Tag: tech

Update on Garmin Forerunner 935

It’s been a few weeks since I picked up my Garmin Forerunner 935. I must say I’m pretty impressed.

Step counting

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.

Rest indicator

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)

Training Load

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.

Garmin Forerunner 935

My trusty Garmin Forerunner 910xt has finally been put out to pasture, 2 years ago the barometric altimeter failed and I got it replaced with a refurbed version and over the last 3 months the power button has been getting harder and harder to push. My best guess is that the micro switch has lifted off of the board so it needs to be push at just the right angle to get it to line up with the contacts and actually activate.

My Fitbit HR had also given up the ghost as well in the last few months so I went looking for a replacement that would cover for both. I looked at both the Garmin 735 and the 935. Both do step counting and have a optical HR sensor in the back. Reviews of the HR sensor on the 735 were not so great and it was missing a barometric altimeter so that didn’t help it’s case. Wiggle were also doing a week of extra discount (17%) at the time as well which helped to bring the price of the 935 down to something slightly more sensible than list price.

So as you can guess by the title of this post I opted for the 935. It arrived this morning so I don’t have a lot to say about it just yet, but the first impressions are:

Garmin forerunner 935
Garmin forerunner 935
  • It’s a lot smaller than the 910xt and even a bit smaller than the Suunto Vector that I have been wearing as a day to day watch
  • It’s also lighter than I expected, I’m used to wearing something with a bit of heft (My first serious sailing watch was a Citizen Yatchmaster which was stainless steel, when I took it off my arm used to float) to it so this it will take a day or two to get used to how light it is.

A lot of the features need a bit of time to learn my training pattern and my day to day activity profile so I’ll give it a week to bed in and write some more about it, I’m also doing the London Tri next weekend so that will be a good chance to give it a proper workout.

Both the 735 and the 935 both support the 2 new HRM belts from Garmin that support recording HR data while swimming (the HRM-Tri and HRM-Swim), while I already have a ant+ HRM belt I’m seriously tempted by both of these (mainly for the geekiness) so I may have to grab one or both soon.