F5 Sapphire upgrade from F3HR

I upgraded from a f3hr Sapphire to a f5 Sapphire. If you can get a good price for your F3 or a good discount on the f5 I would say go for it. I managed to sell my F3 for a good price and found the f5 with 10% off. If you can't do either or both of those things I wouldn't bother upgrading. The new metrics are good but not worth paying out full price for. There are also a few bugs at the moment so coming from a F3 that just worked to this is a little frustrating at times.

Interesting - what bugs are you experiencing? The F3HR isn't perfect though, altimeter still not right and calories are stupid!

Is the screen resolution much better?

Like most people I've had issues with instant pace jumping all over the place. Some people are also unhappy with gps tracking but for me the tracking seems to be an improvement on the F3. The latest issue I've been experiencing is poorish Bluetooth and ant connectivity although the 2.96 beta update seems to have improved this a lot.

The hardware is great and the screen resolution is noticeably better than the F3. I wanted to upgrade to get the new metric and also for the smaller form factor. At first though I disliked the smaller size of the f5 compared to the F3. I still dislike the narrower strap. If I were to do it all again I'd perhaps just stick with the F3.

I think many people on here ended up returning their f5 in favour of a 935. I really like the f5 but it isn't that much of an upgrade over the f3 and given the bugs sour things a little further.

If you have any more questions I'd be happy to answer them.

I think it is noticeably smaller, particularly the strap. I've got used to the size of the watch now and actually prefer the slightly smaller size compared to the f3. The narrower strap I'm still struggling to get used to.

The other thing worth mentioning is that some folk seem to have had issues with the black bezel on the Sapphire edition scratching easily. I have the black Sapphire and so far mine has been fine.

To be fair i thought my F3HR scratches too easily anyway.


I wonder how the slate grey sapphire compares

I've upgraded from the F3 to the F5. Primarily for the new metrics but also for the all-day heart rate tracking.
Prior to buying my F3 a year ago I'd used a Fitbit Surge, Tomtom Spark and Garmin Forerunner 235. I couldn't wait for the F3HR but also I wasn't confident based on my experience with the 235 that Garmin would do all-day heart rate tracking properly.

The F5 so far has been significantly better than the F3 in almost every way. I thought the slimmer strap would bother me but the strap is actually so much nicer than the F3 bands that it doesn't matter. It is smaller but it's still a really large watch - but it is noticeably lighter.

There are a few annoying bugs but nothing that is show stopping for me. Obviously lots of people have lost their s**t about the GPS tracking but to me it seems better than my F3 - which was already just as good if not better than the other watches I had used. I have never bothered with instant pacing but it does sound like it's a deal breaker for a lot of people - and it looks like the Forerunner 935 works better so clearly the "premium" casing of the Fenix series is causing issues.
The one bug that is annoying but I know will get fixed sooner rather than later is that synchornising between the Connect site/app and the watch wipes any of the settings that you have set on the watch rather than the site/app. The most frustrating part of this is the alarms - anything you set on the watch is likely going to get wiped and replaced by the alarms set on the sits/app - even if there are none set!

I second your comments about the gps, comparing the tracks to ones on my f3 the f5 looks better but I was already happy with the f3's performance in that area.

I've only just noticed people posting about the alarm bug, for me it's working fine. I have noticed that my lactate threshold values aren't syncing correctly between the device and garmin connect though.

I moved from the F3 to the F5, and overall I'm very happy.

The watch is smaller, and this is a bonus, because now I have better mobility in the wrist; with the F3, it impeded a bit the movement when raising the palm of the hand vertical—only 5mm difference, but some very critical 5mm. The band is smaller, but also much higher quality, so I actually prefer this size of the band,

With regards to instance pace, as with the F3, I use a foot pod with the F5, which makes the pace very consistent, and I believe accurate. Without a footpod, I believe the F5 like the F3, uses the cadence sensor in the watch itself, but that depends too much on the hand movement; and raising the hand to check the pace will impact this. Or it simply uses GPS, in which case it means GPS accuracy itself is sub-par, but meh, good enough for me. The 24×7 HR monitoring more than makes that up for me.

I moved from the F3 to the F5, and overall I'm very happy.

The watch is smaller, and this is a bonus, because now I have better mobility in the wrist; with the F3, it impeded a bit the movement when raising the palm of the hand vertical—only 5mm difference, but some very critical 5mm. The band is smaller, but also much higher quality, so I actually prefer this size of the band,

With regards to instance pace, as with the F3, I use a foot pod with the F5, which makes the pace very consistent, and I believe accurate. Without a footpod, I believe the F5 like the F3, uses the cadence sensor in the watch itself, but that depends too much on the hand movement; and raising the hand to check the pace will impact this. Or it simply uses GPS, in which case it means GPS accuracy itself is sub-par, but meh, good enough for me. The 24×7 HR monitoring more than makes that up for me.

I'm actually finding instant pace on the watch to be pretty good. In fact I've just removed my foot pod from my shoes as I suspect it's linked to some issues I'm seeing with the run dynamics data.