Garmin Lily 2 review: A sleek, easy way to keep your health and fitness goals on track

Garmin Lily 2: One-minute review

I’ve tested a lot of smartwatches, but this is the one I’ve had the most compliments on, with its slim design and bright color it got a lot of attention. I loved that I could wear it on a night out – as it doesn’t look chunky or too sporty. Easy to attach to my wrist, I barely noticed I was wearing it – but its watch face lets its design down – and we’d love to see some more color in the next version. The touchscreen was also a little tricky to get used to and sometimes didn’t react to our touch. 

With 18 different workout profiles, you can record everything from running to cycling and several forms of dance. However, it lacked sports such as tennis and football, so we didn’t get accurate recordings of these. The GPS watch also shows basic stats such as heart rate and steps taken, while more comprehensive stats can be viewed in the app. The Lily 2 also has features such as timers, alerts, and Fall Detection. 

Testing the watch over a month, I loved the running stats and the GPS ability, but the touchscreen wasn’t always easy to use, and I found it frustrating when it was either oversensitive to touch, or just didn’t react – an irritating factor when you are trying to record your fitness on the move. Sleep score and Body Battery via the app were great add-ons, but I’d love to see my detailed statistics on-watch in future versions.

Garmin Lily 2: Specifications

Garmin Lily 2: Price and availability

• Starts at $249.99 / £249.99 / AU$429
• Released earlier this year
• More expensive than the Fitbit Sense

The Garmin Lily 2 was released in January 2024 and is available now from the Garmin website, costing  $299.99 / £249.99, with Australia prices TBC. Similarly priced to other Garmin watches, in the same category,  it’s more expensive than the Fitbit Sense, which comes in at around £30 cheaper.

• Value score: 4/5

Garmin Lily 2: Design

• Super lightweight 
• Hidden display 
• Touchscreen 

Surely this is one of the lightest Garmin watches ever? Weighing just 20.6g, our version, which has a circular aluminum face, also came with a light purple silicone strap. Five other colors are available, including two with a leather wristband and a further two with a fabric band. Designed to look like a lifestyle women’s watch I felt like I could keep it on all day –as it looked great with my whole wardrobe, not just my activewear.

Easy to attach to my wrist, made with quick-release bands, you can buy extra wristbands to mix and match with colors. With a 240 x 201px screen, like its predecessor, the watch face is designed and made using Corning Gorilla Glass 3 and set with aluminum, while the watch face has a touchscreen.

The hidden display took a little longer to get used to. I’m an Apple Watch user normally and love having the watch face and other stats to hand straight away. The hidden display meant I either had to move my wrist quite vigorously to ‘wake it up’ or press the button on the bottom center of the display, which like the touchscreen, was sometimes frustratingly hard to work. 

The black and purple watch face has a crisscross wallpaper design, plus eight different designs to choose from, including traditional clock settings and digital displays: we chose one that showed both our heart rate and steps taken. With future versions of the Garmin Lily watch, we’d love to see more color in the watch face. 

•  Design score: 4/5 

Garmin Lily 2: Features

• 18 exercise settings 
• Sleep score and body battery
• Fall detection 

If you’re looking to track your daily exercise there are now 18 workout profiles you can track, including HIIT, running, and cycling. You can also add more or take some forms of exercise off if you don’t use them – which will save you scrolling. Garmin’s always been excellent for modularity, and the Lily 2 is no different. Good news if you’re a dancer too, as it will track many types of dances including hip-hop and Zumba. Unfortunately, there is no ability to add exercises such as tennis or even indoor cycling, meaning you probably won’t get accurate readings for those. Perhaps these will be added in a future update.

The main menu also gives you the option to set alarms and even timers for particular exercises. While under the settings tab, you can also set alerts, such as how many steps you’ve completed that day and reminders to stand up. If you don’t want these on, which I decided after a couple of alerts I didn’t, you can change your alert notification settings on the app.

To find the dashboard you simply swipe down, which gives you access to features including ‘do not disturb’, sleep mode, and even your music.  I also love the feature, which wasn’t on the original Lily, which can detect an accident while you're out running or exercising. Simply add your emergency contact information into the app and it will alert them if you have a fall.

The watch can also track your sleep, giving you a sleep score each morning and a timeline of your sleep. This sleep score and your activity will then calculate your body battery – which both show up on the app every morning. The watch records all your data on the Garmin Connect app – I found this app quite hard to navigate, especially when I was originally looking for my exercise statistics.

•  Features score: 5/5 

Garmin Lily 2: Performance

• 5-day battery 
• Detailed stats for running
• Clunky touchscreen

I found the watch easy to set up and connect to your phone. For more detailed statistics, after your workout, you can link your watch to the Garmin Connect app. Easy to charge, via a magnet clip, which plugs into a USB port, it took me around an hour to fully charge it. The battery lasts five days, so unlike my Apple watch, I didn’t have to worry about a constantly drained battery – and sometimes it lasted even longer than five days. 

I tested the watch over a month, wearing it for running, gym classes, and while I worked out on my Peloton. To start recording an exercise you simply select your activity from the list – the Lily 2 performed well when I wore it while running, although calories burned were slightly off (when compared against my Apple Watch) and unlike some watches, it didn’t detect intervals when I was running on a track. The breakdown of my performance on the app was helpful – giving me an overview, and stats such as pace, average speed, and max heart rate. The charts section also gave me an idea of my cadence and how long I stayed in heart rate zones.

I thought some of the exercise choices were a little redundant - for instance, the stair stepper and the rower could come under the umbrella of cardio, so I took these off. I would have liked to have replaced these exercises with sports such as tennis or squash, but this wasn’t an available option. I picked either ‘cardio’ or ‘other’ to track these activities, meaning my stats weren’t accurate. The cycling selection also didn’t include indoor cycling, which is unusual, especially as indoor cycling has become more popular.

The first time I tried the sleep tracking, I forgot to put the Lily 2 on SLEEP MODE: I didn’t make the same mistake twice. It did show in my sleep tracking, however, a big 2 am wide awake gap - which, although it meant I got a rude awakening, I could identify that Garmin’s sleep tracking proved to be accurate that night. Every cloud has a silver lining. I’ve used many devices for sleep tracking, including the Oura Ring Generation 3 and the Whoop 4.0 [links], and although it gave you a sleep score, it wasn’t detailed enough for me. I love analyzing my stats and have been known to become a little obsessed, so the Lily 2 didn’t go far enough for this. The addition of Garmin’s  Body Battery feature is also clever, but again I’d love to see more detailed statistics in future versions of the Garmin Lily. 

•  Performance score: 3.5/5 

Garmin Lily 2: Scorecard

Garmin Lily 2: Should I buy?

Buy it if...

Don't buy it if...

Also consider...

Fitbit Sense 

A smartwatch with a similar price point, it looks good on the wrist while also tracking your fitness stats. 

Read our full review

Apple Watch Series 10

Whether it’s the latest Apple Watch 10 or its predecessor you’ll get spot-on tracking for sleep and fitness - while also getting all your notifications straight to your watch.  

Read our full review

How I tested

I tested the watch over a month, tracking all my fitness, including daily walking, cardio classes at the gym, and long runs. I also tracked it while I slept and also compared it to my Apple Watch to see how it stood up to its competitors. 

First reviewed: September 2024