I've waited a long time to upgrade my Fenix. Had a Fenix 3, which didn't even have a wrist HR sensor. The Fenix 7X was the one that finally convinced me to drop nearly $1K on a watch, with so many new features compared to my Fenix 3, including a touchscreen and the ability to set activities up from the phone.
After about a month with the new watch - I'm disappointed.
Yes - it's absolutely a big improvement over the 3 - how could it not be?
Having HR in the watch is great. Touchscreen works very well so far (except it goes kind of nuts in the shower).
I love the flashlight in the 7X.
Lots of other new features for me.
But sadly, there are about a dozen things that could be great that just haven't been designed very thoughtfully. Some might be bugs - hard to tell what was intended since Garmin doesn't document so much of what they're doing.
Some of them:
Settings for power, brightness and backlight response to gesture have to be the same for all activities - that doesn't work. I'd really like to have raising my wrist turn on the backlight for biking, but if I activate that, when I'm doing martial arts it turns on for every punch. Awesome way to drain the battery.
There are some great new features for Training Load and Training Status but it's all focused on biking with a power meter or running outdoors. Pretty much everything else either doesn't get included in training assessment at all (Training Status) or it gets included incorrectly because you can't customize heart rate zones for other activities. Even if you have power for another sport (indoor rowing), you can't set the power zones or track FTP, VO2max accordingly. The info and capabilities are there but Garmin decided not to implement this for rowing, so it won't be included in my Training Status. On the other hand, you can set Power Zones for XC-Skiing. I realize XC-Skiing is popular - but I suspect there are a lot more Rowing ergs out there than Ski ergs.
The Intensity Minutes feature continues to be badly implemented. It only includes activities recorded with wearables (ie not from an Edge bike computer). But let's say you record all your activities with your watch. If you search long enough, there's a setting for how the watch determines moderate and vigorous intensity (this is in GC phone app under Health and Wellness it turns out - found that by accident). You can either choose two HR zones or let Garmin determine it on its own. Cool. How does Garmin determine it? I dunno. Well okay, I'll pick two HR zones. Zone 2 for moderate and Zone 3 for Vigorous. What about Zone 4? Will that also contribute to vigorous? Is it Zone 3 and above or only Zone 3? What if I pick Zone 2 for moderate and Zone 4 for Vigorous. What will happen with Zone 3? Add to moderate? Ignored? I dunno. Which Zone 2 and Zone 3 will it use? The Generic non-sport specific Zones? The Sport-Specific Zones if available? I dunno.
Health Snapshots are a great new feature. But they don't capture HRV or Stress for at least some people. To be clear, this is a bug - they are SUPPOSED to capture both of those, but there are lots of reports (including mine) of this not working. And Garmin Connect doesn't seem to properly sync Health Snapshot history - they're all on the watch, but many are missing on GC.
There's a Fitness Age feature, which also takes into account vigorous activity. Does it use the same criteria for vigorous activity as Intensity Minutes? No idea.
If you calculate Stress with a chest HRM using the HRV Stress app you get a radically different value than Stress from the wrist based monitor and Health Snapshot. Perhaps this isn't surprising - but HRV Stress only works with a chest HRM and the Health Snapshot only works with the built in wrist HRM. So how do you integrate these? You don't apparently.
Sleep? My Fenix 3 only distinguished light vs deep sleep. I had no objective comparison but the results seemed reasonable based on my own sense of my sleep. I was excited that the 7X uses more sophisticated analysis to also determine REM sleep and sleep quality. Well, according to my 7X I pretty much never have deep sleep and almost no REM sleep. My sleep score is poor almost every night. It's amazing I'm still alive. Bummer.
Pulse ox? I wasn't expecting too much from this and I recognize a wrist sensor isn't likely to be super accurate. The results however seem decent. However, pulse ox isn't used for much - as far as I can determine, it's used only for altitude and heat acclimation. The sleep screen shows pulse ox and respiration -but I don't think either has any affect on the analysis.
For CPAP users, it would be great to see some kind of correlation in changes in pulse ox, respiration and movement or sleep stage. RIght now though, I don't think they're doing much of anything with either of those. Maybe in the future.
Oh yes- anytime you enter the Glances menu (widgets) to look at compass, steps, sunrise, weather, notifications, etc or use any app, including breathwork, the watch starts connecting to any sensors that are around. My bike trainer is usually plugged in and there's a tempe in the house. So I get notifications and vibrations and tones as it tries to connect and disconnects if they aren't close. This was particularly appreciated while I was doing the tranquility breathwork and the activity kept getting interrupted by these notifications, along with buzzing, backlight turning on, breathwork counts and display getting blocked. Very relaxing. Fortunately, the health snapshot didn't record my stress value so I couldn't see my stress going back up.
Speaking of sensors, there is no way to limit sensors to particular activities. So when I'm trying to connect to my rowing erg, if the bike trainer is still plugged in, it will connect to that and get zero power data. And vice versa. The tempe never turns off so that's frequently connected even if it's somewhere in the basement or attic, attached to my backpack. Some of my bike sensors stay on apparently - you get the idea. Simple solution? Ability to designate sensors as on/off for a particular activity. They could default to all on but allow excluding some.
I was excited about the new Physio True up capability and it does help - but it's still very limited, especially if any of your devices are older. My bike computer is an Edge 520. Since it doesn't have the more sophisticated training calculations it's not clear how it integrates into the true ups. It seems that I'll need to record my biking activities on my watch, and save those, and discard the edge recordings - using them only while I'm riding.
Floor counting? Still doesn't work. Not much better than the Fenix 3. Why? Because there's a threshold of 10ft to count a floor and the altimeter is sometimes off by a half foot and misses it. Obvious solution - either set the threshold slightly less than the standard height of a floor or allow user adjustment. As it is though, my watch counts about 1/3 of the flights I do. Just like my Fenix 3. Unless I do a dance involving bending down at the beginning of each flight and raising my arm overhead at the end. That'll look very professional at work I'm sure.
Menu structure - as always with Garmin, a mess. Settings for Glances (what used to be called widgets) are in an appearance menu but settings for Activities and Faces are in their own menu. Settings for various things are scattered in even more places than before - multiple menu systems on the watch, some in Garmin Connect under each device, some in Garmin connect in your account or profile, some in Garmin Connect somewhere else. Good luck remembering where they all are. Every time I need to change something, I spend 15 min trying to remember where it was. I'm sure I'll get more used to it.
Setting data fields in activities from the phone? Sort of. For CIQ apps, you have to go to Connect IQ Store, pick your device, then go to my device, then find the app to change the settings. For built in apps, you do it through Garmin Devices menu (again, that doesn't work for CIQ - those are accessed through the store). Took me a while to figure that out. On the positive side, doing it all from the watch with the touch screen is much easier than it used to be.
Garmin Connect access to all the new information? Phone app is decent. Web - not so much. The entire Performance submenu seems to be totally absent on the web version of GC. And some of the Health features (like Health Snapshot) result in a no such page error in the browser. Bad link on the Garmin Connect menu? No one checked the menu links? Really Garmin? I know a high school kid who would do this for you for $50.
Conclusion: the 7X is certainly a great improvement over my Fenix 3 -but would I upgrade from a 5 or 6? If I were you, I'd wait.
