Review on Garmin Ultimate Multisport Smartwatch Monitoring by Will Murphy

12/10/18 UpdateTitanium Bezel I have a question if it's really titanium as it's so soft it smudges and frankly looks bad just a few months after buying this watch and I am not rough with it. Subtracting another star for inferior materials in a product that should be a premium product. a lot but I ran and used music so it didn't phase me. I haven't run in the last 2 weeks and decided to take a look at the battery life. At best, I get 6 days on a single charge, while Garmin claims 12 days in smartwatch mode. I'm not someone who's always on the phone and I don't send/receive dozens of texts a day, it shouldn't be that far. Oh, watch faces can affect battery life. No problem, I'll take a Garmin watch face, unfortunately I can't find one that actually shows the minute hand consistently, which is well documented by the user community, but Garmin doesn't fix them. As for my comment about having to take the golf course, the foreplay was inaccurate. One field we play every week wasn't showing on the clock so I went to the app but every other field I played was on the clock. Golf is good but not great because it automatically moves the hole towards you at odd times. In the middle of the hole, on top of the green, on the tee, etc. If you are using a clock to score, you fumble the clock to the correct hole, then enter your score and then advance it to the correct hole. The running and the music were great. My Jabra headphones stay connected and the tracking/stats are amazing. We were recently in the mountains and the altimeter matched the actual altitude almost exactly (tested with a helicopter altimeter set to barometric pressure) and the step/heart rate tracking was very cool. I'm sticking with its original title of near perfect, but it's a shame for Garmin that it's touting a battery life that's nowhere near as good. Original review below: Fenix 5 Plus is the first of the Fenix line. with music built into the watch. I actually ordered and returned the Fenix 5X about 2 weeks before the announcement of this device as the music in my device is one of the things to consider. running 5-6 miles a few times a week, and believe it or not, this is my first Garmin device (I've used Polar). Why is this device better than 5x? I like to wear as little equipment as possible when running. Now at 5 plus I wear a watch, Jabra Sport Elite bluetooth headphones and sunglasses. Tracking is excellent, and there are plenty of metrics for each launch (too many to list, look at the product specs), plus the music streaming to the headphones was perfect, never missing a moment. I use google play for my music and you just have to manually download it to the watch via USB cable. Oh, and I've already taken it to golf at my local golf course. You need to plan ahead a bit as you will need to download the course before playing, but I don't really care as you can do it via your smartphone or PC/MAC USB cable. The distances were accurate and on many holes I actually found the center of the green on the device. The battery life is excellent, even when jogging/listening to music. I can say "days" but haven't tried fully draining the battery yet. It's been 5 days and 2 runs for me so far and when I plugged it in it was still at 37%. Why is he so great? Things you have to accept and get used to in order to extend battery life. The stark contrast they show in promotional photos is NOT the screen you will receive. I wish they would post some realistic pictures of the screen as it doesn't have a backlight and when you press the backlight button it looks more like an 80's LCD watch than a modern day smartwatch. This screen is only closed when promotional photos are outside as bright light is used to reflect and illuminate the screen. So the battery life is really great because there is no lamp for the screen. When you're not pressing the button (there's a gesture setting where the backlight turns on automatically when you turn your wrist, but you use it so infrequently that I turned that setting off). This is not a touchscreen watch, you use the buttons to control all functions. Having tried a few Google Wear devices, I'm happy with a non-touch screen. The 5 buttons let you navigate where you want to go, and there's far less button navigation error compared to the occasional choppy touchscreen. Navigation I'm not used to yet. The main buttons are Light, Up/Menu, Down, Enter and Previous Screen. When I wanted to start my first run, I launched the launcher app, then selected the screen I wanted to see and couldn't figure out how to start a run after the GPS was blocked. After some fiddling I figured it out, but I'm a computer gadget geek and I'm having a few problems. For a non-nerd, these things might be too many keystrokes to understand. I would give them 5 out of 5 if this very expensive sports watch had some honest photos of what customers would see and if the button navigation was cleaner. This is a kitchen sink gadget and so far it's working great. But it's better for the money they want for it!