Why, look at the leaves. It’s Garmin running watch season again! The sweatiest time of the year! As luck would have it, we’ve got a new flagship running watch to pore over in the form of the Forerunner 970. It features Garmin’s brightest AMOLED screen yet, built-in maps, a flashlight, a speaker, a mic, and more data fields than most of us mere mortals can process. It also costs $150 more than the previous running flagship, the Forerunner 965. Let’s see if it’s worth it. New Look Photograph: Brent Rose The Forerunner 970 is the high-end version of Garmin’s storied running watch line. It has a 1.4-inch AMOLED touch display that is incredibly bright—it’s quite a bit brighter than my Fenix 8. New hardware includes a bright LED flashlight (three levels of white and one level of red), Garmin’s latest fifth-generation optical heart rate monitor, and a speaker and a mic for taking calls and interacting with the watch’s (or your phone’s) smart assistant. It comes in three colorways—black, white and yellow, or gray and indigo—and features a sapphire crystal screen with a titanium bezel and a plastic body. It’s 12.9 mm thick and is waterproof to 50 meters. All of those features work well. The screen arguably works too well, because if you have it cranked to full brightness it will put a significant dent in your battery life. I chose to keep mine at power level 1 (out of three) and found it plenty bright, even when running in indirect sunlight. I also chose to use the gesture-based screen waking, so the display is off until I look at it. Between those choices, I averaged about two weeks of battery life, depending on how much GPS-tracked activity I was doing. The watch gets 26 hours of GPS tracking per charge. I can’t say enough good things about the external flashlight. It’s bright enough to find my way down a dark trail at night, but the red light is enough for me to make my way to an unfamiliar hotel bathroom without blinding myself. It also has a strobe mode which can provide additional visibility for night runners. The optical heart rate monitor is fantastic. I tested it against a chest strap on a couple of activities, and it matched just about perfectly, which is really impressive for a wrist-worn HRM. It has sensors for your pulse oximetry and skin temperature, and it can take manual ECG readings, which can help detect AFib. The speaker and mic are nice additions. Sound quality isn't great, but it’s handy when I get an important call in the shower. More importantly, it allows you to interact with your phone’s voice assistant, and even when you aren’t connected to your phone it can understand a number of voice commands for specific features. This includes starting/stopping a specific activity, changing a setting on the watch, or starting a timer or stopwatch. It works well and can save a lot of menu navigation. (Mostly) Sweet Software Photograph: Brent Rose Garmin makes the best software of any sports watch, and that holds true with the Forerunner 970. We don’t see any departures from the winning formula here. It still uses the same five-button navigation (plus touchscreen), it still has hundreds of downloadable watch faces, it still tracks a ton of 24/7 health metrics and a massive number of sports and activities (though not quite as many as the Fenix 8). There’s plenty of new stuff to pick through, though.