Top critical review
3.0 out of 5 starsRegrets
Reviewed in the United States on April 6, 2024
First thing to know, this is not a smart watch. Next, it has quite a learning curve and I think I've almost gotten to the top. I set my activities as walking and "other" because Garmin doesn't have racquet sports included. I've tried creating that category but it doesn't seem to work. One of the watch faces shows running distance and even though I removed running as an activity and added walking it still shows running. At the very least, it should show steps. Garmin you have a glitch. I changed to another watch face.
I use Strava on my iPhone and my Garmin watch when I work out. My iPhone picks up my GPS immediately but Garmin takes a while. They both show I workout for the same amount of time but Garmin shows I walked a shorter distance and my min/mile are higher even though I start them both within three seconds of each other. Of course, I use the Strava numbers for my trends.
After getting a GPS signal and starting my watch, it will pause so I have to stop it to start it again. Today, it paused a second time. I made sure I hit the button only once each time and it still pauses immediately after start. If I hadn't been paying attention, my whole workout session wouldn't have been recorded. Of course, this started after the return window had closed.
The Body Battery is a cool concept but doesn't work because it's based on the sleep metric which is a dismal failure. One morning i raised my wrist and turned on the watch light to see the time, 4:08, and the watch not only didn't show me awake but in a deep sleep. Recently, I was in the middle of a dream answering the phone, it was my watch buzzing on my wrist, it showed I was in a light sleep. (I have my watch set with an alert for a low heart rate, all other notifications are turned off. When I turned the watch light on, I was bleary eyed, I saw a 17 as the beginning of a line and that was it. Later, I looked at Garmin Connect (software app) and my HR was no where near the threshold.) This morning I was dreaming in color (REM sleep) right before I woke up and Garmin recorded it as a light sleep. I'm not going to be sleeping with my watch anymore.
I have a 20 year old Polar heart rate monitor with a chest strap. Garmin is half a step above that, there's no chest strap. You still have to push buttons and the buttons have multiple functions. The Garmin will tell me what zone my workout was in, my VO2 max, and my steps (we already know steps is recorded low, see above). I'm not sure how reliable any of it is since the zones are based on HR. One of my toughest hills to climb which is my maximum HR for my session, showed my HR as if I were on a flat surface. Again, this happened after my return window closed.
The connection to charge is really weird. It's in contact with your skin all of the time so can get sweat and gunk in it. It seems like it should be on the side or at least covered. Garmin says to rinse it with water but it still seems there is a design issue.
The face is a little big for my arm and actually made my arm tender over my bones. I moved the watch face to my inner wrist and it seems to record fine and no more pain. The text is already small with a large watch face so making a smaller watch face would make the text unreadable.
So if steps, sleep, body battery, HR, and zones are unreliable what's the point? I can get the same information with my old Polar watch and Strava app. I thought as a backup I could give this to my husband to replace his old Garmin and chest strap and get an Apple watch. Well, that's not going to work because my watch is "aqua" and Apple watch 9 dropped the blood oxygen metric due to patent infringement. I very much regret not sending this back.
