Images that may show a pre-production version of the long-awaited Garmin Instinct 3 sports watch have appeared online. The photos are intriguing, suggesting a big departure from the Instinct 2's design, but it's worth taking them with a pinch of salt because their origin is impossible to verify; the pictures are now circulating widely, but by a user who claimed to have found them "in some Telegram channel". The images, which you can see embedded below, show a watch that keeps the solid build and monochrome memory-in-pixel display of previous Instinct watches, but has a busier look with a chunkier appearance and visible screws on the lugs.
It's an unusual look, which led the original poster to call it an "ugly Fenix 6's baby". The presence of screws suggests that the outer section of the bezel and top of the lugs may now be metal rather than resin. This would add weight, but could mean that the new watch has an ECG sensor.
The prototype watch seems to have the same two-part display, with a small secondary screen at the top right to display stats or contextual information in menus, but there are now orange details printed on the bezel, which appears to be quite large for the size of the actual screen. However, as one commenter on has noted, it's worth bearing in mind that the image of the screen could be a sticker rather than the display itself. A sticker on the back of the watch (which covers the heart rate sensor) suggests that this may be a unit provided for testing purposes.