Review on 🏋️ Titanium and Sport Bands Garmin Fenix 3 HR GPS Watch by James Pope

I gradually became a fan of watches. Luckily when I was deciding on a clock case for my dresser I went with a 12 slot device instead of the 6 as originally planned as I quickly surpassed that and am now sitting at 9 o'clock. I have several fashion/dress watches and with the Fenix 3 HR watch I have three smartwatches. Fenix is on the verge of being a smartwatch in the sense that it offers the current generation of smartwatches. Can I text him, no. Can I use it to control my Nest or other home automation, not great (I could set it up as a locator in SmartThings if I really wanted to). Does it display information from texts, emails, weather and more, oh yeah. I don't actually use notification content on the Fenix to stretch the battery. I have a Moto 360 and a Pebble which are better suited for this purpose if I need this type of device. Phone. Fenix is perfect for this purpose. At the time of purchase, I had no idea it would sync over Wi-Fi. And that's a big plus since I have a Verizon MiFi. So now when I leave the house and complete an activity, I can turn on MiFi and sync that activity to it. It's smaller, lighter and the battery lasts much longer since it doesn't power the huge color screen. Not to mention that it has a 4,000mAh battery, weighs just under 5 ounces and can charge the Fenix itself. On longer hikes, I can now leave my phone off and only use it as an emergency phone without having to carry around a huge battery to charge my phone because the Fenix is recording my routes. This saves me 5-10 ounces of pack weight, mostly depending on which battery I took with me before. I'm not a fan of ultra-light packers, I like to work light, but I'm a data geek so I need to nurture that passion. I've seen many complaints about the heart rate monitor, inaccurate wrist watches, etc. My Moto 360 was terrible. I could only get readings 20-30% of the time I would say. It was so frustrating I never bothered to check for accuracy and it was selective reading. So far, in my experience, the Fenix has shown itself at its best. Once at the gym while riding a stationary bike, I compared the handheld monitor to the Fenix. Both measured the same BPM speed. Then I counted the hours and my BPM matched what Fenix reported. I also have a Tickr chest strap which I have not yet paired or tested with the Fenix. The GPS accuracy seems to be pretty good. As expected, the interior leaves a lot to be desired. One of my indoor walking routes, which I use at work when it's raining, was recorded jumping around all over the place, probably when it picked up and lost signal again. The distance turned out to be right in the end, but the path was just amazing. ABC is one of the main reasons I bought the factory calibrated altimeter. I found him a few hundred feet away. This was an easy fix in Fenix. Lidar images have precise elevations for use in calibration. Google, "Daft Logic Altitude" to find a page where you can click on the map and get the altitude. After I calibrated it, it was accurate. I checked by clicking on the dot at the end of the driveway to get the post-adjustment elevation in front of my office. The barometer is very useful. I turned on the barometric pressure alarm to notify me of a pressure drop of 2 mbar within three hours. I had a case where in a forest where nothing was on the radar, a storm erupted literally ten miles south of me, in two frames on the radar it went from nothing to yellow and red. Unfortunately I didn't have the watch yet so can't tell if this has been spotted but there is hope when I'm out. The barometric sensor is also used to calculate the ascent and descent of stairs. I tested from the street up to the seventh floor, my office level, and it was accurate. The compass pushed me towards the Fenix 3 over the Vivoactive HR model. Fenix has a magnetic compass, while Vivoactive is based on GPS. Not everyone understands that there is true north and magnetic north. Depending on where you are on the ground, this differential angle will change. But in short, if you had to go to a fixed location three miles away with a declination of 15 degrees, the difference between magnetic north and true north would be almost three quarters of a mile. Do your research before you discover this in real life. I drive sailboats and the shop has a watch face for Fenix. So far this has proven very useful, I'd like to see more functionality so I'll probably write it myself. But it was a different driver for me. I can use the watch to get lift and header notifications during the race. I would like the app to notify you when you have reached a layline etc. Of course a comparison of GPS and magnetic compass would be helpful here to take the current offset into account. I was surprised by the battery life. When used simply as a watch, tracking a walk regularly throughout the day, it typically loses 10%. At the time of writing this review, it has been 24 hours since it was charged and the battery is at 87%. This is an expensive watch and I do not regret the purchase at all. I did find the button layout to be a little different in terms of flow, but I'm used to it. I just have a feeling that the back button should be on the bottom left and the menu up/down buttons should be on the middle right and bottom right. No problem, it works! A criticism I will not give a star for, although I wish we could give half a star. This is a proprietary loading system. I suspect it's probably due to the water ingress. But if it used a standard micro-USB connector, I'd already have one of those cables down the road. So this is another charging cable that I have to take with me on a hike, which adds to the weight. Aftermarket chargers are available for the Fenix 3 model other than the HR model. Connect the watch case with a micro USB connector. The Fenix 3 HR doesn't have a heart rate sensor cutout yet. At the very least, make sure your OEM Garmin charger uses a Micro-USB connector or, going forward, a USB-C connector. Oh yes, it also tells the time. Because it is based on GPS, it follows you across time zones and is always in place.