Garmin 010-01689-00 Forerunner 35; Easy-To-Use Gps Running Watch, Black

Garmin 010-01689-00 Forerunner 35; Easy-to-Use GPS Running Watch, Black

• Easy-to use GPS running watch tracks how far, how fast and where you run.Special Feature:Bluetooth.Water Resistant: Yes
• Estimates heart rate at the wrist, all day and night, using Garmin elevate wrist heart rate technology
• Connected features: Smart notifications, automatic uploads to Garmin Connect, live tracking and music controls (when paired with a compatible smartphone)
• All-day activity tracking estimates steps, calories and intensity minutes and reminds you when to move
• Automatically uploads your data to Garmin Connect, our free online fitness community where you can join challenges, receive insights and share your progress as you meet your goals

Buy Now : Garmin 010-01689-00 Forerunner 35; Easy-to-Use GPS Running Watch, Black

Brand : Garmin
Category : Electronics,GPS, Finders & Accessories,Sports & Handheld GPS,Running GPS Units
Rating : 4.5
ListPrice : US $169.99
Price : US $116.99
Review Count : 14806
ChildASIN : B01KPUHBK6,B01KPUHBS8,B01KPUHEHQ

Garmin 010-01689-00 Forerunner 35; Easy-to-Use GPS Running Watch, Black

• Synopsis: Overall, this is a good, basic running/ fitness watch that makes a nod at also being a smart watch. There is nothing flashy here. The watch doesn\'t do color, just back and silver/white on the display. For those who have used or who remember the traditional Kindles, this is actually pretty nice in terms of contrast as it is easy to ready in low light and high light conditions. In the dark, you still need the light from the lighting button. Unless you are a pro/ elite level runner who will use the advanced features of the higher end watch offerings from Garmin or their competitors, or are someone who doesn\'t mind paying an absurd amount for a the latest tech gadget, this watch is more than adequate when paired with external sensors such as the HRM Run. As you read this, please bear in mind that I haven\'t had the opportunity to run the higher end models, so my only points of comparison are the spec sheets and the price points. I will try to avoid providing second hand anecdotal evidence for or against them.What\'s Good:-- The weight. This watch is very light. Unlike my dive watches and other larger, necessarily robust watches, this guy is light enough that I don\'t feel a need to take it off to type or when doing wood work (both activities that involve repetitive motions that become annoying with larger watches on. For those who mind having something heavy on your wrist during a run, that won\'t be an issue with this watch.-- The Band. The silicon band that comes with the watch seems to be robust and is stretchy and comfortable. I have had sport watches in the past that became uncomfortable in hot conditions after a while as moisture built up under the bands making them itchy or painful. To date, I have had no such problems with this watch. I also like the securing ring on the band which has a tooth on the inside to lock it into one of the fitment holes. The stretchiness is important as you need the watch snug/tight to adequately place the optical heart rate monitor.-- The Smartwatch functions. I don\'t own an apple watch (which wouldn\'t work with my phone anyway) or a Gear S3, so I don\'t have a basis for first hand comparison. However, I have observed the frustration of my friends and family with such devices when trying to use them for input tasks (two way communications with the cellular device.) This watch passes on notifications from your phone, but you have no ability to respond with it. For me, this is the best of both worlds. I get to keep situational awareness while avoiding getting caught up in the minutia of responding with a yet smaller computer interface. This is a personal preference, but I do like the way it works. It is also nice that notifications turn off during a run.-- The interface. The UI (User Interface) is menu driven. It took me only a few minutes to get used to it, so it has to be fairly simple. Overall, it is intuitive once you absorb the designer\'s logic, you just have to be patient. It does not have a touch screen, so you have to use the buttons. This isn\'t a problem for me.-- The GPS. Because this is a lower end offering, the watch only uses the GPS constellation and not the GLONASS constellation (Russian GPS). As a result link up times are a little slower and accuracy can be degraded as the US places a mandatory limit on how accurate civilian GPS instruments can be (its a strategic thing.) Overall, this watch isn\'t too bad. At the end of my recent runs, the watch is generally off by about .03 to .05 miles from my phone which uses both locating systems and you can see the differences in the map. Part of this is, I am sure, due to the frequency of updates which is not user changeable unlike on the higher end devices (I would love to minimize the time between fixes.)-- External Sensors. You can still use external sensors with this watch. I love this feature as I prefer the HRM Run over the watch which has its own accelerometer. This becomes very nice when I\'m pushing my daughter in a running stroller. For bikers, you could also use a cadence sensor.-- Movement Tracker. I like to track steps. As a teacher though, I take everything out of my pockets when I get in front of a class so I don\'t fidget with it, so its nice that the phone will continue tracking for me. Its also nice that it will tell me if I\'ve been sitting too long. This is good for two reasons. Research shows that you start to lose focus and effectiveness after about 50 minutes of continuous concentration, so its a reminder to take a break (the movement bar seems to ping after about 45 to 50 minutes). Its also a great reminder to remain active instead of just sitting there like a lump on a log.-- Battery life. The phone is advertised as having up to a 13 day battery life. I haven\'t seen it. However, it does seem to last about 5 days with workouts which draw significantly more power than standard operation.-- Charging. The charging of this device is impressive. My first forerunner, the venerable F405, had to charge on a cradle that was poorly designed and didn\'t positively engage the device. Over time, the connections would degrade and eventually stop working. The new version uses a clip that actively clamps onto the watch. Even with oxidation, it should last a long time. The other part of the equation is the speed of charging. In this aspect, the watch charges very quickly. My personal experience is that a full charge takes less than 1 hour. So if I\'m at my desk and notice that my watch is low, I can put it on to charge and have it back on my wrist in time for my next break.What\'s not?-- User control. The sacrifice you make to get a robust watch is that you sacrifice control. You can still adjust view fields on the exercise screens, but can\'t change how often the watch takes position fixes which would affect accuracy. There are some other little niggly bits of control that are sacrificed as well, but they are well hidden. Now, that having been said, how much control does the average user really need? If you ask the fruit company, they will tell you not much.-- Accuracy. As mentioned with the pros, the watch is not quite as accurate as I have come to expect from my phone. However, it is within the tolerance of the system so really, how much are you missing?-- User feedback. The watch does not provide the same level of feedback as the higher level watches. Such esoteric values as VO2, Lactate threshold, expected recover time, and foot contact time simply are not measured. Now, here\'s the thing. If you are an elite level athlete or a professional, or have a personal coach that actually cares about this stuff, you might care. If you are an every day runner or biker out for fitness and fun or a weekend warrior out to train for your local half, do you really need that extra information and will it be of benefit to you? This is a question you have to ask yourself. My answer was clearly no. Now that having been said, the higher end watches all rely on the chest strap sensor to develop those metrics. Would it be possible for Garmin to move the calculation muscle to your paired analysis device (computer or smart phone)? Well, the answer is that there is nothing technically in the way, so clearly it is a selling point for their higher end lines. Will it show up on Garmin Connect in the future? Who knows.-- Limited activities. The watch has limited workout options: Run outdoor, Run indoor, Bike, Cardio, and Walk. If you are looking for something that will track your cross fit WOD, this may not be your baby. Nor is it really designed to track golf, basketball, Frisbee golf, ultimate Frisbee or weight lifting as separate activities. Of course, most of the devices that are built around that desired capability are not reported to work well in that application. If you really want something that has specialized tracking capabilities for a wide variety of sports, by all means, pay for the higher end models.-- Garmin Connect. Perhaps I\'m just getting used to it, but Garmin Connect has some issues in the way that it appears on my phone. It tends to be difficult to navigate and can be hard to get it to sync.-- Only two potential watch faces. There are two built in watch faces and there are no options to be able to create your own. This would be worse if I cared more, but I personally like the simple, in your face faces that are standard with the watch. The higher end watches have infinitely adjustable faces.Wrap up. Over all, I am very happy with this watch. It is the rare blend of having most of the features that I wanted and all of the capabilities that I need, while maintaining a reasonable price point without having to turn to the factory reconditioned items that may have been a lemon to begin with. I highly recommend this watch/ fitness tracker. If you don\'t believe me, check out the consumer reports review of this watch.
• If I were a runner who ran mostly outdoors, I would probably give the Garmin Forerunner 35 five stars, but I\'m obliged to rate it instead according to its value to me, and even though I may not be the typical user, I can see no reason why better design decisions couldn\'t, in most cases, made it just as useful to me. However, because, as a crackerjack programmer and software designer myself, my expectations for the functional designs of computer-based systems of others are quite low, so I was not unduly disappointed by my purchase.I expected at least, that the Garmin would provide me with an accurate GPS-based reading of time over distance for my infrequent outside workouts and races, and on that it delivers well - both with accurate readings, fast GPS acquisition, and so far no dropouts even though some one of my courses follows a winding road up a wooded mountain.Also, I didn\'t necessarily suppose that I\'d find much use or interest in the device as a fitness tracker, and that I wouldn\'t want to wear it 24/7, but in that respect it provided me with a pleasant surprise. It\'s small size, comfortable band, and highly legible readout without illumination, all make it desirable to wear just as a watch, and the HR and fitness tracking data are just gravy - interesting, if not always reliable (more on that below).I am, in fact, a competitive speed walker who mostly trains indoors on the treadmill, so I also purchased the Garmin footpad accessory in the hopes that it would help me to cross-calibrate the various treadmills I use with each other and with my actual speed, but in that respect the reported Forerunner + footpad results have been puzzling and unreliable. The functionality of the footpad, which laces into one\'s shoes, is supposed to based on an accelerometer that provides an estimate of stride length, and in some way this is supposed to be further calibrated for accuracy by wearing the footpad while training outside with the GPS also enabled. I suppose that the GPS measures the distance, while the footpad accelerometer at least counts the number of strides over various sampled distances, and (if its program were sufficiently sophisticated) might be able to correlate variations in acceleration with particular over the ground speeds - but no documentation is provided by Garmin on the programming so one can only guess about this.Be that as it may, the actual speed/pace results the Garmin reports on training sessions of various treadmills where, as usual, I exercise at constant speeds for most of the session (anywhere from 40-120 minutes, typically), are far from the steady constant speed one presumes for the treadmills themselves. I do much of my training on my home treadmill, which is of pretty good quality, but I also go to the gym and use many of their expensive and robust treadmills, and the least I would expect from the Garmin is that it would report an even pace for the long stretches when the treadmill speed doesn\'t vary. But that\'s not what I get.in the first place, instead of an even constant pace line, I get a Garmin readout consisting exclusively of up and down spikes which bounce around the treadmill-reported pace by several % each way. That might be OK provided there was a way to derive the exact average for particular training stretches, but as it is the only thing I can do is to eyeball the graph and make a crude estimate of the average. The Garmin needs to smooth the data instead of reporting it as a series of inaccurate spikes.But that\'s a minor problem compared to the other anomaly I\'ve encountered in my constant pace sessions: the spiky Garmin-reported pace often sags across a session, with my average pace declining, say, from 5.2mph to 4.9mph, but then sometimes the pace seems to climb a gentle slope from lower to higher, and besides all that, there are occasional dropback spikes to much lower paces, even though I, and the treadmill belt, are just plugging along at one and the same pace throughout.Thus, one of the two main reasons I got this Garmin + footpad (total price well over $200), to give me a way of independently checking the reported speeds of the various treadmill speeds I use, has been frustrated, and neither customer service, nor the sketchy manual have been able to offer any cogent explanation for these anomalies.Given the extensive functionality claimed for this device as a tracker of fitness, goals, personal bests and stuff like that, there are a number of other problems with the Garmin Forerunner 35. For example, it has modes that are supposed to be customized for walkers as well as runners, both inside and outside (differentiating GPS based walking from inside footpad-measured walking) and there are also modes for biking and for \"cardio\" (whatever that is). Yet personal bests over various classic distances like the 5k, are only reported for running - which I don\'t do - I\'m a competitive speed walker or race walker, and am faster than many runners over the distances I do, yet my records don\'t get registered.Calorie TrackingThe device undercounts calories for me both because it apparently treats the hundreds of stairs I climb each day as flat walking, and, more importantly, it undercounts the calories for the fast treadmill walking I do by from 5-15% compared to the online ExRX calculator (at https://www.exrx.net/Calculators/WalkRunMETs) which is based on American College of Sports Medicine data. And since the ExRx calculator also undercounts calories for the speeds I walk at (5mph and up), the Garmin undercounts by some 10-20%. For anyone else in my boat, who does speed walking or race walking, I suggest that they multiply the ExRx results by about 1.1 if their speeds are in the 5-5.5mph ranges. I\'ve worked out this factor based on comparisons between the graphs for the running and race walking world records that the World Masters Athletics organization has come up with and built into their own WMA Age-Grading calculator (at http://www.howardgrubb.co.uk/athletics/wmalookup06.html) which also permits level playing field performance comparisons between people of different ages.Heart Rate TrackingWhen I get up after sitting for a while, walk down the hall and climb a set of stairs, or conversely, after moving around I trot downstairs then sit down and check my HR, I get counts that are highly volatile and way out of line both with the Polar FT7 HR monitor I train with, and for that matter with my measured pulse. Thus, doing the above might skyrocket my HR to 112 on the Forerunner display, which then settles down rapidly, say by 10 beats every few seconds until it gets back to my actual rate in the 60s, 50s, and 40s - all within the compass of 20-30 seconds. My actual HR virtually never gets above the high 80s after climbing the stairs, or the high 70s if I\'m just walking down the hall. It appears that these wild fluctuations are somehow smoothed out and ignored in what the watch stores because they don\'t leave such wild peaks in the 4 hour rolling HR report display or in the HR graph that displays when I upload the data. Why, then, doesn\'t the dynamic watch display work the same way - smoothing out the data like my Polar FT7 does before reporting it in wild misleading swings? It appears that the same set of poor design decisions were made for HR reporting as for pace reporting.Sleep ReportingI\'m not going to comment on the device\'s differentiation between \"deep sleep\" and \"light sleep\" because these terms are nowhere defined in the sketchy inadequate manual, let alone related to the scientific sleep literature. I\'ve read and thought a lot about sleep science but the Garmin provides me with nothing of value when it parses my sleep period into these two undefined categories, punctuated with occasional slivers of wakefulness, which don\'t necessarily correspond with my actual state of consciousness. What does matter to me though, is my heart rate during sleep, because I have, all my long life as a distance athlete, used my resting pulse (RP) as an indicator of fitness, or the lack thereof, and as a warning sign of undue stress or overtraining. But the Garmin reporting of HR, and what it calls \"average resting heart rate\" (ARHR) has it\'s own anomalies.For example, when I went to bed last night my ARHR was 45bpm. According to the graph of my HR for this sleep period (based on the uploaded data), my total sleep period was 6:30. During the first 4 minutes, my average pulse was about 48, and during the night there were five short spikes up into the 50s ranging from 1-4 minutes, and for some fraction of a minute my pulse reached 66. The first of the three times I got up to pee the Garmin showed that my ARHR had by that time dropped to 44, indicating that even though customer service told me that ARHR is an average over the last 7 sleep periods, my ARHR when I went to bed was close to 44 - which tracks with readings of the previous night, which also dropped intranight to 44.However, last night, except for those 4-5 brief intervals, which totaled about 10 minutes across the duration of my 6:30 sleep period, the graph of my HR shows a resting pulse that ranged from 34-44, with the average for the night being about 40. Yet at the end of my sleep period my ARHR had gone back up to 45!How did customer service explain this anomaly? Apparently the device ignores any resting pulses below 40 as artifacts, and since my RP was in the 30\'s for about an hour and a half, and since this wasn\'t even counted in averaging over the night (which gave more weight to the brief periods when my RP was in the high 40s and 50s) there was no drop in my ARHR, and in fact, over the last 6 months I\'ve only briefly ever gotten it down to 44, even though my actual RP for the night is typically around 10-42, except on the nights after intense training sessions.Despite these evident software design flaws, my overall impression of Garmin, and even of the Forerunner 35, is positive. Customer service is good to excellent, with actual Americans at the other end (instead of Indians or Filipinos working from a script), who are at least familiar with the workings of the devices they are supporting. And because English is their native language they are at least able to understand the more probing questions I ask about how the device was actually programmed to work, though they are seldom able to come up with the answers on their own. But then even their supervisors or the experts they go away and consult with are apparently in the dark about how the device is programmed, and as is to be expected these days of minimal American literacy the manual is barely adequate as a guide to the operation of the device, and quite inadequate to explain the meaning of the various readouts, which renders the whole thing of dubious value once you venture beyond the bounds of its core functionality - i.e. GPS tracking of time over distance.

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