New F5+ arrived!

My new F5+ sapphire arrived yesterday! I'm upgrading from an F5 with the mineral crystal in slate gray. It was completely dead when it arrived, so I had to let it charge for a while before it would start up. After it did, I spent several hours playing with it, installing the missing apps, syncing with True Up and upgrading the maps.

Sitting these two watches side by side, you could never pick out which was which by looking. The F5+ in black looks almost identical to the F5 in slate gray, with some minor differences concerning what's printed on the bezel. Some people have reported that the sapphire crystal makes the watch face look a bit darker but I compared in a few different lighting conditions and couldn't see a difference. One of the first things I did was to fool with the run widget. I was cycling through the pages so I could add my custom ones and noticed the map page. That's cool! Frankly I doubt I would ever use it running. I might if I get lost cycling, but its very cool. I also noticed that there are some new exercise widgets, like stair climbing and such. Perhaps those were there with the F5, I don't recall. Only one of my apps - a sailboat start timer app - refused to run. That's a good app, so I hope the developer fixes it.

I also installed my spiffy watch faces and my aftermarket orange strap. The strap fit perfectly, which I expected. The watch face looks exactly as it does on the F5.

Then I loaded some music onto it. I'm not thrilled that to use Spotify with this watch I have to pay them $10 per month, but at least I can manually load my music. I paired it with my Jaybird X2 bluetooth headset and it worked as expected, sounding good. I did notice that there does not seem to be a way to actually turn the music off, short of pausing it. Perhaps this has to do with the battery life issues being reported?

The watch face I use updates only once per minute. I let the F5+ charge all night, so I'll be able to get an idea of the battery life vs the F5. During the winter, when I'm not doing much outside, I would get great battery life from the F5, as in nearly three weeks between charges. That's with the OHR running al the time, bluetooth connection to my phone for texts and alerts and the occasional GPS activity. Hopefully I'll see comparable battery life. Fingers crossed!

0 Seren over 6 years ago

Which watch face are you using?

Maps will be great...shame the built in ones have no contours (unlike the US model). I have the TalkyToaster ones installed.

0 HeliosJim over 6 years ago

I'm using Steam Gauge, which I think looks great. The three dials display day/date, battery and UTC hour offset. This watch face can display seconds on one of the small dials but I assume that would sue more battery so, at least until I get a sense of the battery consumption, I'll stick to the same setup as I used on the F5.

I have the US model and Garmin Express did install an update to the toppo maps. Have not even looked at those yet.

0 HeliosJim over 6 years ago

First 24 hours, 8:00AM to 8:00AM the next day, the battery went from 100% to 90% doing nothing but smartwatch stuff. That means measuring my heart rate and being connected to my phone and displaying the occasional notifications. I realize I'll need several more days of data but that's not too encouraging, although it is close to Garmin's claim of 12 days as a smartwatch. However, My Fenix 5 does much, much better. It would easily last 2.5 weeks or longer on a single charge, with no or very little GPS activity. We'll see what the next few days brings.

0 Gr4z over 6 years ago

The 5+ does not match the 5 or the FR935 for battery unfortunately. I am not sure why as you would think later technology would of improved it. If you don't use the new 5+ stuff like music, Garmin Pay or maps you would think it would be the same or better. The hardware inside maybe inferior.

0 Seren over 6 years ago

It's probably mainly to do with the faster CPU. Also possibly the memory chip takes up enough extra space to require a smaller battery, but this seems unlikely.

Odd thing is I think the 5X plus got a battery boost over the 5X...maybe they just realised a bigger battery for product differentiation.....

RF components also changed and they might have upped the power to help solve dropout issues

0 Dr Phil over 6 years ago

The 5+ does not match the 5 or the FR935 for battery

It's related to the weight difference ;-)...at least with respect to the 5+ and. the 935.

0 HeliosJim over 6 years ago

I didn't say I expected the battery life to be better than the F5. In fact I said I was hoping it would be comparable, which it is not. But that does not mean I'm necessarily disappointed with it either. It's too early to tell.

This is different hardware, as someone pointed out a faster CPU, and possibly different radio hardware. Often, newer chips are actually more efficient and it's not impossible that a faster CPU actually uses less battery, same with newer radio chips. That said, this device is actually doing more too. The big difference I could point out right off is wifi, so there is going to be a cost to that. Also it had occurred to me that Garmin may have had to make the battery physically smaller to fit other stuff. That all said, I would think most of what dictates how long the battery lasts is the firmware. I write software and have written firmware for a living, so I know this first hand. The FW developer has to be careful to put things to sleep whenever possible and this is complex firmware.

All that said, I'm not going to return it if the battery does not last just as long as the F5. As long as I can live with the battery life I'll be happy. I'm not an ultra marathoner so if I can get 5 hours of it with GPS and music I'll be fairly happy.

0 HeliosJim over 6 years ago

As for other, non-battery life related aspects of the watch I'm pretty happy. I didn't think the wifi would be a big deal but it is nice having the data from a workout just upload itself when I got back to wifi.

I just used the GPS for the first time. I have to check some older walks to be sure, but it seems like the GPS is much better than the F5. I work in Boston and walk many days from South Station to my office building. The GPS using the F5 was horrid. Today I drove up but I walked to Dewey Square (next to South Station) for lunch and check the GPS track a few minutes ago. It was much better than I'm used to seeing. In both cases, it was GPS+Galileo (the F5 recently got a FW update that enabled this feature).

Everything else, so far, is working as expected. Battery level was reported at 80% this morning after exactly 48 hours of smartwatch only use.

0 Seren over 6 years ago

The walks I have done so far (3) have been hit and miss on GPS accuracy. Cycling has been very good...sometimes 100% spot on, even showing small deviations around stationary traffic accurate to a foot or so. I guess cycling is the best case scenario for GPS....watch almost stationary relative to the movement, pointing up at the sky (I use flat bars on my commuter bike). GPS plus Galileo in both cases.

Will reserve judgement on hiking/walking until I have some more data points

0 Dr Phil over 6 years ago

GPS tracks seem to be related to pace/speed. The slower you go, the more 'wobbly' they get. My take is that this happens because as you move faster it's easier for the software to calculate direction and movement. When you are walking, the data points are closer together, the margin or error for each data point can then 'blur' the true direction.