Garmin is the perfect solution if you want a smart watch with a gps that takes 5mins to possibly sync 50% of the time and a touchscreen-only interface that doesn’t work if it gets wet or say sweaty. Ie during most of the activities it’s supposedly designed for.
When I got a garmin smartwatch I was astounded by how poor the basic ux is in almost every single way. If I’m swimming, how do I stop my work out? The touchscreen doesn’t work because it’s wet. I have to do some sort of double click of the button. No that’s pause. Maybe triple click - no that didn’t do anything. Maybe hold the button? Now it wants to delete my whole workout.
And the GPS sync thing amazes me. I put up with this problem when I was using garmin GPSs for accurate time sync for servers back in the 1990s, but 25+ years later for them not to have figured it out when literally every other GPS device does it just fine completely blows my mind. Apple watch? I want to go for a walk/run/whatever I hit go. If I move during the 3-2-1 countdown nbd it figures it out. Garmin I want to do it I hit go, it tries to sync the sattelites. If I move during this process it starts from scratch. Sometimes the sync takes 30 seconds or so. Annoying but not impossible to live with. Most of the time however the sync takes 30seconds or so and just fails. Also annoying but whatever. Some of the time however the sync takes a few minutes and then fails. And if I move at all during this, it gives me a message saying it’s going to have to start again and starts from scratch.
And to add insult to injury the thing has a custom charging plug with the socket on the back of the watch. It has a ridge and two spikes that physically press into my wrist making it actually painful to wear. So bad.
Opposite experience here. Went from Apple Watch to Garmin, couldn't be happier. Never had an issue with the charging point chafing, it is recessed and no problem. Buttons to start/stop/pause/resume activity work as expected, so much better than trying to swipe and tap the Apple Watch screen especially in wet conditions. GPS sync never been an issue for me, you can start an activity before it syncs and it figures it out.
> GPS sync never been an issue for me, you can start an activity before it syncs and it figures it out.
I’ve had a lot of issues with this, like going running 15 km and it registers only the last 10 km. My workflow now is to put the watch on the balcony while it finds the satellites, and then go out when it’s done.
Never had this happen to me. Admittedly I am in a very rural area, and while I do sometimes get some gps points that are "off" it's generally very fast and accurate. Basically all the errors I've personally run into fall into what I'd consider acceptable margin of error.
Even in heavy tree cover on a remote island for a hike last year. It (Garmin Instinct 2X) was incredibly accurate.
If the watch was recently synced with the app to get current GPS ephemrides, it gets the lock within seconds. Otherwise, it may take much longer just like any other GPS device with outdated ephemerides.
Neither of your two statements coincides with my experience at all.
My garmin watch needed to be synced every time and it was always slow, and my garmin GPS on my motorcycle was the same. For example I once remember it trying and failing and eventually succeeding to sync during my walk from the tube through the parks to work one morning and then trying and failing and staying failed during my walk from work to the tube that evening. I was wearing the watch the entire day, so there was no possibility of it losing lock or whatever other than the obvious, which is it is just a really terrible device. Before I ditched it entirely I totally gave up on any gps functionality - it just was too high friction for too little payoff.
Secondly literally no other GPS device that I own has a noticeable “sync” or “lock” at all. They all use reasonable heuristics to get started and then improve their resolution as they go. If they ever lose GPS lock I don’t know about it except maybe a “map glitch” where I seem temporarily to be in the middle of a building instead of the street outside or whatever. The garmin takes ages, frequently fails to sync and sometimes also loses GPS lock while I’m doing an activity, and when it does that it ditches progress and pukes in the most inconvenient way possible.
I’m not in the middle of nowhere and there are no tall buildings near me. I am in London in zone 2 so there is exceptional coverage as you would expect.
Which Garmin to you have? This isn't my experience. And you have option to buy Garmin watches with actual buttons, I agree the touch-screen only are useless.
Garmin vivoactive 5 I think. It’s in the bottom of a drawer of shame somewhere. Possibly the worst consumer gadget purchase I have ever made which is quite some achievement.
I've been using Fenix 5 and then Fenix 7 for many years now and I don't recognize any of the points you're making. I might agree on the awful charging port, but that's fixed by getting one of the cheap charging "pads" from Amazon.
What garmin is this? My Epix (just a Fenix 7 with a fancy screen) seems to hit GPS near instantly, and you can disable the touchscreen. AFAIK it’s only the very basic ones / fashion smartwatches that are touch only (or touch and one or two buttons)
I've had such issues with my Forerunner 735xt (from the very start), but ever since I upgraded - or seen friends using - newer hardware, these issues have entirely disappeared.
e.g I've traced sync issues to some problem in the BT stack: forcing a disconnect/reconnect made it sync without fail. GPS was slow to lock because of low storage thus no AGPS data.
The situation with "new" hardware is completely different.
GPS lock is ~instant, by the time I get out of my RF bunker of a home I have a lock by the time I have moved the arm to press the start activity button.
Sync is subsecond usually, and takes mere seconds when it "catches up" due to phone being away from watch for a while.
Touchscreen is handy sometimes but a mere occasional bonus convenience in specific occasions: the main input mechanism is squarely buttons. I mean touch for watches is kinda braindead as an input mechanism since a finger covers so much of an area, obscuring a quarter of the screen.
UI and menu organisation felt very odd at the beginning, but after a while I started understanding how and why it's laid out this way.
It is a very alien interface at first but it absolutely makes sense, and the amount of things one can do straight from the watch is insane. I mean you can never ever sync the watch to Garmin Connect and still have a massive amount of features. It's essentially completely autonomous, something I used to great effect when their system was brought down because of IIRC a malware attack.
Garmin instinct fixes this. Rugged, physical buttons with a battery life that last weeks. It's true about the special charger, but there are also usb-c adapters.
I recently picked up the entry-level Forerunner 55 as my first ever "smart watch" and its lack of touch-screen controls and the 5 tactile buttons are my favorite things about it.
I had a Fenix 3 for over 5 years and I've had an Epix 2 for close to 3 years now and I don't have any of those problems. GPS normally takes about 30 seconds, and certainly under a minute. It has 5 buttons and for the first year I kept the touchscreen off completely until my bank started supporting Garmin Pay.
Yeah, it does use a custom charging cable, but the one for the Fenix 3 was solid and since I only charged it once a week (more than I really needed to) it wasn't a problem. The Epix 2 gets charged twice a week since it has the AMOLED screen and I keep it always on and I record workouts at least 6 times a week unless I'm on vacation. But still, the charge points are inset so they're not noticeable.
You must have gotten a weird Garmin that doesn't suit your needs then. Why did you get a Garmin with a touch screen, when you really wanted buttons and Garmin offers watches with buttons?
And I believe the GPS sync is necessary when you don't have an internet connection on the watch.
I really like vivomove looks but after buying lux as a gift for my wife I think I will steer clear. App was bad, syncing issues, she wore it for a while because she liked how it looks but I think she has not charged it in over a year because of how much the experience sucks compared to apple watch or even withings.
I have a withings scanwatch right now, the app is nice, ecosystem is nice - but accuracy is very underwhelming.
I would pay 1k for a watch that
- is hybrid with subtle watch aesthetic and minimal display/vibration for notifications
- has Apple watch level metric accuracy
- has week long battery life
- ideally would have replaceable battery but not a deal breaker if warranty is 3 years
2 short taps on the top button on Garmin Venu Sq 2 when swimming is the default activity. It counts laps automatically.
It can be setup to display 2—4 statistics during the swim.
Now if someone could explain what the other thing is that appears for a few seconds when changing direction at the wall in the pool is, and how to disable it, that would be useful. Two counters, one in large font and below one in small font. Typically they start at, or are, 0.
Apparently there is some transit system in China that uses this format for payments. So you can get one of those cards, add it to your watch, and program the RFID system to accept the ID of the card you got. There was an HN article about it this weekend.
Don’t know about Apple Watch development, but the scope of what you can do with Garmin's SDK is limited, apps run in a VM, ie no native code with respective performance issues and, as important, their developer support is a complete and utter garbage.
It's a lucky day when someone from Garmin graces Forums with their presence and bestows few sentences they think could pass for an answer.
In other words, yeah, the SDK is free, you can side-load and it’s not hard to write for, but you just can't write much.
It's severely limited in terms of what you can do. Garmin doesn't support some Unicode (Georgian) characters, and when you get a notification with Georgian characters, watch freezes, starts heavily draining the battery and then resumes in a few seconds.
Garmin has refused to fix this for many many years, and there's no games you can play with SDK that will help you fix it yourself
Less hackable in what way? I've found it's tremendously easier to write a watch face for the Garmin than the Apple Watch. I know, I've done it (and if you, like me, don't want to share your watch face, leave it in Beta all the time).
I can't get over garmins predatory business model. The way they bin their products by activity is terrible if you have multiple hobbies. All of these devices are just a gps reciever, screen, battery, yet they sell it to you a dozen different ways for $500+ a pop usually because why unify the software and make it easy for the consumer?
The watches are terrible replacements for the dedicated unit for activities like cycling, hiking, even golfing imo (don't like anything like that on my wrist).
> why unify the software and make it easy for the consumer
I honestly believe that selling them as separate products is easier. Both for the company who can focus in on the advertising, and for 99% of the customers who can go straight to their hobby.
That being said, it does look like the very first watch on their website is specifically in its own multi-sport category.
They only offer that for watches and often certain features are cribbed within that watch vs the dedicated sport one (I know this is the case for the golf line where the multi sport watch have limited featureset). Really I want the head unit. Thats what people want on their bikes. Thats what people use hiking. Thats what I like for golf just something smaller than my wallet to slip into my pocket (incidentally I carry a simple bushnell gps that goes for a fraction of the price). But Garmin doesn't offer that. If I want all of that I need three units, one for the bike, the garmin approach, and one of their hiking units. Really therre is nothing stopping any of these devices from offering the same functions but an insistence of binning these into different skus in the hopes of selling multiples to someone who already shells out on multiple personal hobbies. No advantage to the consumer with how it is lined up, only pain.
Watches, not gps units. Why is the garmin approach unit and garmin bike gps different products? why cant I get a unit that can do both of these things and also abrogate hiking trail maps? Storage is dirt cheap in 2025 is it not? So I don't think its a matter of cramming a limited number of functions on a few kb internal storage like the old days.
I absolutely love my Garmin instict. It has an always-on display and a battery that lasts for nearly a month.
I mostly use it for reading my calendar, weather, notifications and time. Occasionally I use it for exercise.
But what it also excels at is GPS. I use it as a backup navigational tool when sailing. It has also prevented me from getting lost when running in the woods a number of times.
My Pebble Time Steel finally bit the dust so I turned to a Garmin Instinct. I can't stand it. The button placement is totally random and legitimately painful to use. The Garmin software focuses on fitness activities to the exclusion of everything else.
I recoil at having been tempted by the more expensive Garmin watches. What a waste of money that would have been!
I just gave away a very expensive Garmin to my son. Its feature set is to dream of. Its user interface is hot garbage. When I'm out on a hike or in the pool trying to just measure my fsking laps I need a single click option or something. Their paradigm of "button 1, button 3, button 5, long press button 4, button 1 again to confirm. Now you can push off the wall in 3... 2... 1" is beyond fucking stupid.
Does anyone at Garmin actually practice sports? For a company with such great hardware they really need someone competent on the UX team. Throwing everything into more and more menus and submenus is not working.
The specific watch I'm criticizing is Garmin Instinct 2x solar. The name is very ironic because there is nothing intuitive about using that watch. Like, at all.
On the positive side, I adore that they sell (sold?) the forerunner series with all physical buttons and no touchscreen. Garbage software, but being able to click through by muscle memory instead of dealing with a touch interface in sunny conditions is essential to me. Fitbits and apple watches have just always been too reliant on the touch method for my liking.
The software is pretty crap though, and forerunner in particular is way too locked down towards running activities.
You have trouble with touch interface in sunny conditions??? Try cold conditions with gloves on, then you'll have real problems with the Apple Watch. Or wet conditions. Or fast conditions like on a bike where you rather not look to turn off the alarm. Sunny conditions is the only time my watch works fine.
Wet is always a disaster, though. If it's going to be moist outside (like hiking with a rain jacket), you have to remember to apply water lock immediately, or you're done for. In that case, the watch is pretty much useless until you get back inside, which is in fact very annoying.
I don't swim, but I have done thousands of runs with my series of garmin watches and I can say that the UX for them is spectacular, everything is in a sensible place for me to do without thinking.
Not sure what problems you've had with it specifically
Getting into the swim app itself takes a couple of different buttons presses. But then it tries to be both too smart and too stupid at the same time. All I wanted to begin with was lap counting with a big number on the centre of the display. Can't configure it and can't even start to get it to count laps without some ceremony of setting up interval training and it only gets more convoluted from there. It's useless for an amateur like me who is not a peak performance athlete who needs to track every minutiae of their swim stats. How many people are they targeting with these this UX? Just people getting ready for the Olympics? There are hundreds of them. Hundreds!
I don't think you're being serious. I have had several Garmin watches and this is not an actual problem. I do both pool swim and open water activities and it's very easy to count laps. Sometimes I set up structured workouts but that's completely optional.
My vivoactive 5 swimming is top right button short press (activities) scroll tap swim. Top right to start. Screen shows only interval time and distance or laps (configurable). Bottom goes to interval rest. Lots more data and a rest timer. Bottom starts swimming again. Top stops the activity. Long press top to save, bottom to discard.
All operations are buttons because the touch doesn't work well with water on basically every device.
this watch has no touch interface. any scrolling and selecting has to be done via the five buttons which I ALWAYS somehow get wrong. Who on this beautiful earth thought it was sane to make the bottom right button be the "Back" button in a L2R (English) locale?
I really can't understand what you're complaining about. There's nothing about the English locale which implies an optimal placement for the Back button. The same devices are also sold in other locales.
These devices have to work in all conditions with some complex functionality available through only five buttons so some level of overlap is unavoidable. Do you also complain that your computer keyboard lacks separate buttons for "4" and "$"?
Ideally, in LTR locales, we move from left to right. This means that objects appear from the right side of the screen (as going forward would mean going right), and a back button is more intuitively perceived on the left side.
But I'd have to try actually swimming with it I guess. It always counts my reps in strength training pretty accurately.
Edit: But then again, if you want to manually track laps, the swimming app doesn't matter. It's only there for the convenience of not having to press a button to increment the counter. You can just copy the "other" activity, name it something like "manual swim" with the lap button enabled. The only thing that differentiates the swim activity from a regular activity is setting the pool length, stroke detection, and automatic lap incrementing. The data is still getting logged the same way as far as I can tell, so using the "other" activity would give you all the data you need to track the swim.
Garmin is certainly better than some previous smartwatches I've had. You get a sunlight-readable, always-on display and a week-long battery life.
But with my Forerunner, they've packed a lot of options into the five buttons. Leads to a lot of "these buttons are for up and down, except at the start run screen where the up button opens the menu, which you can then navigate with up and down to choose between the six types of run, or exit with the back button"
If you're the type of person who doesn't like to read the manual, you're going to have a bad time.
My Fossil HR Collider lasted 4 weeks. It could do much (but not all) of the stuff my Pebble Classic/Pebble 2 could do. Both could control music during workout, pick up calls, put radios off. What I liked most about it is it could disguise as a non-smartwatch. On top of that, Pebble 2 HRM was bad.
A Pebble successor has to be better than a Pebble 2. The only reason my Pebble 2 isn't used anymore (and why I swapped to Fossil which is discontinued, too) is hardware buttons died. I tried to donor from a Pebble Classic, but sadly failed.
On top of all this, I get skin rashes from watches, so I cannot wear them 24/7.
To be honest, that is not a problem unique to.. well.. any domain-specific company's tech stack.
Raymarine their marine GPS navigation units are supposed to be very intuitive, but they lack so many "that would have been nice" features, and their UX has stuff where various buttons have click / double-click / hold / hold 2s / hold 10s, all to access different functions. Some of it isn't even written down in the manual.
I mean honestly I have this issue with every level of compute device. Smart phones are much more limited than computers and so much stuff is buried. But then think about the absolutes gigantic amount of undocumented buried stuff that exists on Windows and Linux and macOS. You have a keyboard and internets and a mouse and it's still literally millions of people's jobs to deal with UI issues on these devices professionaly.
Its worth clarifying you are talking about the data on the phone app, which does require connectivity as nothing is stored on the phone app, its all on Garmin's servers.
However, most if not all of the data (recorded activities or health data) can be viewed directly on your watch, without any connectivity.
I have a lot of experience working with the Garmin API. The data you can see on the recording device (watch) is limited and basically worthless. Akin to looking at a raw csv full of data rather than nicely plotted over a map.
Which data are you unable to view while offline? I never sync my Garmin watch to my phone, and I'm able to view all the data that interests me on the watch.
Any data in the app. It just doesn't work offline, at all. Like they looked at a book chapter on basics of data caching and went "nah, not doing that, that's too f#cking advanced".
Gadgetbridge added support for Garmin watches recently [1]. All data is stored on your Android phone with no internet connectivity required and you can even export the sqlite DB so you own your sensor data. The UI isn't as nice as Garmin's but it does its job.
I'm not sure I understand. I have had an Instinct, Tactix Delta, and Tactix 7 Pro and have always been able to see the data without a phone or any network present.
I love these watches after moving from an Apple watch, primarily for two reasons:
1) the battery life - I cant stand having to charge my watch every day or so - my (current) Tactix 7 will go ~3-4 weeks depending on how much GPS I use.
2) (this may be out of date) when I would use the Strava or Run app on the Apple watch, it would not signal when it had a GPS fix, which resulted in a number of runs that had a "teleport" at the start, resulting in messed up metrics. Only a small thing, but it really frustrated me.
I'm assuming the parent poster is talking about using the Garmin Connect app, which does require connectivity. You are correct, the data is visible directly on the watch.
What are you even talking about? Garmin has an auto start/stop feature for lap swimming. All you need to do is single press top right button once to start the session and press the same button to stop and then another button to save it. It will literally do everything else for you automatically.
I got a tiny bit offended by the assumption that I'd rather have an Apple Watch.
I'd think the ideal for me would instead be something in-between a Pebble and a Sensor Watch. Something hackable with more battery life, that is a watch first (and a smartphone notification screen never).
I wonder how far I could go towards that goal with the upcoming Pebble hardware and rewriting the OS kernel to sleep more.
I think it's just a static redirect, it sent me to the Apple Watch page in Firefox on Linux. But I also wondered if it would shuffle between a few different brands or something (I guess not).
There exists 'smart bands', which can be applied to any (generally non-smart, obviously) watch that uses normal pin-style watchbands. They have a contactless chip in them that can store one card.
My traditional watches use them, though I had to custom-make one of the bands to be in a style I wanted.
It's a major use of the watch for me also, but something like a Pebble 2 HR would tempt me to abandon payments.
Do you have any links to examples of these bands you've found useful?
My (Timex Pay) one seems to function using a virtual card (remotely lockable) provided by the bank, which uses some sort of tokenization-based security chip on the band itself. I imagine there's probably some security flaws because they provide the NFC encoders to the user. It's backed by https://tappytech.com
I wouldn't count on that, getting every bank on board is a massive undertaking. Even Garmin Pay and Fitbit Pay (before it was folded into Google Wallet) have/had huge gaps in their coverage, especially outside of the US.
The amount of us who clicked no is amazing. I loved my Pebble Time but I'm going to give money to yet another Kickstarter and have it be killed shortly after.
Feels a little bit salty to send customers to Google's competitor given the fact that Google provided the exit and also liberated the code. They didn't have to do that.
A better "thank you" to Google would be to direct people to Fitbit.
Google used to (still?) have a page internally where if you clicked on “I don’t care about security” it sent you to the jobs page of a competitor that had suffered a notable breach.
Fitbit isn't dead yet, but it's not doing great either. And the alternatives kinda suck (tldr; the best choice is probably a Garmin for 3x as much money and with less features ).
