Sapphire vs Gorilla Glass experiences

I've had sapphire glass on my 3HR and 5X+. I now have Gorilla glass on my 6X Pro Solar. By and large I would say that smudges have never been a cause for concern. Sure, I will buff the glass occasionally, if it's particularly smeared, but probably only once a day or less.

The bigger concern for me, and the reason I moved away from the sapphire glass is that it is duller and more reflective than Gorilla, so depending on the lighting it can be more difficult to see the display, especially in dim lighting without the backlight (if you have backlight on only after dark).

I've had the 6X Pro Solar since December. It has some minor scratches that I do not notice in daily use. I need to look for them to see them and angle the watch to catch the light in the right way, so it's also not a concern. I think the worst contact would have been with metal door handles or my Oura Ring with DLC coating. My guess is that it's the ring that created the marks, but now I wear both on the left arm/hand so further contact is impossible. If you regularly operate in tougher conditions, like rock climbing, I think sapphire would be the only safe option, or a screen protector. I tried a tempered glass screen protector, but it brought all the problems of reflection and lower contrast that sapphire brings, plus it didn't look as good as the naked watch, so I now take my chances without protection (I don't rock climb).

Thanks mate, really informative answer.

Interesting you mention the Oura Ring as I didn't know it existed until I heard it on Lance Armstrong's podcast a few days ago. How does its "Readiness" score compare to Garmin's body battery?

Body battery and readiness are similar in intent, but quite different in operation. Readiness is a once per day assessment of your readiness when you wake up and factors in the quality and duration of sleep, HRV during sleep relative to your baseline, resting heart rate and timing of lowest heart rate overnight, previous day's activities and comes up with a score when you wake up. You don't get another assessment until the next day.

Body battery is constantly monitored and updated, day and night and seems mostly based on stress (HRV), but measurement is suspended following strenuous exercise for a while as the watch seems unable to measure stress following such activities until the body calms down. Anyway, you can see your body battery changing throughout the day. Rest and it will recharge. Stay active or unrelaxed and it will continue to fall.

With this in mind, body battery can read 100% on a regular basis - most nights for me it is back to 100 before I wake up. Readiness is probably extremely unlikely to reach 100. I've never seen it. Maybe it is possible, but I suspect not, as there is usually something in your behaviour or physical response that doesn't fully satisfy all conditions.

For example, after 8+ months with the ring it strikes me that it is focused towards the general health conscious population rather than balls out, hard core athletes. Now, I won't claim to be one of those, but the daily activity recommendations are modest compared to my usual exercise regime. Despite good figures generally I seem to get marked down simply for doing too much with "insufficient recovery". So it might recommend 450 calories of activity per day, such as walking, and I'll smash out 1500 calories instead.

With all these things, I use them as a guide, an insight, but not as a literal instruction on what to do. I think the watch and the ring complement each other and usually they tend to be in agreement with my status. However, if I could use only one it would be the watch, as it has such broader value, and I probably won't replace the ring when the battery is knackered. It's good, but not critical to my quality of life.

Basically, the ring is a sleep quality monitor and not an activity tracker. It can accept activity data from Google Fit, which, for me, gets its data from Strava, and it will accumulate calories and general intensity from that data, but it barely has features to monitor these things itself. It can count steps and walking (maybe running), but I think that's the limit. It won't have a clue about things like cycling or kayaking unless you can feed it that data from a third party. It is actually pretty dormant during waking hours and only comes to life when you sleep.

I compared my 6X Sapphire to the 6X Pro + protective glass.

Flare and contrast level is approximately the same for both watches. 

6X Pro with Gorilla glass has better contrast and less reflections if there is no protective glass applied.

I'd say that both watches are handling smudges approximately equally too, both need wiping from time to time :)

How is your bezel holding up on your 6x pro compared to your sapphire? The pro is made up of a PVD coating and the sapphire is made up of a DLC coating and I’m curious how difference they are from one another.

I have a 6x solar. No scratch. No mark. I'm careful with it though. And compared to sapphire glass from other brand (Coros, Suunto) or even gorilla glass from Polar, the readability is MUCH better. It's by far the best watch for reflections. It's more important than durability for me. In a place with both shade and sun (like in a forest), it can be difficult to read on the other watches unless you turn them the right angle. The solar has a clear advantage for that. Even in everyday life. Less contrasty, but more readable. I really love this display, it's big and offering a lot of info on the maps. 

I have had my Fenix 6X Sapphire for 3 months now.
As I can't make a direct comparison to a Gorilla Glass version I leave that out.
Overall I'm satisfied with the glass and the DLC coating. I have managed to bang the watch into some stuff but not a single mark so far.

The glass have a glare but not that it bothers me much and it also get smudges quite easily, but a simple wipe with my hand or on my clothes removes it easily. I do not feel like I'm constantly wiping it. I was also choosing between Sapphire or Gorilla but decided that if I'm going to spend that much money anyway, the extra for Sapphire was not such a big deal...personal bankruptcy was imminent anyway :D (when I bought mine, the difference were like ~$60)
I realized that if I went with Gorilla Glass I would need to fiddle with protectors and such which I didn't want.
Regarding the glare, it is only in very precis angles it occurs. A small twist of my wrist and it's gone. For me that is a small price to pay for a tougher glass.