Fenix 5S/5 Plus - 5.53 Beta Release

If one bought a sports watch, it is quite natural to expect the sports functions to get highest attention from the developers.

I still consider the Fenix primarily a sports watch.

It is nice - probably - that music functions have been added, but if that means that Garmin suddenly has redefined their watch to be a music watch with some intermittent sports functionality, then I guess I didn't get that memo.

So I must admit that I feel provoked every time I see Garmin adding new music functionality instead of making the existing sports functionality actually work.

As said, I understand the frustration regarding features that doesn’t work. There’s really no good excuse for functions that remains broken for months or years.

But, Garmin would also need to innovate their products if they still want to be relevant, and even if there wasn’t a memo, at least there was marketing when the 5+ line was launched, and if I remember correctly the main selling points were music, pay and maps... Focus on removing childhood diseases from these new features shouldn’t come as a surprise in other words.

Yesterday I charged my F5+ until 89% and went for a 1:05h Workout Run with music and gps+galileo. The consumption was only 3%. Pretty amazing but....after a couple of hours it lost 6% more. The post activity drain and the completely faulty battery percentage are the most serious bugs at the moment.

I charged my fenix 5 plus last sunday , and during this week i just realized 3 run less than an hour each one, two of then with music and some alarm in the watch. Today friday night i just checked my watch to see if i am ok for tomorrow saturday long run and my battery is completely depleted with just 6% lasting. So i go ahead and put it to charge during the night. So battery is garbage, no offense ahh and i do have bt on, but i dont receive any notification on my watch. Bt is only for the watch to sync.

Hope this may help some people. I'm using a F5x Plus, but have had the power drain problems as well. Am still using FW 5.10 Stable, but I did update both the BT v3.03 and Sensor Hub v2.21 from the 5.53 Beta package. Power drain increased to about 1%/hr with this config. At best (no BT, all sensors turned off including Compass), power drain was about 0.8%/hr. I downgraded the Sensor Hub back to v2.20, and it looks to have returned the power drain back to what it was before (0.2%-0.4%/hr, Garmin watchface, sensors and BT on).

Have also just done a bike ride, which consumed about 2% for the hour-long ride with OHR and GPS. Most importantly, power drain seems to have dropped appropriately after ending the activity.

Yesterday’s run was 6:05h with gps+glonass, course navigation in unfamiliar route, maps on , climb pro and whr. The watch is perfect in features. Maps were awesome when we lost in crossing paths but.....after 6:05h the consumption was 52,6% and this is disappointing. I know that I had a lot of features enabled but it’s far away from the 18h that Garmin mentions. I’m running an ultra in one month that I am supposed to finish in 14-15h. I am really afraid about the battery. Probably I will shut down the whr and I’ll have only GPS on with course navigation without loaded maps. These are the minimum settings I can have and even with these, I’m afraid that I have to use a power bank. That’s really uncomfortable when you run without vest, only with a small racing belt.

Yesterday bike was 4:15 with gps+hrm tri and the battery consumption was 21%... the smartwatch mode battery consumption is the best from all the versions but there is also the post activity drain...

Just did 18.5 miles, 2 hours 18 min. GPS plus Spotify, no phone with me, no navigation. Battery went from 96% to 20%.

that is no where near the 4.5 hours advertised. Hell, if it can get 3.5 hours for a marathon I’d be happy, but this is crazy. My old 935 could handle this without music and lose 15%. They need to fix the music battery drain as this is not acceptable and the entire reason why I bought this watch. 5s on 5.53

Same here, it's embarrassing.

One thing to check if auto backlight.
I had this on for an MTB ride and noticed the light was on loads as the watch bounced around. The battery was hammered on that ride.
It might help a bit?