Garmin Forerunner 570 review — Bright, accurate, slightly overpriced

The Garmin Forerunner 570 is one of the best mid-range running watches of the year so far, and it might be roundly considered a direct successor to the Forerunner 265.

Like that watch, it can do more than most people need. But it doesn’t have advanced features like on-watch maps, ECG readings and some of Garmin’s nerdiest stats.

A few competitors, like the Suunto Vertical and Polar Grit X2, do have some of those tasty extras at a similar cost. And unsurprisingly, the last-generation Forerunner 965 and Forerunner 265 seemed better deals when they arrived — unsurprising because of all the expensive tariff chaos and general inflation seen over the last couple of years.

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We do find it hard to be too hard on the Forerunner 570, though, because the overall experience is excellent, and buoyed by a new, even brighter screen.

The Garmin Forerunner 570 costs $549.99/£459.99 regardless of whether you pick the 42mm edition or the 47mm one. Its older sibling, the Forerunner 265 cost $449.99/£429.99 at its launch in 2023.

Garmin Forerunner 570: Design

The Garmin Forerunner 570’s price won’t make it the right pick for everyone, but it does have an all-embracing design. There are two sizes, 42mm and 47mm, and by Garmin standards, this is not an imposing watch.

Its bezel isn’t built-up and bulky like that of an adventure watch. And while the 47mm version we have may be a little large for some wrists, the 42mm will look petite in comparison.

The Forerunner 570 build is mid-range. It has an aluminium bezel and Gorilla Glass 3, rather than the Titanium and Sapphire crystal of the Forerunner 970. During the few weeks we have been testing it, we have managed to put a tiny nick in the display glass. But we’ve even managed to do that with Sapphire before.

The rest of the casing is Garmin’s plastic “polymer.” It’s not flashy, but its strength and hardness are excellent. It weighs a mere 50g total, which is actually less than the 56g Forerunner 970 even though that watch’s bezel is low-weight titanium.

We’ve worn it mostly 24/7 throughout testing, and haven’t felt the need to wrench it off at night, despite testing landing during a hot summer.

In its black finish, the Forerunner 570 is quite a low-key watch. There’s no colour pop. It’s not a show-off, but show-off finishes certainly are available. Here’s the rundown of the colourful options:

- Raspberry (pink) bezel, white shell with mango highlights (42mm)

- Amp yellow bezel with off-white casing, turquoise highlights (47mm)

- Indigo bezel with purple casing (47mm)

Whether you choose the 42mm or 47mm Forerunner, you get a very sharp OLED screen and one with significantly higher brightness than in previous generations. As noted in our Forerunner 970 review, Garmin really lets these OLED panels rip. There’s a tendency in tech for high brightness “nit” counts to be splashed onto product web pages, but for that to rarely, if ever, be visible in real-world use.

Not so here. Outdoors visibility is exceptionally good.

Garmin Forerunner 570: Features

The Forerunner 570 is a mid-tier Garmin watch, despite costing quite a lot of money. A lack of mapping support is the most obvious feature cut.

At one point, we used the Garmin Connect app to work out a half-marathon route and sent this to the Forerunner 570. That works fine, but all you see is a breadcrumb trail, not any map data around it.

New for this generation, the Forerunner 570 gets a speaker and mic, because Garmin has decided to go big on voice support. There are two types. You can use the mic to access your phone’s own assistant, as you might with wired headphones. Or, more notably, a Voice Command mini app lets you control certain Forerunner 570 features

That might be starting an activity or toggling a setting. We only really find it useful for setting timers, because it’s otherwise just as fast to use the Forerunner 570’s buttons.

We’ve almost exclusively used the buttons to operate this watch (there are five of them). But you can use the touchscreen too.

And aside from maps, it only really misses out on the most specialised of recorded stats. In the Garmin hierarchy, the elements it gains over cheaper models are things like Training Readiness, Training Status and the Race Calendar.

Those first two build on what key Garmin stat Body Battery does — basically telling you how run down you are — but with a view to serving the athlete class. The Forerunner 570 also has multi-sport activities, for triathletes (and duathletes), although the feature is more flexible than that too, as you can create your own custom MultiSport profiles.

These join the usual pantheon of activity modes, of which there are far too many to dig into here.

All Garmin Forerunner 570s also have music support, and there’s a fairly stingy 8GB of internal storage for your tracks and podcasts. As usual, Amazon Music, Spotify, Deezer and YouTube Music are supported, with mini apps that let you download tracks from their respective libraries, if you have an active subscription to them.

You get a good spread of features in the Forerunner 570, but it’s worth noting Coros, Suunto and Polar all offer on-watch maps for this sort of money. Are their mapping features and interfaces as good as Garmin’s? No.

The Forerunner 570 also lacks ECG support, which requires Garmin’s sensor array with extra little panels that sit on your wrist. You get these in the Forerunner 970, although think twice before considering ECG a must-have. While it can look out for signs of arrhythmia, it makes you take 30 seconds out of your day, as it’s not a passive reading.

Garmin Forerunner 570: Performance

The Garmin Forerunner 570 is a watch we recommend, but with an important disclaimer. Its new, super-bright screen is a bit of a battery hog. It’s doubly worth bearing in mind if you are upgrading from an older Garmin watch with a low-power-drain transflective screen.

As per the spec sheet, the Forerunner 570 is rated for 11 days of use. But this will drop significantly if you use it to train outdoors a lot, and dramatically if you use the always-on screen mode.

We often recommend using this mode, but with the Forerunner 570? We’re not so sure. There’s such a jump in brightness when the screen is actively used that it barely feels like the watch screen is on when passively displaying the time. And battery life drops to 3-4 days with heavy use.

One of the issues here is that while there’s a brightness control, it doesn’t seem to massively impact the brightness ceiling. The watch will still get super-bright when it needs to contend with a bright day.

That brightness is an awesome skill to have, but it does clash with one of the traditional Garmin highlights. So is the Forerunner 570's 11-day battery life claim a bit rich? No, but the way we use it, we are not going to get close to that.

Here’s how our last weekend of testing panned out. The Forerunner 570 came off charge at 8:30 am on Saturday. We used it to track a Parkrun 5K, and after adding the run there and back, it ended up around an hour of GPS tracking. We were down to 93% by 9:35 am.

After an hour at the gym and a few more hours past, the Forerunner 570 was at 82% by 3 pm. The Sunday included a 2-hour run. By Monday morning at 8:30 am, exactly 48 hours after charging, the watch was down to 33% battery. This tells us reasonably heavy — but perfectly realistic — use will leave you with three days of battery life.

We have also found that the display can contribute to overheating, which can happen during one run. The watch didn’t reset, but became completely unresponsive until we got under the shade for a few seconds. This was, admittedly, on a 30-plus degree day at the tail end of a 2-hour run, but a more powerful screen will contribute.

Other elements of performance are mostly on par with the best of Garmin. Heart rate performance is great for running, and only really showed up the deficiencies of wrist-worn tech when in the gym for weight sessions. A chest strap is still miles better for that scenario, but the Forerunner 570 will admittedly do the job OK.

We’ve found, as with the Fenix 8, the Forerunner 570 can take a little longer to report a GPS lock than previous generations. But when this is across the board, we wonder whether it’s a difference in what stage the watch claims a GPS lock, rather than it actually taking longer. It might be up to 15-20 seconds.

This watch has dual-band GPS, and we’ve seen no issues with mid-tracking signal reliability whatsoever during testing. The route maps you get after a run, your pace stats and distance travelled numbers are all excellent. It’s a watch on which you can rely for your training.

Garmin Forerunner 570: User reviews

The Forerunner 570 has received mostly highly positive reviews from buyers. And while some of our own comments circle around potential battery life complaints, shoppers have favourably compared battery life here to that of the Apple Watch series.

Garmin’s watch comfortably outlasts Apple’s, hugely so if you don’t exercise a ton. Others have also commented on how light the watch feels, and that was an owner of the larger 47mm version. The 42mm one is even lighter.

Should you buy the Garmin Forerunner 970?

In one narrow but important way, the Forerunner 570 is Garmin’s most advanced watch, alongside the Forerunner 970. These fitness trackers have the company’s brightest screens. Yep, including the Fenix 8 and even more expensive specialist watches.

This does wonders for outdoor visibility, not that Garmin watches had an issue in that area to begin with.

If that doesn’t appeal, the Forerunner 570 may seem a bit expensive. And thanks to global events since the last generation in 2023, it is a little high-priced for US buyers in particular. Garmin is far from alone among tech companies in having to tweak pricing to reflect commercial realities, though.

If Garmin Forerunner 570 is not for you

There are several options within the Garmin stable that may be a better fit. From the last generation, the Forerunner 965 is available for just a little more at the time of review, and has on-watch maps.

Right now, it’s a better deal, but it won’t be supported as long. Similarly, the Forerunner 265 direct predecessor, is probably better value. There’s no voice assistant support, but no Garmin watch is really an Apple Watch replacer in that smartwatch sense.

Don’t discount the even lower-end Forerunner 165 either. It’s still a great watch and can be found for significantly less money.

How we tested

The Forerunner 570 was tested for several weeks, and was used directly after testing the Forerunner 970. This helps to nail down some of the differences that might not be apparent from the spec sheet, like how accurate the heart rate and GPS tracking feel, as is. The results? Pretty similar.

It was used as my only fitness watch, and only watch in general, for around three weeks. Phone notifications were switched on, and it was variously used with the “always on” screen mode to better gauge battery life. And in that time, its heart rate readings were analysed alongside a chest strap, worn at the same time during a few workouts. Exercise tracking will have included upwards of 150km of running and a handful of gym sessions, as well as more ordinary step counting.