Hang around the Tom’s Guide fitness desk long enough, and we’ll probably strap a fitness tracker to your wrist and ask you to go and count your steps. Sure, step counting isn’t the best measurement of how fit you are or how good a fitness tracker is, but our thinking is that if a watch can do the basics right, it’s probably doing the bigger things well too.
Next up on our list of trackers to test was the new $799 Apple Watch Ultra 4 and the $1099 Garmin Fenix 9 Pro. Apple says it made the pedometer more accurate with its new rugged adventure watch, and while both high-spec watches do a lot more than just count steps, I was keen to put them head-to-head.
To find out more, I strapped one to each wrist and used my trusty clicker tool to manually count 10,000 steps. Read on to find out which watch came out on top.
The Apple Watch Ultra 4 is Apple’s latest adventure watch, with an improved heart rate monitor and 50 hours of battery life.
The Fenix 9 Pro is Garmin’s latest high-spec adventure watch, available in three different sizes, with a monster battery life and built-in flashlight.
I walked 10,000 steps with the Apple Watch Ultra 4 and Garmin Fenix 9 Pro
If you’ve read one of my walk tests, you’ll know we always start with the basics. For this test, I manually click every time I take a step, because counting to 10,000 while navigating traffic and a deaf dog is too overstimulating to describe in words.
I manually click every time I take a step. For this test, I wore the Apple Watch Ultra 4 on my left wrist and the Garmin Fenix 9 Pro on my right. Both trackers count your steps using an internal accelerometer, which measures arm swing.
Each swing counts for two steps, and it doesn’t matter whether you wear your watch on your dominant or non-dominant hand. It doesn’t matter if you walk with your hands in your pockets or hold a cup of coffee; the accelerometer should still measure your body’s movement.
As with all the best Apple Watches, the Apple Watch Ultra 4 still doesn’t tell you the number of steps you’ve taken during a specific workout; instead, you see an overall number of steps throughout the day, which you can now pin to your home screen.
This is probably because steps aren’t actually that useful a metric beyond a certain point, but annoying for me when writing these articles. For this comparison, I downloaded a third-party Pedometer+ app onto my Apple Watch.
I split this test into three walks, and when I got home, I downloaded all the data. Here are my results:
In all my years of doing these walk tests, I think this is the closest one yet. As you can see, there’s only a difference of 32 steps between the two watches, which is unheard of.
The average person takes 2,000 steps a mile, so 32 steps is nothing. The Apple Watch Ultra 4 was ever so slightly more accurate, only missing 43 steps, making it pretty much spot on.
To really put these two watches head-to-head, you’d need to look at a lot more than just how well they count steps. Both are designed to be worn 24/7 and cope with outdoor adventures. There are some big differences, however: even with a bigger battery life of 50-74 hours, the Fenix 9 Pro still offers 29 days in smartwatch mode and up to 54 hours in activity mode. The Fenix also has a built-in multi-LED flashlight and full offline mapping.
That said, the Apple Watch Ultra 4 is like having an extension of your iPhone on your wrist, and with the new heart rate sensor, it’s definitely the best Apple Watch on the market for anyone serious about training. We’ll continue to compare the two watches head-to-head, so stay tuned for more testing.
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