This is what Garmin’s first solar AMOLED watch could look like

Garmin has been trying to crack the solar AMOLED problem for years. Now another patent has appeared which shows what such a device could look like. That said, Garmin is no longer alone here, as Zepp Health has already put the idea into production with the Amazfit T-Rex Dual Solar.

To be absolutely clear, what appears in this article is not an official Garmin render and it is not a leaked product. It is a render of the watch shown in Garmin’s patent drawings, created to give an idea of how the design might look if it ever became a real device.

Garmin has been chasing solar AMOLED for a while

Back in 2022, we covered one of Garmin’s earliest patents for a solar-powered OLED watch. That approach proposed placing photovoltaic regions between the individual display subpixels instead of simply putting a solar layer over the screen.

The problem Garmin was trying to solve was fairly obvious. Cover an OLED display with a conventional semi-transparent solar layer and you start compromising the thing people bought the OLED screen for in the first place. Brightness, contrast and visibility can all suffer.

Then another approach appeared in 2025. We covered a Garmin patent designed to combine solar charging with AMOLED using microscopic structures that guide liquid photovoltaic material into tiny channels. Instead of carving sections out of a finished solar layer, Garmin’s idea was essentially to build the solar grid only where it was wanted.

That filing was particularly interesting because it mentioned materials such as perovskites and organic photovoltaics. We later dug further into the same technology and found that Garmin was also considering solar charging using indoor and lower-intensity light, not just the strong direct sunlight current Garmin solar watches really need.

So this latest filing should be viewed as another part of a much longer development path. Garmin has not settled on one obvious solution yet, at least judging from its patent activity.

Turning the patent drawing into an actual watch

The watch shown in the patent has a detailed physical design. There is a round case, several substantial side controls, traditional analogue-style hands on the display and a bezel divided into functions including notifications, date, calendar, time zone, activity, weather, training and maps.

Patent drawings are not product renders, of course. Details can exist purely to illustrate how an invention works, and Garmin is under no obligation to build anything resembling the watch pictured in the filing.

Still, there is enough there to make a realistic interpretation worthwhile. And it is distinctive enough from other Garmin watches to be interesting. We kept the basic proportions, control layout, round bezel and dial arrangement from the patent, then translated those into something closer to a finished Garmin outdoor watch.

We went with a metal case and a more conventional Garmin-style strap, but those details are speculative. Garmin has not specified that this future watch would use titanium, nor should the image be taken as evidence of an upcoming Fenix, MARQ or any other particular product.

Why Garmin keeps coming back to this

At the moment there is still a fairly clear split in Garmin’s higher-end watch range. AMOLED gives you the brighter, sharper and more colourful screen. MIP remains attractive for outdoor visibility, low power consumption and solar charging.

Garmin itself recently made clear that MIP isn’t going away just yet. Interestingly, solar AMOLED also came up in that discussion. Garmin’s Martin Trenkle pointed to different ways photovoltaic cells can be positioned around a display rather than directly covering it.

It is clear, the advantages keeping MIP alive are gradually getting narrower. AMOLED power efficiency keeps improving, Garmin’s battery life on AMOLED watches is already much better than it was a few generations ago, and the company clearly continues to investigate ways of adding solar.

If Garmin can make solar contribute meaningful power without noticeably affecting AMOLED brightness or image quality, one of the biggest reasons for keeping the two technologies separate starts to disappear.

Multiple patents tackling the same basic problem are more interesting than one isolated filing. Garmin clearly continues to spend engineering effort on combining solar energy harvesting with OLED and AMOLED displays. At some point, one of those approaches may become practical enough to ship.