AW Ultra thoughts?

I would love to have such an accurate heart rate sensor on my fenix 7.. According to DCrainmaker and Desfit Apple is just king on heart rate accuracy. It really is in line with a chest strap and that is impressive. The sleep tracking/stage should be on point aswell according to "quantified scientist" guy on youtube.. 

I am not an "Ultra" Athlete, nor is sport my main hobby in life. But I still, love doing different activties, indoors and outdoors. I own a Fenix 7s even though I guess it is way overkill for me. But I paid almost the same as the AW7 without LTE costs here.The AW8 got around 100€ more expensive here, so not even an option anymore imo. 540€ for non LTE 45mm, 540$ exluding tax. No thanks. Ultra is 1000€ here.

What always draws me to Garmin's higher end watches are all those metrics and battery life. I would totally miss recovery time, training status, most of all body battery. But also these tons of activties, activity configurations... AND battery life. It is so annoying to charge the watch every day i,f you use it probably with GPS outside.

But one more thing. The last year I have thought a lot about privacy and I know there is no perfect company. Most of all Apple who preach stuff and no one knows exactly what they do with all of this data. Now they will introduce ads within the devices as if their devices aren't expensive enough already. And I learned to not keep your data with only one company. I use all Apple devices beisides AW and have had all my data with Apple, better said on iCloud. Months abog I turned off iCloud completely, sync photos and music manually, and use a different provider for office suite. And they don't get my health data anymore either. I deleted the health app.

And this is why Apple Watch is not an option anymore. And no other company either. Polar is the only company with watches that I like but their step counting is beyond bad and ridiculous. 10.000 steps on a quite accurate Garmin, 20.000 on a Polar. And they have always since forever had the worst step tracking of all, +200% since forever and never working on this. As I look at my daily steps this is important to me. And there is no other company I trust more than Garmin either. F.e. Coros is chinese (mostly) if you look at it correctly. I don't want a chinese company to have my health data, no thanks. Fitbit belongs to Google, no thanks. Besides that Fitbit has the worst quality with almost every device being defective after 2 years. So that leaves Garmin and besides a few annoying bugs on almost all of their devices I am quite happy with their watches.

EDIT: I know Apple Watch does some stuff way better, mostly HR accuracy and till OS9 sleep tracking according to reviews. But regarding HR I still find it so annoying that HR is only measured each 5-10 mins all day besides sports. AW battery life is so bad and even with this bad battery life we only get HR data each 5-10mins. Sorry but how can the best HR tracking work if it only tracks it each 5-10mins? It misses a lot of HR data, maybe very low HR or very high HR because of that. That is ridiculous for a health watch.

Its a small step compared to Garmin wearables but a giant leap for Apple.  Where have I heard something like that before?

I dont think this watch is a 'Garmin Killer' at all, in my opinion there still is a long way to go to push the crown off garmins head. BUT, I really do envy Apple's ability to make such an accurate and reliable optic heart rate sensor and sleep tracking. Ive seen quantified scientist, DCrainaker and desfits reviews and tests of the device and it is amazing how far they have come in terms of accuracy.

I would love to have a watch that has Garmins training and health metrics but Apples accuracy. - I dont think Garmins sleep tracker is reliable at all, and since Training readiness depends on sleep score, that function is not that reliable aswell among other functions
I know all these devices not are for medical use, but the closer to reality the better.

Also, I think Garmin really should step up their Game in terms of accuracy if they want to keep that crown in the next 2-3 years.

Looks interesting but they're only just out the gate. I'll definitely be keeping an eye on how they progress and maybe in a gen or two might consider it.

Garmin stuff when it works is excellent but their QA is pretty bad and it just lacks that last bit of polish (Golf popping up everywhere is just weird and sloppy for a start) , I hope this serves as a bit of a wake up call to get that last 10% of quality control and polish added. Hopefully they'll do an overhaul of Garmin Connect and make it a lot more modern and orderly.

Importing gpx files to add courses shouldn't be so obscure for a start, there's loads of little things that the more hardcore learn and then are fine with but I can bet 80% of people are missing out due to bad UX/UI decisions.

A good UI/UX should make people feel smart, not dumb. Computer games have been doing it for years, guiding the player through the levels, making it fun and helping you achieve goals without it being obvious the game is guiding you. There's always a small amount of apprehension when visiting the Garmin Connect site when you want to get something done, which isn't a good indicator... 

I can't see Apple having many of those design problems.

To me two critical things every most Garmin users would miss is body battery and recovery time. Not only me.

Esp body battery. There are so many posts about BB on reddit. People love the fact they can see when they get sick or when they drank too much and their body is not fit. It is one number showing a lot of things. There are many posts of new users telling this.

Of course now one could say HRV is the same on AW. But this is the point. No normal users knows what to do with HRV. With those numbers. But they know body battery showing a high number meaning they are fit and a low number meaning they are not fit or sick. But most AW users never experienced a Garmin watch. So they don't know what they are missing.

I am a neutral only Apple and Garmin user. And I know both have their flaws and Apple SW isn't perfect at all. Better then Garmin? Maybe, but not perfect at all. Every serious person knows that. To me it seems like there are some Apple "fanboys"/"people" here trying to convince Garmin user's to switch without any proof or solid reason. Not everyone here owning an AW but a few write strange posts.

Apple does something really wrong here, something even AW users would love if they know it would exist. Bringing several data together and showing people what it means. Like body battery. They even do it with their rings which is a brilliant concept regarding activity. Many fitness companies have something like a score. Before Apple tries to reach "serious" ahtletes they should give their users some more metrics to understand their health. This is a huge point Apple is failing at atm. Something many reviwers over the years have complained about too. They give us HRV ok. But what is the problem twhy hey are not doing something with HRV and give us some kind of recovery status and health status. Garmin is doing that very well. Others too. And again: A fitness and health watch with amazing HR sensor that only gives data each 5-10mins besides activity. Maybe they should work on these flaws before trying to reach ultra atheletes ... Maybe this is the reason I barely see AW on wrists of famous atheletes.

And lets face it. Most AW users aren't that sporty compared to most Garmin users, so maybe they don't even need any metrics at all. There aren't many Garmin users who are not quite fit but there are MANY AW users not being very fit. It may be shallow of me to think that but I find it a little ridiculous seeing some people having set their calorie ring to 100-200 a day. This is all-day activity included, not only activity itself. Those are not people who have an active lifestyle at all. They don't need a Garmin, they will never. Totally different consumers.

So genuinely, myself being a past garmin user, what’s the point of a watch if metrics are just off or all over the place? I still keep an eye out every now and then for garmins as i love the look and the battery or it, but i will never miss the bugs, crashes, scuffed metrics resulting in wrong BB, training status and what not. While apple is very slow implementing new features they are proven to be accurate which really for me at least is the only thing that matters when having a fitness watch. Why would i want to be looking at some imaginary numbers that are wrong or off just for the sake of looking at data? I’m no where near an apple fanboy but sheesh it overall just WORKS. Garmin needs to up their software and hardware instead of chilling cause they have the ‘best’ battery life (granted also just hardware related and underperforming/underclocked chipset) and all new features like readiness, training status, body battery,… which in the end seem to be just numbers cause they are off due to inaccuracy and a sleeker looking watch.

Until they fix the basics I sadly cant switch back to it and the battery life for me at least for now is a non issue as I’m no ultra or multi athlete or hiker and fastcharge my stuff anyways on a daily like everyone that doesnt have a nokia brick.

Apple seems to be on the right track albeit slowly but still. Cant wait to see what apple pulls out their sleeves next iterations and with future updates honestly. It’s a locked in eco system but going back it’s a breeze with how everything seemlessly works together not gonna lie

100 agree with everything you said. I would hands down prefer better accuracy and sacrifice a little battery life. What is training readiness, bb, stress etc worth if the optic heart rate sensor is poor.

This is quite interesting, using third party apps on the AW Ultra:
www.youtube.com/watch