201–210 of 229 posts
How can they call 36 hours of battery life "long"? The $799 version Garmin Fenix 7 solar (which they seem to be targeting) has an 18-22 days of battery life.
Apple is missing the mark in this segment. Their competitors: Garmin, coros all offer weeks of battery life with tradeoffs people in this segment happily make. I get 20 days of battery life on my coros pace 2. Charging a apple watch every night or two would not be acceptable.
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I prefer my Axiom. The day they need a charge.. means I was in a total darkness for a couple of months. /s but only so slightly
Never heard of that. https://www.axiomwatches.fr/en/ This? Very informative website. Also I thought we talk about smart watches with GPS. Like 50 years ago we already had high precision mechanical watches that you dont need to charge ever...
Well, I never heard of that too. I wear Citizen. [0]
> Also I thought we talk about smart watches with GPS
I had a lengthy response here, but it was throttled.
To sum up: since the smartwatches became a thing I attempted multiple times to justify why I should buy one, but the need to constantly monitor it's charge level, along with my smartphone and whatever else (bt-headset, tablet, another smartphone - depending on the period) always killed the idea. I still use a wired earphones with the same reasoning - I don't want to bother with charging them, I just plug them in and they work.
And the main point is still what I don't [yet?] have a killer feature in any smartwatches what would offset the charging hassle. Especially if it needed to be charged everyday (I don't think anyone lives on a 36h cycle and forgetting to charge them in the evening means they would die around noon).
https://www.citizenwatch.com/us/en/product/AU1065-58E.html?c...
Apple is missing the mark in this segment. Their competitors: Garmin, coros all offer weeks of battery life with tradeoffs people in this segment happily make. I get 20 days of battery life on my coros pace 2. Charging a apple watch every night or two would not be acceptable.
I don’t think this is actually the target segment. This is who the targeted consumers for this device aspire to be, not who they actually are.
I've had an Apple Watch SE for the last couple of years. It's been pretty good on the whole. Bought it after my Garmin Forerunner nearly failed to get a GPS lock in time when I was in a start pen for a half marathon (AFAIK the Fenix gets a lock far quicker).
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I totally agree with you as well. I currently have a Garmin Fenix 6 pro and it lasts around 14 days. As someone who is into trail running and backpacking, a 36 hour battery life is untenable, and charging it every night seems like a pain. The irony is that AirPods have a really great battery life (especially the carrying case) despite the small form factor, and are my go-to for long runs.
Dumb question, if I may, having never used a GPS smartwatch: How easy to use are the Garmin watches on the trails? Can I download a certain route (like from Alltrails or Trailforks or Gaia) onto it and then have it position + route me in the woods, with just GPS and no cell signal? I don't really want a smartwatch (ugh, slack on my wrist? no thanks), but a backpacking safety companion would be awesome!
Additionally, you can do simple ad-hoc routing on the watch itself, while you're out on the trail, also totally offline.
For more complex ad-hoc routing, it can be easier to design a route on the Garmin Explore app on your phone and then sync it to your watch via Bluetooth. This works (also totally offline), but the problem is that Garmin Explore's UI and trail labeling kind of sucks, at least on iOS.
My preferred approach, if I'm out on a hike and want to set a new route to someplace, is to draw routes on Gaia GPS (which also has offline maps), then sync them to my Fenix 7 over Bluetooth for navigation. I wrote a Pythonista script to make this work well on iOS: https://github.com/mshroyer/pythonista-scripts/tree/master/G...
Apple is missing the mark in this segment. Their competitors: Garmin, coros all offer weeks of battery life with tradeoffs people in this segment happily make. I get 20 days of battery life on my coros pace 2. Charging a apple watch every night or two would not be acceptable.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I totally agree with you as well. I currently have a Garmin Fenix 6 pro and it lasts around 14 days. As someone who is into trail running and backpacking, a 36 hour battery life is untenable, and charging it every night seems like a pain. The irony is that AirPods have a really great battery life (especially the carrying case) despite the small form factor, and are my go-to for long runs.
The real irony of the charge-at-night model is that you miss the single biggest source of error in human life: lack of sleep. Accurate sleep measurement is, on a day-to-day basis, far more valuable than many of the features advertised on this system. That said, the red night vision setting, dive computer capability, and the iPhone's satellite messaging capability are pretty awesome. Combined with the ability for the…
What's a good consumer device nowadays for that use case? I remember looking for some good sleep tracking (and heart health tracking) a couple of years and got hopelessly lost.
How can they call 36 hours of battery life "long"? The $799 version Garmin Fenix 7 solar (which they seem to be targeting) has an 18-22 days of battery life.
So my guess is their thinking is:
- Garmin has 10 times the battery life
- We have a 10 times better user experience
- Most "outdoorsy people" (or prosumers or, let's face it, lazy people who want to look cool) will prefer user experience over battery life
- So we prioritize on that
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The real irony of the charge-at-night model is that you miss the single biggest source of error in human life: lack of sleep. Accurate sleep measurement is, on a day-to-day basis, far more valuable than many of the features advertised on this system. That said, the red night vision setting, dive computer capability, and the iPhone's satellite messaging capability are pretty awesome. Combined with the ability for the…
> Accurate sleep measurement is, on a day-to-day basis, far more valuable than many of the features advertised on this system. What's a good consumer device nowadays for that use case? I remember looking for some good sleep tracking (and heart health tracking) a couple of years and got hopelessly lost.
He’s a professional scientist specialising in sleep research and the reviews concentrate on data/accuracy only.