As a former very very fast swimmer, i never found a watch that worked. The ones with the features were to heavy/draggy. So i always bought dirt cheap ones that i could leave at one end of the lane. Cheap ironmans. They got stepped on every day. People would apologise and i would throw the watch across the deck to show how much i did not care about scratches. Try this: put your watch on your other wrist. The weight/drag difference will be dramatic.

Couldn't you clip it to the little lane dividers or hang it from the edge somehow ?

Honestly, Garmin watches are amazing. Going from a watch I had to charge daily (Samsung Gear line) to one I charge about 3 times a month feels incredibly liberating, particularly for travel. _And_ it feels almost as slim and light as my old Pebble Time Round.

I agree completely! Our Garmin Descent Mk3i dive computer smart watches are the best watches I've ever seen. They just work. You can charge it for an hour or so and it's good for 25 days. I hated having to charge previous watches every day. It has a double-tap light on/off feature with a very bright LED, four light levels, and a red light mode. It automatically starts tracking my dives and is rated to 200 meters. It can also do diver-to-diver messaging, air tank tracking, and group tracking using subwave sonar. And it has all the normal pulse ox, heart rate tracking, step tracking, sleep tracking, and smartwatch stuff. Just don't enable the one touch kill-switch ;-). Apparently it's a feature for military divers to erase their data (but sounds like a marketing gimmick).

Pebble Time 2 is available again! I bought one.

It doesn't have all the Garmin features, but it's free and I don't have to worry about it's software getting redesigned.

True, but in defense or Garmins, one cool feature is that they are really similar to their GPSr units in that you can just connect them to a computer and transfer data and maps (including many custom maps) through MTP (or as a USB drive on older models). Plus they work with Gadgetbridge. So you can pretty much use the watch forever without Garmin involved.

Yep, agreed. Garmins are great! I tried Fenix and I liked its feature set, but it's just too large for me physically.

If only the map rendering wasn't so terribly slow. I often use mapping when cycling and panning or zooming the map is just unbearably slow.

I'm now usually taking the Coros Nomad because it has super-fast maps and still a battery life of three weeks.

They are really great otherwise and I love my Coros Nomad and Garmin Fenix so much more than the Apple Watch Ultra.

The missing heart-rate monitor is a pretty big limitation for a lot of users. LOL. Imagine writing a review and leaving the heart rate in last place. Just don’t write a review then.

He's talking about an 11 year old device of a 15 year old (long since discontinued) design, even flagship devices were less featureful then than some mid-market devices are now. Imagine expecting a review of such a device to be enticing to someone comparing modern options…

Also, not everyone with a GPS watch cares that much about heart rate. I am a runner (well, less so now that I used to be, but working on fixing that) and have a Feninx7, not for the health tracking features but for route tracking and the long battery life (for “ultra” events covering many hours or even multiple days).

That's just an old and not useful device.

GP is talking about a model that was released 14 years ago, and is closely based on one from 2009.

Seems to me that "still working well after more than a decade of use" is a more useful piece of info than "newer models include additional features".

Is a stone working after 1000 years? Yep, still a stone though.

I have a Garmin Vivoactive 3. Fantastic watch but I find the HRM underwhelming. Not very accurate and drains battery. I pair a chest band with it instead for much better quality monitoring.

i have a fenix solar, i charge it once a month.

it has an insane number of features

The price is also insane nowadays though. IMO they are very vulnerable to the likes of Coros, who also have MIP watches that last for weeks, have much faster mapping and are less than half the price.

I know. I got a health perk at work for the year and used it all on the watch. I don't know if it would have been worth it to me without that.

How's the accuracy on the Coros watches?

I haven't compared it with a heart rate band yet. GPS accuracy is good since I enabled dual-frequency (MAX), before I had some inaccuracy in (urban) canyons.

Are these algos local, as well?

Yes, mostly because the Garmin app on iOS is pretty bad at keeping a live connection up even for weather =)