of a bag on the eighth mile of a run terrifying, the Lily 2 might be right for you. If you’re into simple exercises, like yoga and hiking, and don’t care much about data like recovery time and heart rate, the Lily 2 might be right for you.
Most importantly, if you want to break out of the “closing your rings” mentality and instead use a watch that raises your exercise/calorie/step goals to a level that still challenges you while staying in perfect alignment with your recent activity levels, the Lily 2 is absolutely the perfect choice for you.
Garmin Lilly 2
The minimalist aesthetic and subtle, elegant lens impressions make the Lily 2 a stylish accessory on any woman’s wrist. The 16-level grayscale keeps the LCD display unobtrusive, while an array of sensors track your most important health data.
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