We Made This Up - Garmin Built It

Back in April 2025, we .. along with some “university engineers” who were definitely just two club members sniggering in the container .. unveiled our April Fool gadget: a shot‑analysis device that used accelerometers to diagnose your technique and then "coach" you in silly voices. It started out appearing serious and got sillier and sillier as the review continued. The moment the device started critiquing your release via insults voiced by Edmund Blackadder, the jig was up.

This was an April Fool joke. Eighteen months later Garmin apparently decided it had been a product road map.

Turns out the sat‑nag overlords had been quietly working on something very similar… except theirs wasn’t a joke, wasn’t powered by duct tape, and didn’t call you a “wee numpty” when you plucked the string.

Enter the Garmin Fenix 9 / Fenix 9 Pro

Released in August 2026, these watches are absurdly smart. Their feature list is five pages long and that’s before you get to the stuff we're interested in. You get the usual Garmin buffet: heart rate, respiration, hydration, sleep coaching, music, stocks, maps, ski runs, golf courses, hiking trails, altimeter, barometer, compass, and enough exercise metrics to make your coach weep with joy.

But hidden among all that is the real spicy bit: ArcheryX.

Garmin has clearly clocked that archers (especially compounders) have disposable income and a weakness for gadgets. So they’ve built a full‑fat archery performance suite right into the watch. Something to lure archers in like moths to a very expensive flame.

ArcheryX: You’re Being Judged by Your Own Wrist

Brace yourself for a smorgasbord of features your OCD would love to play with:

Shot Break Analysis Tracks bow‑arm movement at the moment of release. In other words: quantifies how much you shake like a caffeinated ferret.

Shot Execution Time Measures the full draw‑to‑release cycle. Compounders don't have this problem like recurvers do. They merely have to wait for the machine to finish thinking about it for them.

Arrow Counter Finally, a replacement for that hateful little number counter thing that is never find-able when you need to tally the end's arrow count.

Minutes of Angle More steadiness tracking. More shaking analysis. More evidence you didn’t want.

Aim Trace Records your wrist’s motion after the shot and gives you an animated playback. Yes, you can now watch a tiny cartoon of your own panic.

Beyond the Bow Heart rate, respiration, stress levels - all logged throughout your session. Now you can see your nervous breakdown in graph form.

Stats at a Glance Every shot, every arrow, every session. Day, week, month, year. A full forensic archive of your addiction likely to be used in divorce proceedings by your archery widow/widower.

Ooof.

The Catch: It’s for Compounders

We were raging too… until we saw the price. The Fenix 9 ranges from $1,199.99 to $1,349.99. (£885 to £995) At which point every recurve archer quietly put their wallet back in their pocket and pretended they never wanted it anyway. But for compounders? A $1.3k watch is basically a stocking filler. Their bows cost more than a used car. This sits neatly in the “toy” bracket.

The good news: Garmin has a habit of rolling features down to cheaper models. So ArcheryX might eventually appear on something more affordable .. perhaps nestled between the chocolate‑consumption tracker and whatever app monitors your sniffing.

Should You Buy It?

Average archer? No. Absolutely not. Spend the money on coaching, arrows, or therapy.

Competitive archer? Probably yes. Data is king, and this thing is a data fire-hose.

Someone with more money than sense? Yes. And a silly question! There’s already a club sweep-stake on how long until Geo orders one. (He’ll claim he’s “waiting for the price to drop”, but we’ve all seen his riser, sight, limbs, and arrows. The man is cheap in theory only.)

Final Thought

It’s genuinely exciting to see a big tech company dip a toe into archery. It’s just a shame the toe is wearing a £1,000 smartwatch. Still, it’s progress and if nothing else, it proves our April Fool wasn’t as ridiculous as we thought.

Now if Garmin could just add a feature that predicts the shot that ends with a broken arrow, that would be worth £1,000.

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Lancaster archery article on these puppies can be found here.
Lancaster's page on Garmin's watches can be found here.
Image belongs to Garmin, used here for review purposes .. even though as poor recurvers we can't afford one.