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My impressions after 3 months

4411990
over 3 years ago

 My  only complaint with the watch is that in the Garmin ads it shows a bright vivid color screen. In reality running the backlight so you get that "look" will drain the battery in less than 2 days. Decreasing the backlight to Garmin's 30% will give you great battery life at the expense of a dark screen. I finally gave up and kicked it up to 40%.

Setting up the activity data screens to display the data I'm interested in was a bit of a learning curve, but now it's pretty easy. And some of the CIQ data fields are great.

I turned off ALL the App, Call, SMS notifications comming from the phone via bluetooth. Bluetooth range is 20-25 ft, so I might as well have phone nearby. Can't actually use that watch to answer calls, or really respond to SMS messages, so why bother. Added more hours to battery life. Gamin can let me know when they have a serious "*** Tracy Phone Watch" and I may be interested!

The "thing" that gets me is not the watch but the Connect-mobile app which runs in the phone background all the time eating battery. WHY? The watch can store days of data and activities. After an activity either turn on BT and start the Connect app, or use the WIFI feature on the watch to upload to Connect-web.

  • 0 over 3 years ago

    Thanks for sharing your impressions, it's interesting to see how other people see the watch.

    4411990 said:
     My  only complaint with the watch is that in the Garmin ads it shows a bright vivid color screen. In reality running the backlight so you get that "look" will drain the battery in less than 2 days. Decreasing the backlight to Garmin's 30% will give you great battery life at the expense of a dark screen. I finally gave up and kicked it up to 40%.

    I guess that's personal stuff, myself I love the screen and prefer it to AMOLED, and I'm using it with 10% brightness from the start as I don't use high brightness settings on my mobile or my PC's screen either. I can perfectly see my screen without the light during the day or when inside as there is always some light, the only exception is that I tap on screen during my time in bed, that and during night run is the only cases I need a backlight.

    4411990 said:
    I turned off ALL the App, Call, SMS notifications comming from the phone via bluetooth. Bluetooth range is 20-25 ft, so I might as well have phone nearby. Can't actually use that watch to answer calls, or really respond to SMS messages, so why bother. Added more hours to battery life. Gamin can let me know when they have a serious "*** Tracy Phone Watch" and I may be interested!

    Myself I found notification feature to be pretty useful since I frequently live my phone in another room and get notifications from it, but I always wondered how much hours can save me turning off notifications. Have you tried to estimate how longer your watch start to run after turning them off?

    4411990 said:
    The "thing" that gets me is not the watch but the Connect-mobile app which runs in the phone background all the time eating battery. WHY? The watch can store days of data and activities. After an activity either turn on BT and start the Connect app, or use the WIFI feature on the watch to upload to Connect-web.

    Actually, later version of Garmin Connect mobile are treating resources a bit better, or maybe it's just the new phone limiting it's activity more effectively. But sure if you don't use notifications from mobile there is no reason to keep it in memory, you can probably try to turn on battery optimization for the app so it will be shuting down when not in use.

  • 0 over 3 years ago in reply to sensovision

    No I haven't directly measured the battery gain by turning off notifications, because I also turned off the phone bluetooth which prevents the connect app from polling the watch. I only turn it on when I'm in the car for hands-free driving. So then the app catches up, I suppose.

    My BT indoors is terrible, probably less than 20 ft thru walls, so phone is usually in the same room.

    I have never had to re-pair the devices as some have complained about. It does it seamlessly.

    I'm currently logging 2 30-minute activities with GPS on one of them, 7 days a week, and battery is lasting 5-6 days.