Review: Garmin Forerunner 645 Music

Once upon a time (last year), in a land far, far away (Cupertino), Apple made a simple, beautiful, tiny item called an iPod Shuffle. You “plugged” it in with a "cable" and added things that were called “MP3s” to it. I loved mine, and it was perfect for runners. For years, I clipped an itty-bitty, hot pink device to my sports bra and slipped out the door, humming happily along to the Foo Fighters as I went. It wasn't that long ago that the iPod went the way of the dodo, but the Shuffle is especially missed.

All athletes like music, but it might be especially important to runners. People spend hours crafting the perfect playlist to keep at 180 strides per minute. While music storage is not a unique feature—you can also add a couple hundred songs to a Fitbit Versa, or Apple Watch—the Forerunner 645 Music is the first device that is explicitly for music-listening runners. I dig it so hard. I haven’t been so happy since Jimmy Eat World announced a new album after fifteen years.

The Forerunner 645 Music is part of Garmin’s acclaimed Forerunner line for runners, and it’s the smallest and most unobtrusive one yet. With a face that is 42.5 millimeters across, it fits perfectly on my small wrist, and comes with a soft silicone strap that can accommodate wrists as small as 12.7 centimeters in circumference.

You can also swap the quick-release band out for bands of different materials or colors, but the silicone worked well for me. I didn’t have any issues with it sliding off or down and disrupting the heart-rate monitor, as I have with other wearables. It took the battery about an hour to charge, and between GPS-tracked workouts and playing music every day, I found myself needing to charge it every 4 or 5 days. A GPS-tracked workout while playing music could drain the battery as much as 20 percent in an hour.

The face is made from chemically strengthened glass, with a 240 x 240 color display, and a beautiful, retro stainless steel bezel. I found it easy to read in both natural outdoor daylight and indoors, but you can push a button to activate a backlight at night. You can also customize the watch face by choosing from built-in face configurations, dials, select your preferred data points to display, different watch hands, or tinker with the background and accent colors.

Rather than a touchscreen, the Forerunner 645 Music uses five buttons around the edge of the bezel to navigate. Even with tiny lettering just inside the bezel to remind you of each button’s function, there is definitely a period where you have to struggle to remember which button does what. You hold down the top button on the left side to navigate through different widgets, like Garmin Pay, the alarm, or timer; hold down the middle button to adjust settings or reconnect your Bluetooth headphones; and hold down the bottom button to navigate through your music.

Adding music is pretty easy (and also reminds me of my iPod Shuffle, RIP). Install Garmin Express on your computer, and when you open it, any music that isn’t DRM-protected will show up. Select and transfer to the plugged-in device. You can also opt to play music from your phone, although this defeats the purpose of buying this particular watch.

In addition to music storage, the other touted feature of the Forerunner 645 Music is Garmin Pay, Garmin’s new contactless payment system. It's easy to add a credit card and PIN in the Garmin Connect App. And of course, like other Garmin watches, the Forerunner 645 Music has a wrist-based HR-monitoring system and uses the Garmin Connect app on your phone to store and display a ton of health and fitness data.

The GPS, step counter, and heart-rate data seemed accurate and comparable to other fitness wearables I’ve tested, including Garmin’s own Fenix 5S. Of all its myriad sensors, the sleep sensor was the least accurate. Garmin Connect regularly logged me as getting around an hour more of sleep per night than either my sleep sensing pad or foggy memory recorded. It doesn’t seem to register accurately when night movement transitions into wakeful movement.

For example, I know that one night was terrible because my son woke up at midnight, and then my daughter crawled into my bed and spent from 3 a.m. to 6 a.m. jabbing her tiny toes into my ribcage. The Nokia sleep pad registered a mere five hours of sleep—the Forerunner 645 Music, a full seven. When I reached out to Garmin, they noted that sometimes if you're wearing the strap loosely at night, it can't record heart rate and the sleep data might be inaccurate. I don't loosen the watch at night, though. Maybe my daughter kicked it off of my wrist?

Anyhow, that's okay, because the Forerunner 645 Music isn’t a sleep watch. It’s a fitness watch. After each workout, the Forerunner 645 Music automatically tells you what your your training effect is, or how big an impact your workout had on your fitness, and how many hours you should devote to recovery.

The Forerunner 645 Music can estimate your times for a 5K, half-marathon, or a marathon (depressing) and estimate your fitness age (encouraging!). It estimates your VO2 max (oxygen consumption per minute, per kilogram of body weight) using your heart rate and exercise data, and tells you how fit you are as compared to other people that are your age and gender. This is in addition to standard stats like time, pace, heart rate, stride length, max and average run cadence, and even the air temperature.

Garmin

You can also record data for a ton of different sports, like snowboarding and skiing, SUPing, rowing, yoga, and strength training, although there is still no rock climbing. And you can also get notifications from your phone, although you can’t really respond to any of them on the Forerunner 645 Music besides decline calls. After a few days, I set the watch to Do Not Disturb.

It’s a little difficult for me to review Garmin’s wearables objectively. Garmin has me all figured out. It’s like waking up and finding out that someone left a 1970 Silver Poly Dodge Challenger in the driveway. Is this the most practical car? No. Shouldn’t I be saving up for a Honda Pilot instead? Yes. But the heart wants what it wants, and Garmin’s devices get mine thumping.

I love the small, clear face, the comfortable band, and the retro, James Bond-esque styling. I love how long the battery lasts, and how every time I stop a workout, the training effect and recovery time automatically pop up. I don’t normally plan workouts within 22 hours of each other, but thank you, Garmin! I even like how it doesn’t have a touchscreen. Admittedly, I'm prone to accidentally swiping or tapping a touchscreen, stopping workouts in the middle or getting wacky lap times because I adjusted a jacket sleeve.

Someone who is used to streaming music will probably be annoyed by the fact that iHeartRadio and something called KKBOX are currently the only available music apps in the Garmin Connect IQ store (Deezer will also be showing up later). Personally, I found the Garmin Express software to be simple enough. Rather than making playlists, I downloaded podcast episodes and told myself I could only listen to them if I went running. At 30 minutes to an hour apiece, 60 podcast episodes is a lot of episodes. My mileage has gone up considerably in the past few weeks.

As someone who is not a millionaire, it's hard to recommend the Forerunner 645 Music. $450 is a lot of money. If you’re not training seriously for a specific goal, you probably don’t need data that is this granular. For example, sometimes the recommended recovery time is six hours. It’s been a loooong time since I’ve done two-a-day workouts.

But if people never bought anything because of emotions, then Dodge Challengers would not exist. While a sensible, sane person wants to tell you that the vast majority of people who want to run and listen to music at the same time will be fine with a Fitbit Versa, the person who is helplessly in thrall has to admit: I freaking love this watch. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go get in four miles and catch up on the latest episode of Forever35.