It’s been a few weeks since I picked up my Garmin Forerunner 935. I must say I’m pretty impressed.
I’ve been using it to record my day to day step count and all day heart rate data as well as all my training and the London Triathlon.
The battery life is great, I’m getting a good 2 weeks out of a charge even when using it to record activities with GPS and ANT+ sensor data. It seams to take about 2 hours to fully charge.
Having it sync with the phone is useful as it means I don’t need to keep a Windows box kicking around just (OK, I do still need one for Zwift but that is less regular) to run the Garmin Connect application to upload my workouts to the web and Strava. There is built in WiFi support as well which can allow it to sync without having the phone, I’ve not enabled this at the moment as even if I’m not always carrying my phone while training it is pretty much always going to be around when I get back.
Another change is that the ANT+ sensors now live in a collective pool rather than being bound to something like a bike profile so you don’t need to remember to pick the right profile if you have multiple bikes. The watch will just pick all the relevant sensors it can see as you select the activity type. The only downside I can see to this is if you lend somebody a bike and both go riding at the same time. To get round this you can force it to pick one if it can see multiple versions of the same sensor. But it does mean I don’t need 3 different profiles, one for the Propel, Defy and the Defy on the turbo trainer.
The new training tracking feature is also helpful, giving indications of how much rest time you should take between activities and also a training load number. The training load number is supposed to unique to each user so not something you can compare with others, but should show if the system thinks you are over training (looks like I need to back off a little)
The only extra I have purchased is a glass screen protector as I managed to get a very small scratch in the plastic face on the first day wearing it. I’ve no idea how it did it as I doing remember knocking or catching it against anything. The protector is very thin and fits nearly flush with the bezel and you can’t tell it’s there. Given I’m planning on wearing this as my day to day watch as well as for activity tracking this is a little disappointing, but this is probably why it’s cheaper than the equivalently spec’d Fenix 5.