Always-On Display, But Only While You Run

Keep the screen on while you run, and only while you run

You're three kilometres in, you want to know your pace, and your wrist flick doesn't quite land. So you flick again, harder, and the screen finally wakes up two seconds later. On a long run, that adds up.

The obvious fix is to turn on always-on display. The problem is that always-on display is the single most expensive display setting on an AMOLED Garmin: leave it on all day and you can lose a large chunk of your battery life to a screen you're not looking at.

There's a better way. Your watch can keep the display lit for activities only, and go back to normal wrist-flick behaviour the moment you finish.

On newer watches: the Activity focus mode

Focus modes are separate setting profiles your watch switches to automatically for a given situation, such as sleep or an activity. Change a setting inside one and it only applies while that mode is active.

1. From the watch face, hold the MENU button
2. Select Watch Settings, then Focus Modes
3. Select Activity
4. Open Display & Brightness
5. Turn Always On Display on

That's it. From your next run onwards the screen stays lit the whole time, and as soon as you save the activity your watch goes back to waking on a wrist flick.

You'll find focus modes on the fēnix 8 and 8 Pro, Forerunner 570 and 970, Venu 4, Venu X1, vívoactive 6 and newer models built on the same software, like the fēnix 9.

On older AMOLED watches: the Display menu

Watches like the Forerunner 265 and 965, epix (Gen 2) and Venu 3 don't have focus modes, but they split their screen settings the same way. Go to Settings → System → Display and you'll find separate sections for general use, during activity and during sleep, each with its own Always On Display switch. Turn it on under the activity section and leave general use alone.

If your watch has a MIP screen

On an Instinct, a solar fēnix or any other watch with the classic memory-in-pixel display, the screen is always visible anyway. There's nothing to switch on. What you can adjust there is the backlight, which is what lights the screen up in the dark.

What it costs you

Keeping the screen lit for an hour's run uses noticeably more battery than letting it sleep between glances, but it's a fraction of what all-day always-on costs. You're paying for the hour you actually look at your watch, instead of the sixteen hours you don't.

If your battery is disappearing faster than it should, the display is only one of the culprits: these settings are the ones worth checking first.