Garmin Bounce 2 – Buyer’s Guide – Everything You Need To Know

Garmin Bounce 2: A Buyer’s Guide

You, the parent, almost certainly already have your own Garmin watch and a young child! Do they need one too?

Bounce 2 is a connected kids’ smartwatch that delays that dreaded milestone day in your child’s life—the day when you have to buy them a smartphone! The watch centres around safety and fun, adding a sense of being grown-up enough to have a smartwatch. Your secret is that the watch is really for you to keep tabs on where your child is and be able to call or contact them.

Bounce 2 doesn’t need a smartphone, but it does need a subscription.

OK, I will discuss some of the pros and cons of the new version. The first version had several issues, and the parents who loved it generally seemed to be the ones whose kids used it periodically—like when out playing or on a family skiing holiday.

The new watch has addressed some but not all of the old issues, which is fine. But the jaw-dropping moment is that Garmin has doubled the price, and really, if you have an iPhone, you probably want to look more seriously at the new Apple Watch SE 3 40mm cellular.

Price: $299.99 or £259.99, compared to the original at $149.99 ($119 on sale now). Add to that Garmin’s LTE plan ($9.99 per month or $99.99 annually).

Design and Hardware: The Aesthetics and Durability Test

The original Bounce was a square-shaped visual monstrosity. You wouldn’t wear it, so why foist one on your kids? The Bounce 2 successor is similar in appearance to a Forerunner and looks OK. Check out the following image of one of the watchfaces; it’s clean and good-looking, which is more than you can say for many of Garmin’s grown-up offerings!

The colours pop with the 1.2″ AMOLED display, and Garmin has made the watch case a little smaller to improve the aesthetics on a small wrist while increasing the display size with a smaller edge bezel.

Also changed is the waterproofing. The watch is now good for 5ATMs, meaning your kid can go scuba diving down to 50m. Hmmm. Seriously, though, this is an important characteristic. We know your kid isn’t going to go 50m underwater, but the rating matches equivalent impacts on water, so in a water park, after your beloved little one has careered 5m through the air and landed with a splash, it means that such an impact is going to be alright. At least on the watch! And yes, of course, they can go swimming as well.

I never got around to reviewing the original Bounce. Several reports of cracked screens put me off, but the case, bezel, and lens glass materials are unchanged to this day. The only change is the display tech underneath the lens—it’s moved from LCD to AMOLED.

So that info might tempt you towards the Apple Watch SE 3. Except I’ve owned many Apple Watches, and the cheaper Ion-X ones all scratch like crazy, meaning your kids will inevitably scratch theirs. But. There’s always a but. The latest Watch SE 3 (2025) is the first of the cheaper Apple watches to boast a new Ion-X glass (2025) that claims to be 4x more crack-resistant than the Apple Watch SE 2. So maybe that will be OK?

Communication and Connectivity: How Parents Stay in Touch

There are some distinct pros and cons around the connectivity piece, and you need to really understand how this works, especially if you plan to travel overseas or if your kids have lots of friends already with smartphones.

Let’s start with the positives.

First up, with the Garmin LTE subscription plan, your child does not need a smartphone to stay in contact. However, they need to be in cell range and will face the same limitations as you when making a regular cell call from your smartphone in a building. Regular cell calls and walls don’t get along too well. You knew that.
Bounce 2 supports two-way calling, which the previous version couldn’t do. So now you can talk with Little Jo rather than bombarding them with texts you know they will ignore. Hey, kids, right?

The ability to type and send texts from a QWERTY-style keyboard is still there, as is the ability to send preset messages like “Time to come home.”

Now the negatives.

This subscription costs about $10/mo or $100pa. Depending on your perspective, it’s either ridiculously expensive or a small price to pay for your child’s safety.

There are technical limitations, though. This is a special LTE service from Garmin. It only works with people using the same service or who have the Garmin app. To be clear, if your child wants to communicate with their friends who might have an Apple Watch, they can’t do it unless those other friends install the Garmin app on their smartphone. If your child wants to text their teacher, they can’t do it.

So there’s a whole host of complexities there. But if you, your partner, your kids’ grandparents, and occasional carers are the only people you want to communicate with your kids, then this is a very good way to ring-fence the experience. Stranger danger is not a problem here. But your kids likely won’t be able to communicate with their friends, which will become a social problem as they age.

But let’s take the other example and assume you are British or American. What happens if you buy an Apple Watch SE 3 5G RedCap/4G LTE and go skiing in France? You bought your data plan, which worked fine at home, but you could easily find that your data plan for the Apple Watch doesn’t have roaming. So all the connected features won’t work when skiing, those features are the key reasons you bought it. That’s different from Garmin, whose plans cover many countries (check).

Safety and Tracking Performance

Garmin has some excellent safety features, as does Apple, but Garmin has innovated a bit here.

The outstanding feature from Garmin is geofencing. It’s unique as far as I know. If your child strays beyond a given boundary, an electric shock is applied until they come back…ha ha, no sorry. You get a text saying they have strayed! Far safer 🙂

Then there are the more generic tracking features, similar to those from Apple. You can track where your child is on a map in real time and be notified when they leave specific locations. That’s a great one to set up so you are notified when they’ve left school. Or you could be working late and they are at home; it can work that way, too.

Finally, there’s the obligatory emergency assistance. The location is sent to you and your family contacts if that’s activated.

Reliability?

All the connected features will only be as good as the cell service in your area, combined with your child’s precise location. The original Bounce suffered many complaints in this area, but ultimately, many reliability aspects are out of Garmin’s control and will still occur with Bounce 2 and watches using similar tech.

Activity, Wellness, and Entertainment Features

A host of activity profiles gives your kids some sport-specific metrics on the watch and the ability to automatically classify the sport they have completed afterwards.

Here’s a selected list. Be mindful that kids shouldn’t wear wrist watches during many team sports: Swimming, Running, Jump Roping, Biking, Tennis, and Hiking. Soccer mode can be used to track practice and game times. The full list of sports is here.

The full list is slightly artificial for kids not yet old enough to have a phone and includes Bike Commuting mode!

So, Garmin covers sporting uses well as you would expect from a sports tech company. On top of that it adds several ways to introduce fun, learning and motivation.

Motivation and Rewards – a Deeper Dive

The chore and rewards system (aka the Tidy Your Room system) lets you set various tasks. When completed, your child earns reward points. You determine the tasks and what the reward points mean, e.g., money, trips, candy, or carrots. Kids love carrots.

Fitness Training Cards are fitness-focused features that teach kids basic exercise moves. Maybe they’re interested in copying your yoga poses? Fitness Training Cards can show them Downward Dog, which they can practice independently.

When Activity Goals are achieved, your child earns Gems, which unlock pictures in a scrapbook (interactive stories) on the app. One example of a Goal might be for a cumulative 60-minutes of activity during the day.

Alongside Active Goals are Active Minutes, which grant more chances to participate in the app’s games (e.g. Copycat, Math Flash), learn new fitness moves, and take pop quizzes.

The Competitive Edge

Not all parents view competition in the same light, but we’re all Garmin owners here, so we probably share similar mindsets about the need for healthy activity levels.

An example Garmin takes is with steps. After you link your child’s Bounce 2 with their friends, they compete in daily step challenges. There is also a family weekly element to competitive stepping!

The clear drawback is that this relies on other families using Garmin Bounce.

Approved Music?

You organise a selection of music (some audiobooks, too) from Amazon to pre-load onto the watch via the Garmin app. You get to choose which songs and artists are suitable.

Monitoring

The app has a parents’ mode where you can monitor your child’s activity, responsibilities, sleep, and chore data. The screenshots I added above are representative and show a light-touch app, keeping the information you see fairly minimalistic.

Garmin Bounce User Reviews – Garmin Has a Major Image Problem to Overcome

The original Garmin Bounce received favourable press coverage and high press ratings. However, real-world reviews revealed highly variable experiences. Parents were initially impressed with the product’s capabilities but disappointed once battery life, rough play, and unreliable cell coverage were factored in.

• Aaron Paquette says, “even though there was a Garmin Find My Watch feature, we were unable to locate the watch”
• RWRW says, “Battery will suddenly drain for no known reason”
• Disappointed Mom says, “Unreliable, hardly functional, unusable”
• TY16’s daughter “liked the watch.”
• Kels Stuven noted that “75% of the messages go through”

Garmin’s Battery Life Claims vs. Real-World Experience

Garmin advertises a battery life of up to 2 days, and the company is always broadly fair in its battery claims. However, with LTE devices, the actual battery life is highly dependent upon LTE usage.

Audio calls will severely impact battery life, and even a simple text exchange requires the LTE to be fired up to send the messages. Thus, usage and LTE network conditions may well mean you get less than one day of battery life even with a new battery.

This issue is not limited to Garmin; in my experience, other products like LTE Apple Watches will fare similarly, perhaps even worse.

Verdict and Buyer’s Guide: Who Should Buy the Bounce 2?

The age at which kids get a smartphone is culturally defined. Where I live in metropolitan London, almost all kids have smartphones when they go to big school at age 11. Many 8, 9, and 10-year-olds also have phones.

Be thankful your children are younger than that. Once every other child in your nearest and dearest’s friendship group has a phone, there is significant pressure on you and your child to conform, despite the lofty ideal you might still hold today! This drives smartphone adoption toward ever-younger children.

Against that, there is clearly a parent backlash. In the UK, schools are just starting to completely ban smartphones in school (2025). It’s unclear what impact this will have on the smartphone adoption age. I suspect very little.

With that in mind, the suitable ages for a Boucne 2 would be from 4 at the very youngest to 11 at the very oldest. So long as your kid can read a bit, they can use Bounce.

Bounce 2 will only be a valid strategy for you and your children while their peers are phone-free. You even have to question whether giving your child a smart watch is, in fact, encouraging ever-younger children to use tech.

That said, Garmin’s Bounce 2 introduces tech in a wholesome and safe way. It’s probably one of the better options out there. That’s not saying too much, as, in my experience, tech aimed at kids is universally poor. I could again cite the Apple Watch SE 3 40mm as an example of excellent tech, but that just so happens to be a small-format adult Watch that can be wrapped in a child-friendly layer called Family Safety.

Garmin Jr.’s app’s rewards and motivations are focused on fun but also on activity, which, in my opinion, is a key aspect of child development. Garmin does a good job here, but I don’t think they will sustain most children’s interest beyond a few months. So the $300 price tag (plus subscription) might not be the value you hope it will be.

The problem with Bounce 2 is that a large part of its value relies on your kids’ friends having and using the same tech. At least where I live, that’s a big ask. My kids would have zero friends using Garmin Bounce, which is fine if I wanted to use Bounce to check on their whereabouts and use the tech within the family. I live in an area with excellent LTE coverage, so I trust Garmin’s LTE would work well almost everywhere my kids go.

Then there’s the holiday conundrum. Several US parents were delighted by Bouce when used for skiing holidays – supreme peace of mind knowing where they are and being able to call for help if needed. In the US, that’s fine, as you will likely stay in the same country, but from where I live in the UK, I was caught out on a trip to France a few weeks ago, where my smartphone data package was a roaming one, but my watch’s was not. Garmin’s international LTE coverage is lacking in some areas (e.g. Asia). Check here to see if that trip abroad will support Bounce 2.

Recommendation: Several niche groups will find Bounce appealing. The group I will focus on to give a recommendation is for parents of a 6-8-year-old who value an active lifestyle and are already invested in the Garmin ecosystem. They are busy parents who value chore tracking features and are willing to pay a premium price. They live in an area with reliable cell coverage and will encourage their child to charge the battery daily.

Has Garmin addressed the durability issues with Bounce 2? That question can only be answered over time.

Available now directly from Garmin, Amazon, and retailers linked here $299+subscription £259, €299

Sources and Resources

• Buy Garmin Bounce 2 – Choice of Amazon and other local retailers
• Garmin Bounce 2 Communication Features (video)
• Garmin Bounce 2 Video Overview of Features
• Garmin Bounce 2 Official Product Page
• Garmin Bounce 2 Product Manual
• Required: Garmin’s LTE Subscription Plan Details
• Garmin LTE Coverage
• Reddit Forum for Bounce 2
• Garmin Official forum for Bounce 1
• Garmin Launch Press Release 17 September 2025
• Bounce 1 vs Bounce 2 Feature Comparison