Review on Garmin Fēnix HR Gray Renewed by Donald Phillips

I've been using the Fenix 3 HR almost continuously for the past month and a half and before that I've been using the Fenix 2 for about a year. The watch software was very stable, unlike the Fenix 2 which plagued many people with issues in both the watch software and the PC update software. I usually use it for running, walking and hiking in crags lately. Although the watch has a sapphire case, I don't go climbing with it. This is an expensive watch and I will not risk damaging it. Battery life was excellent. Lasts very long if you only use it as a watch, lasts very long if you use it for GPS activities. The optical HR on the wrist doesn't drain the battery as much as I initially expected. As far as GPS operation is concerned, the signal is usually received very quickly, in many cases unexpectedly quickly. With the Fenix 2 I would use the time I was waiting for the GPS to warm up, but with the Fenix 3 HR there's usually almost no waiting and that's if I were to use it in the same places use the Fenix. 2 to run. Garmin first developed it as a GPS watch, not a smartwatch. This means it supports longer battery life compared to smartwatches without a powerful processor. The philosophy was that people already have phones, why would they need a watch that does what a phone does and still requires the phone to be really useful. if you can only have a watch that is primarily a watch and get information from the phone if you wish. Their philosophy is never to type a message on a dial pad, I tend to agree. You can connect your watch to your phone via Bluetooth to get some cool features like weather, email, news, etc. and customize watch faces made by other people. I try not to connect them unless I change something. I like how the order of actions is customizable, I can hide actions I'm not interested in. You can customize which data fields should be available on actions, their order, etc. You can download additional data fields that have been coded by people. Some people have coded activity pages that have significantly more data fields than even Garmin's standard 4 per "page". This way you can see much more information without having to switch to other pages during your activity. There are many cool features here. Not as many features as a full-blown smartwatch, but personally I think the battery life more than makes up for it. The altitude, barometer, and compass functions were also important to me, and while many smartwatches can use GPS to determine altitude and the compass bearing to determine direction of travel, they tend not to take barometric pressure into account. Which is important for me personally when I'm camping/hiking/climbing somewhere far away from civilization. The built-in weather alert feature is cool and customizable, but I wish it was more permanent. Just as if it worked when you didn't have the watch and then put it back on you don't get a notification that an alarm has occurred. However, most watches don't have this feature at all. Great menu to add any number of alarms and set them to sound once, daily, weekdays, weekends or custom. The default alarm is sound + vibration + backlight, and it will wake me up pretty well. Also, you can set an alarm __ minutes before the GPS calculates sunrise and/or sunset, which I find useful for outdoor professionals, hikers, etc. A lot of people these days depend on alarms on their phones, but it's nice to have redundancy. if you thought you plugged it in to charge but you didn't and it dies or the power goes out when you sleep and it dies instead of charging or the software crashes or whatever. I wish you could just import the GPS coordinates of the places you're interested in instead of adding them manually, but that doesn't matter how I use my watch at the moment, and adding just a few points wouldn't do too take a long time. . Optical pulse on the wrist.