I spent $5 on this Garmin watch face — and it's now my go-to

Garmin Portal Hybrid Watch Face on Forerunner 970 watch — (Image credit: Future)

A new watch face is a great way to freshen up your experience of using any smartwatch, and when it comes to the best Garmin watches, there are hundreds of great options in the Connect IQ app store.

There are a lot of excellent free Garmin watch faces you can use, but if you don’t mind spending a little money, then you can unlock some impressive options, including the Portal Hybrid watch face from developer Stash.Digitale.

The Portal Hybrid face has been a fixture on my wrist for the past couple of weeks; here are five reasons why I’m such a big fan.

It has a clean, appealing design

The Portal Hybrid face is an elegant analog face with precise second markers running around the outside.

Within that, the face shows your stats using another ring, which can be filled or left as an outline, and you can choose the color of the various markers on the face.

I think it works well, giving the impression of a classic analog face, but with some modern touches like the inner ring, and it also looks good in always-on mode when the second hand disappears.

It shows a lot of stats without feeling cluttered

You can show seven stats on the Portal Hybrid face, with three in the inner ring and four more in circles inside that. These can be "target" stats, so the circle fills in as you get closer to completing your step or active minutes goal, for example.

That’s a lot of data, but it doesn’t look or feel like it’s too much, thanks to the way the stats are presented on the watch face. You can also hold any stat to open up more info on the watch.

You can also use the outer ring to show another time zone using the pointer, which I find useful when someone in my family is traveling.

You can customize your stats on the watch

With many third-party Garmin watch faces, you have to adjust settings and choose the stats you want to show in the Connect IQ app, but Portal Hybrid acts like a native watch face, letting you customize everything on the watch itself.

This includes picking the color of the face, choosing the stats to show, and other customizable parts of the face, like whether the inner ring is filled in and the appearance of the hands.

It shows active calories

You can show your total daily calories burned on native Garmin watch faces, but this includes resting calories, which are estimated and fixed based on physiological stats like your height and weight.

I’m much more interested in my active calories burned each day, most of which come from running, because keeping an eye on these helps me ensure I’m not losing weight during marathon training.

It’s power-efficient

One fear I always have when using third-party watch faces is that they’ll drain the battery on my watch faster than native Garmin faces, but having used the Portal Hybrid face for a couple of battery cycles, it is as efficient as a native face.

That’s even with a setup that shows a lot of data even in always-on mode, and you could perhaps extend the battery life a little more by making the always-on mode simpler.

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Nick Harris-Fry is an experienced health and fitness journalist, writing professionally since 2012. He spent nine years working on the Coach magazine and website before moving to the fitness team at Tom’s Guide in 2024. Nick is a keen runner and also the founder of YouTube channel The Run Testers, which specialises in reviewing running shoes, watches, headphones and other gear.

Nick ran his first marathon in 2016 and became obsessed with the sport. He now has PBs of 2hr 25min for the marathon and 15min 30sec for 5K. Nick is also a qualified Run Leader in the UK.

Nick is an established expert in the fitness area and along with writing for many publications, including Live Science, Expert Reviews, Wareable, Coach and Get Sweat Go, he has been quoted on The Guardian and The Independent.

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