Top positive review
5.0 out of 5 starsReally great golf and activity watch!
Reviewed in the United States on October 4, 2018
First, let me just say I haven't worn a watch since I was in middle school, and never had any desire to get a smart watch, even though I am a die-hard gadget guy.
One day I was struggling with the Freecaddie app on my phone during a round of golf and decided that one of the golf watches had to be better, so I did some research and ended up settling on the S60. I was expecting to use this for golf and that's it, again I don't wear a watch and didn't intend to start.
The S60 arrived and I started fiddling with it, and it really started feeling like a generally useful tool, not just a golf toy. I started wearing it all day, and after some tuning to the notification and other settings I'm really liking having the thing on my wrist. I try to walk for an hour or so a day, and its step counter matches my Samsung S8 pretty closely
The golf app is great. I really like being able to pull up my scorecard after the round and see each hole and where each shot was, distances, etc. It will let you track your clubs used and such, which I find to be a little annoying but if you really care it's easy to do. I just track total strokes, putts, penalties, and it forces you to enter the direction of your drive but I usually just say it went straight (which is rarely true ;-). It does a pretty good job of detecting actual strokes vs. practice swings, sometimes there are extra strokes on my score card but they're all at the same place on the map so it's easy to see what happened there. The touch-screen and maps interface is also great, it's very easy to find distances to the pin and obstacles. Overall I have nothing but good to say about the golf app.
I also bike quite a bit, and the biking app is just as good as the golf app. It uses the GPS to record your route, which you can pull up on the map in the app on your phone after you complete the activity and it shows all the route details with speeds. I ended up buying the speed, cadence, and heart rate strap sensors to use while biking, I'm not sure in hindsight that they're really all that useful since the watch can figure your speed via GPS and the cadence and heart rate turn out to not be that interesting to me but if you're really into hard-core biking maybe they are more useful. It's a little tricky getting the sensors to connect before you start the activity, sometimes it takes a couple short laps around a circle in my driveway to wake the sensors up and get the watch to connect to them. But overall it works great. I bought a rubber widget (ASIN: B01N2ZIN1W) that goes on the bike handlebar, the watch goes onto that so it's visible while I'm riding, and have set up a couple scrolling data screens to show speed, cadence, distance, etc. and all work great.
I also have used this with the "walking" app while hiking in the mountains. It does the same thing as biking where it records the route and will display it on a map in the mobile app after the activity is completed. It records some other data like elevation changes, time, etc. Like just regular walking it appears that the step counter matches my Samsung S8 pretty closely so I'm assuming they are both at least equally accurate.
There is also an indoor rowing app, which works fine but seems minimally useful given that my rowing machine counts strokes and that'a about all the watch will do. I guess if you want to have all your fitness activities recorded in one place that might be a good reason to use the watch but otherwise it seems sorta pointless to me.
The battery life is great, 10-ish days if not doing any activities. Biking an hour with the biking app running with GPS, speed and cadence sensors, eats about 10% of the battery. A 5-hour round of golf eats about 50% of the battery. Hiking with the GPS enabled seems to eat about 10% per hour, so it seems the key factor is the GPS and that 10% per hour seems very consistent. It takes a few hours to charge from about 25%, not sure exactly how long since I just let it charge over night when the battery gets low. The touch screen works well, and I'm glad I didn't get the Fenix since it doesn't have a touch screen. I do wish this had wireless charging, plugging the cable in is a little tricky in the dark, but I can live with that. It would also be nice if there were an integrated heart rate sensor like the Fenix but again I can live without it, the chest strap works fine for the occasions I actually care about heart rate.
I bought the premium version primarily to get the better bezel, the leather strap is nice but I feel like once it's been sweaty too many times it's probably going to get gross. The metal strap from Garmin is real nice and I've settled on that full-time. I bought one of the plastic straps but haven't used it.
Bottom line, this Garmin S60 is awesome!
