Question for Fenix 5X Owners: Battery Life & Maps Usefulness

1. How long is your Fenix 5X battery lasting per charge, and what's the duration of activities (GPS in regular mode, 1S recording, maybe even sensors attached) you can record before a charge?

Charged the F5x to 100% on Saturday morning last week.
Saturday: Night-Marathon in 3:47h (98% down to 76%)
Sunday: Rest-Day
Monday: 1:11h run
Tuesday: 1:22h run
Today: 1:10h run

Activity tracking on, 24/7 HR monitoring.
All runs with HRMrun2, tempe and stryd-footpod
No Map-usage at all

Now left with 28% battery charge

I'm trying to decide between the Fenix 5 and 5X. I've got the Fenix 5X on backorder.

I've got 3 questions for Fenix 5X owners:

1. How long is your Fenix 5X battery lasting per charge, and what's the duration of activities (GPS in regular mode, 1S recording, maybe even sensors attached) you can record before a charge?

2. Have you found maps feature on the 5X useful (i.e. used maps heavily for an activity)? If so, what activity?

3. How does heavy maps usage affect battery life?

Thank you!

I tossed up between the 5 and 5X for a while.

But for me, the point of maps is route planning, and I question how much planning you can do on a watch-sized screen. Routable maps is perhaps a useful function, but I generally prefer to do my own planning with paper maps or phablet-sized screens rather than leaving it to software. Maybe I am more old school on that than most people.

The 5X has a pretty good battery life, and there aren't that many people who do an activity that lasts longer than the 5X battery life. Ultramarathoners, multi-day hikers, and long distance cyclists would be about the only people that do. However, I do the last 2 activities, so extremely long battery life is important to me. It is worth noting that the both the 5 and 5X can be recharged on the go (although you need to take it off your wrist to do so).

These factors led me to choose the 5 over the 5X, so I don't have direct experience with the 5X.

I've not had my 5X for long, but the battery life seems comparable to my 920XT

Full charge on Friday, half ironman on saturday - had about 65% battery afterwards. Bike commute to and from work on Monday (about 1hr20). Charged it Tuesday lunchtime when it was on about 35%. That's using 1s recording, ANT+ heart rate and power meter, GLONASS during the swim but not bike/run.

I'm very pleased with the maps - I debated getting the 935, but there are a lot of trails near where I've moved and using the 920XT breadcrumb map isn't great when you meet a fork and can't tell which one it wants. I've added Ordnance Survey (awesome UK maps) to my 5X, and when it's in map mode you can still have data showing at the bottom (I just have heart rate so I don't overdo it on the hills).

I've had a go with the on-watch routing and it seems quite good, though I think I'll need to tweak it a bit. When I was away racing it was able to navigate me back to my hotel, but the instructions flash up and cover the map for far too long which doesn't make them that easy to follow.

Generally very pleased with it, despite it being a hugely expensive watch! (but so are the alternatives I guess)

Everyone likes something else.
Somebody likes such a view:



I like so: :)

Charged the F5x to 100% on Saturday morning last week.
Saturday: Night-Marathon in 3:47h (98% down to 76%)
Sunday: Rest-Day
Monday: 1:11h run
Tuesday: 1:22h run
Today: 1:10h run

Activity tracking on, 24/7 HR monitoring.
All runs with HRMrun2, tempe and stryd-footpod
No Map-usage at all

Now left with 28% battery charge

I'm not sure if my math is right:

Your night marathon battery usage:

• For the night marathon, your time was 3 hours, 47 minutes (227 minutes) and you used 98% - 76% = 22% of the battery. 227/22% = Approximately 10.32 minutes for 1% battery use. If we multiply that by 100 (%), and assuming battery use is constant, you'd get 1031.8 minutes, or about 17.3 hours of battery life -- approximately 5.8% battery use per hour.
  

Your overall battery usage:
With a few sensors attached and no map usage, you got 5 days watch usage + 7.5 hours of GPS usage, which took you down to 28% battery.

• Garmin indicates that the battery lasts up to 12 days in "Smart Mode". Does that mean watch only? If so, you charged the 5X on Saturday morning and wrote your response on Wednesday night, so let's approximate 4 days, 8.5 hours regular watch usage (subtracting GPS/activity tracking use), or 4.35 of the 12 days. That would result in estimated battery drain of 36.3%, by itself.
  

• Subtracting the watch-only estimation leaves 63.7% battery. Since you had 28% battery remaining on Wednesday night, the 7.5 hours of GPS use used 63.7% - 28% = 35.7% battery, or approximately 4.77% per hour. That's not too shabby, and seems to back Garmin's 5X battery life claim.
  

The Fenix 5 battery life is still better, though - which leaves the question of Maps usefulness.

Maps for the fenix 5X

You also add satellite imagery to the fenix 5X with a Birdseye subscription. Especially when you can't find any other descent maps of the area.

I did a 100 miler at the weekend. Used 102% of the battery for the full distance in 22 hours 49 minutes.

(For info: 102% because I used 40% in 54 miles, then charged to 90% and finished the rest with the battery at 38%)

I've had 5x for a couple of months now. I mostly run. I really don't like running the same routes much, so I've been using the mapping on the watch in 2 different ways:

1. I build a route in basecamp, often a long one and try to make it as interesting as possible. Transfer it to watch as a course, and use the "follow course" mode with the most appropriate map. If i see a road i'd like to explore i can go off course knowing i would be able to navigate back, or just use the map to get back on course at another point.
2. I activate TBT routing on the watch to some far off point and then pretty much run whichever way I feel, letting the watch re-route to eventually bring me to my destination.

I have discovered a lot of interesting routes this way and certainly glad I bought the watch. As a matter of fact, I use the mapping so much I have been updating my local OSM to get better routing :)

My Fenix5X doesn't have perfect battery life for me. It's sometimes about %10 an hour and sometimes %6 or %7. Today I had a bike ride and it was %8 per hour. But after the activity I looked at the recording on the watch and synced it via WiFi and now it fell to %72 which means someway it consumed %28 battery power. Sometimes it consumes less sometimes more. Sometimes I pause it a lot and use resume later function, but it seems it burned more than normal activity. I think mine battery is funky. Sometimes it recharges itself etc. I don't want to send it to service at the moment. Because this is my second F5X and the previous consumed about %10 during my activities. I think map use increases the power consumption. Because while Fenix3 just draw lines on the map page, this watch does much more file and memory accesses and calculations. Also Fenix5X has external DDR RAM chip and a 16GB flash chip that needs power too, so it's normal it'll use some more power than Fenix5 version.

Do I need maps? I'm not a very planned person, even if I plan it may be far from a good plan or even a good plan probably I won't start at the time I planned. :D Today I rode to a forest and eat something during sun down. Then it got dark and I wanted to get out of the forest as soon as possible for apparent safety reasons. So I didn't want to return back my route which was long and used the F5X to select the nearest crowded park on the map and draw a route. As the distance was about 5KM it immediately calculated the route and I continued. If it didn't had the map, I would probably use trackback function or frequently stop and look at the map on my phone. Actually trackback and pre prepared courses was important functions of F3 for me but during some road forks I sometimes go to wrong roads and return back, or sometimes road is blocked someway and I had to return. But with F5X this is much better with map. Even though I sometimes rode to a wrong road because I'm stupid to ride in a dark forest with a pale bike light, I could see there is another road ahead that goes to correct road and continue. But for other occasions maps can be slow and not as functional as a map on the phone. Watch can't search addresses and even some building names, just POIs. But anyway after tonights tour I know I don't regret having this watch (except some GPS madness. :D ) and it will help during my future rides in dark trees... :D

Honestly I am not impressed (maybe somewhat disappointed) with both battery life and mapping features. Firstly, coming from the F3 where my battery was around 4-5% per 24 hours in watch mode with no GPS and around 6-7% per hour when gps was active. On my F5x so far I am seeing around 10% per 24 hours in watch mode and around 10% per hour in gps mode. That stinks compared to the f3 and seems much less that garmin advertised the 5x to be. Furthermore, on the f3 navigation or follow course was the best I have seen from garmin and it was stable and reliable (other taking a long time to load the course. I figured the mapping would enhance my navigation experience but instead it is frustrating the heck out of me and i hope that in time garmin will sort it out. For starters, if you choose follow map the watch can reroute you at will which seems to always mess up my planned route. If you choose follow course you don't get tbt popups which is crazy since I was getting them on the f3. Spoke to garmin about this and they say it shouldn't be and they will look into it. Today I tried to follow a simply 5K run course and the map messed up again (maybe because I had follow map again). The map also showed all these blue pins on the map (what the heck are those) and I couldn't even tell where I was since my location is blue arrow which was drowned by the blue pins. I have the map set to show "less" and show user location but I only have one user location saved.

So, thus far I am not impressed and starting to regret selling my f3 to move in to the f5x and hoping that all this nonsense will be sorted out soon.

One more minor item, it seem that if you want to delete a course from the watch, the only way to get to courses is to start an activity and drill down to courses. I think courses access should be made available from the main settings menu. Okay, enough venting for one day. :)