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It looks like 2020 is the year I've let loose on my acquisition program. Yes, I finally got myself a smart watch and it isn't an Apple Watch.
Why a Garmin instead of an Apple?
- Cost. No, I don't have infinite amounts of dough. At about half the price of an Apple Watch, this seemed to be a reasonable purchase. You do have to give up features like a high resolution OLED display, Apple Pay, a ton of iOS apps and the jewel like build of an Apple device. But I can live with that.
- Battery life. With a published best case battery life of 7 days in watch mode and 13 hours in GPS mode, it seemed to fit my needs better. I don't normally wear a watch and only do so for activity tracking. My plan is to use this as a heartrate sensor (broadcasting to an Edge 1030) while cycling and to track my runs with GPS.
- Sweet spot. The Garmin Forerunner 35 would be cheaper at SGD130 (for versions with brightly coloured bands, black costs more...) instead of SGD200 (could have gotten the silver bezel version for SGD175, but I really prefer a less conspicuous look). But it is black and white only, has half the display resolution, no touch screen, and doesn't look quite as good as the Vivoactive 3. Admittedly, it lasts 2 days longer in watch mode and has the same heartrate sensor and GPS features.
Initial impressions
When I received the box from the delivery guy, I thought he had handed me an empty box. The watch is light for its size. Noticeable lighter than the wife's Apple Watch. It looks well made, but workman-like, not in any way flashy. Other than the metal bezel, everything else is a matt black plastic. There's a heartrate sensor on the rear with 3 green LEDs, encircled by a metal ring. There is a charge/sync connector above the heartrate sensor.
Heading out for a slow run
Hmm... why isn't it registering my stair climbing?
Just last night, I came back from another slow run and cooled off by walking up and down the stairs. And for some reason, the stair counter would not increment. Tried a few more times. Still no dice. Took off the watch, wiped it down. No dice. Sync'd with phone, wiped again, gave it a few gentle taps. And viola! Stair count reactivated! No idea what happened there. When it does increment, it is accurate. One floor counted for every climb up the single flight of stairs. About 3m worth of altitude gain.
Battery weirdness and charging
Charging the watch is simple. Just plug one end of the supplied cable into a USB-A port and the other end into the receptable on the back of the watch (that thing with 4 silvery dots you see in the picture). It went from 50% to 100% in less than an hour.
Here's the funny thing. I switched off the watch. The next morning, when I turn it on, it says 90% battery. Weird. So I give it another charge and leave the watch on and now after almost 8 hours, it's down to 96%. Does that mean it uses less power when it is switched on? How could that be? Unless it didn't really shut down but went into some strange mode.
2021-01-27: Update on the battery issue. Googling revealed that some folks have had good success avoiding high battery drain when the watch is switched off. Before switching off the watch, disable the phone connectivity. Press and hold the button to get to the controls menu, press on the icon with a phone/Bluetooth symbol so that it's grayed out. Then press on the power icon to switch off the watch. I've tried this and it appears to work. Another method is to powerdown the watch by pressing and holding down the button for 10 seconds.
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