Really? Which apps for android and apple watches let you insert individual custom data fields? I thought only Garmin and the older Suuntos supported that.
I wonder if it's possible for them to enable showing the same field on different pages?
Hopefully a third field will be added in a future update, it's hard to see a technical reason if it can be done on the FR735.
Yes, it is very disappointing. Also because now, with the addition of running power, which has been added as a datafield by garmin rather than as a in-built field (like for example pace), we are basically left with 1 datafield.
Anyone has contacted garmin about this and gotten any response? My guess is there are no reasons not to have more than 2 datafields, and garmin as always is being lazy or incompetent (probably both).
The difference with the 735 is that you can't access the widget loop during activities; the RAM savings from that support the extra ConnectIQ field. It'd be nice to be able to select widget loop or a third field. Since I don't know anything about programming the platform the watches run on, I've no idea if that's easy or impossible. You know enough about it to be confident that Garmin are lazy or incompetent, so I'll look forward to a detailed explanation.
I'm sure they can page out from memory for activities that are not running - if they can show a widget / face with 30 fields and a chart , they can show 10 / 15 fields
You're not comparing like with like. Widgets and faces with 30 different pieces of information do not have 30 independent data fields; it's one program calculating and drawing all of them. Similarly, there are data fields around which occupy the whole face and have multiple pieces of information on, like the DozenRun or Peter's Race Pacer pages. Each data field has a sizeable overhead just for the Connect IQ platform (one of the reasons for the shift from 1.x to 2.x excluding old hardware is requiring a minimum of 32k available per field to keep ahead of the growing platform requirements, which were pushing up towards half the memory on a 16k field on an F3). You can't swap out data fields which record data to the fit file, they absolutely have to be running all the time, which at the very least puts a heavy limitation on what you can swap. Swapping is challenging in real-time environments anyway, so it may be that data fields which don't write to the file can't be swapped for performance reasons. My 32-minute run yesterday (with Stryd and Garmin power) was a 56k file. Swapping one 32k data field out and in would transfer more data in and out of the flash memory than recording the entire activity does.
I'm not defending the two field limitation, I find it just as frustrating as you do - said run used all available fields for power, and I'd love to be able to use more. I am pointing out that it's not as simple as you'd like to think, and that hardware decisions to keep power low and battery life high figure in this limitation. I've a feeling we won't see more until the next generation watch comes out, and only then if we keep complaining loudly about this limitation. So, even if I disagree with you about what's possible now, I absolutely encourage you to keep complaining :)
