Have been running with a 5S for a couple of years, several half and full marathons. No real problems while I used it, especially no problems with GPS accuracy. Go the 5 Plus on Friday, only reason was it was "new" and perhaps to use Garmin Pay once it comes to a bank near me. First thing I noticed was the change in size, after a few days this is no longer on my mind but at first the 5 Plus seemed huge. It took a couple of hours playing around with the menus to get it set up with everything that I use, such as an external heart strap. Not interested in music as I run with my iPhone and maps are currently not available for where I live. Went for my first run with the watch this morning, frankly not much difference to running with my 5S. Especially important is that the GPS track (GPS and Galileo) is pretty much exactly as captured by the 5S. I have never had a problem with the 5S GPS, so the 5 Plus is good enough for me. I have only two minor problems with the 5 Plus at the moment, firstly the advanced running analytics are not working properly, for instance Stride Length and Vertical Ratio are not reporting constantly. Other issue is that when I connect my 5 Plus to a Mac laptop I can not see the watch mounted as a drive as I see with the 5S. What this means is that I can not access the storage on the watch - hopefully this is a temporary issue as such access is needed to install Beta releases of the software. Overall I have not seen any huge advantages with the upgrade from a 5S to a 5 Plus, other than having something new on my wrist. Hopefully Garmin Pay will accelerate its roll-out.
Sold my Fenix 5 on eBay, bought it 3 months ago. At least I had time to test Garmin products, coming from Fitbit and got my money back after the sell. Now I want to buy the Fenix 5 Plus because I got used to have music on my watch (after using Fitbit Ionic) when i'm at the gym or outside walking/running. I absolutely LOVE the fact that you can connect chest straps, in my case Polar H10, to the Fenix line-up. I like the build quality and the design, much better then the "fragile" Fitbit products. And the battery life, in my case, seems and really is amazing. Hope to not be disappointed by the PLUS model.
Other issue is that when I connect my 5 Plus to a Mac laptop I can not see the watch mounted as a drive as I see with the 5S. What this means is that I can not access the storage on the watch - hopefully this is a temporary issue as such access is needed to install Beta releases of the software.
IIRC Somewhere buried in the settings is a setting for USB connection - off the top of my head, there's two, the default is something like "Media transfer" and there's also an option for "Garmin". Might be worth seeing what happens if you change it to "Garmin".
.... the advanced running analytics are not working properly, for instance Stride Length and Vertical Ratio are not reporting constantly. Other issue is that when I connect my 5 Plus to a Mac laptop I can not see the watch mounted as a drive as I see with the 5S. What this means is that I can not access the storage on the watch - hopefully this is a temporary issue as such access is needed to install Beta releases of the software. Overall I have not seen any huge advantages with the upgrade from a 5S to a 5 Plus, other than having something new on my wrist. Hopefully Garmin Pay will accelerate its roll-out.
I had the same problem with my chest strap and the advanced running data. I’ve running with it for a couple of weeks without knowing that that information was missing. In fact I think that the Lactate Tresshold test I made failed because of it. As I posted in another thread I think I have solved it by deleting The HRM-tri from the 5plus, removing its battery for a while and then installing it back and connecting it again with The 5plus (I wont be able to run again until wednesday but I did a test walking with the strap on and the watch in “Run mode” and the data was all back but the time of contact with the ground ).
There is an app for mac called android file transfer that alows you to easily install the betas (in fact it works faster than the old system of beeing mounted by the Mac OS).
I’m very happy with the 5plus, works better and faster than my old 5.
I’ve run today. It doesn’t work. Garmin should fix this as soon as posible.
