I agree. Mostly.
My major two reasons for buying the 945 (coming from a 935):
- music, as I became a podcast fan this year and was fed up taking my smartphone with me
- wanted to stay on top of the list…
I am not (yet) convinced from the new Garmin package and taking into account the price of the watches I may will revert back to my beloved FR935. What do you think?
Isn't it ultimately your…
I'm on my second 945. I haven't sold my 935 at I'm expecting this 945 to fail soon
Feature set improvement is weak. Quality is terrible.
I agree. Mostly.
My major two reasons for buying the 945 (coming from a 935):
- music, as I became a podcast fan this year and was fed up taking my smartphone with me
- wanted to stay on top of the list when it comes to updates, new features
My secondary reasons:
- Garmin Pay
- maps
- physiological features
From a hardware perspective, the 945 is worse than the 935. Although my buttons work, the haptics are not good compared to the 935 and surely not adequate for a 600€ watch. As you wrote, GPS locks are far worse than with the 935, but I can live with that. GPS quality for me is comparable to the 935.
Battery life is ok for me. More or less on par with the 935.
Going back to the software features: Garmin music is ok for me, I am no Spotify or Deezer user and only have the option to plug my watch into the computer and manually upload new podcasts and delete old ones. Well, this is so early 2000s when I did that ;-). But ok.
Upgrade policy starts to worry me. There a quite a few bugs and there is no visible activity from Garmin.
The secondary features: well, nice to have them but would not really miss them when losing them. All are ok, although the only source of physio analysis I do trust is Runalyze. Too much uncertainty about the Garmin way of doing (e.g. manually uploaded workouts from Zwift do not count in, etc.).
Overall: yes, the watch is ok, but quite buggy. Hardware quality is getting worse and from a feature perspective the smartwatch capabilities are at a level I had a few years ago with my Fenix 3.
My current plan is to keep the 945 until the Apple Watch 5 is released. When it is promising enough, I will sell my 945 (hope this works out because of the lousy buttons) and maybe get an additional 735XT for my sparse multisport activities (if really necessary). Have an Edge 820 for biking (which is btw also very buggy :-( ).
Can't believe that your battery life is equal to the fr935. I disconnected the watch yesterday with 99 percent at 10 pm and now 18 hours later I have 76 percent with 50 minutes running and 45 minutes bycicling. With this battery drain I have to charge tomorrow again Fr 935 never ever showed such a behavior.
I wrote "it is ok for me". I have to recharge about two times a week which I think is fair. One obvious point there is that I have the 945 more often attached to my Mac because of uploading podcasts meaning it gets additional recharges that my 935 did not have.
Edit: apart from that I do almost every run with music on and hence I am ok with additional battery consumption.
I am not (yet) convinced from the new Garmin package and taking into account the price of the watches I may will revert back to my beloved FR935. What do you think?
Isn't it ultimately your decision regardless of what others post? Doesn't it depend on what features the 945 has that the 935 doesn't and how the individual values those features? I value the maps more than other feature on the 945. I also don't have the battery issue you're seeing, and my experience with the 945 differs from fischest. I don't know if either of us can give you a "what do you think?" answer. The good thing about your situation is the 935 is a great device to revert back to should that be your decision.
I really like Garmin Pay. Otherwise it's not worth the switch from the 935 at all imo.
I recently upgraded to the 945 from the 935 as well. I did so with a bit of trepidation after reading reviews suggesting the GPS was not quite as accurate, but battery life was better as a result. Overall, I have found the opposite in both cases, The 945's GPS so far seems to track a bit better than the 935 when I have looked closely at the tracks. Battery life is not as long, though most of that I'm sure is due to the other bells and whistles of the 945.
I agree that it it takes far longer for the 945 to get a fix on satellites than the 935 -sometimes it's really, really annoyingly slow.
I find the 945's optical HR sensor to be far, far superior than the 935's.
I find the body battery surprisingly useful and have been referring to it a lot. I'm discovering that not all 'rest' is equally useful - sometimes when I think I've done nothing and should be 'recharging' the indicator tells me I'm not....and I think it's correct...
For sure, the changes are more incremental than revolutionary from the 935 to the 945, so it's not a no-brainer whether an upgrade is worth the price tag or not for everyone. It is certainly worth it for me. I have no regrets and am not tempted to go back to the 935.
On the "big-picture" topic of battery life, my wife uses the latest Apple watch and can't even make it through a busy day without having to recharge, so I can't complain too much about recharging every 3 or 4 days even if I could go a week or more with the 935.
For me, Maps is the big one. I do a lot of trail runs in unfamiliar areas. This can literally be a life safer.
Battery, generally I've found to be on par with the 935. The one area where it falls quite a bit short of the 935 is CIQ apps (not data fields or watch faces). The 935 could last 4 days running a CIQ app 24/7. The 945 about 1.5 days. But this impacts less than 0.001% of users.
HR is way better on the 945. I never found the 935 accurate enough to be worth turning on. The 945 still doesn't match my chest strap, but close enough.
I don't care about music, but that alone will probably get a lot of people to switch.
Garmin pay is nice, but not necessary. It'll be better when you can count on it being supported just about anywhere.
Then there are features like Golf that are being added to the 935, somewhat reducing the need to upgrade. Thank you Garmin for continuing to support a 2 year old device even as it is being replaced.
Bottom line is they are both amazing devices. No reason to upgrade if your main interest is tracking your activities (other than possibly HR). But easy to justify if any of the new features are important to you.
On the flip side, I wouldn't buy a 935 today as the 945 will clearly be supported with new features well after the 935 isn't.
After 2 months with the 945, I returned it at REI and went back to my 935.
Too many issues to be paying $600 for it.
Below are some:
- GPS lock is unreliable under tree cover compared to 935
- Auto-pause in hiking activity seems buggy. It keeps pausing and starting constantly under trees, [may be relating to gps lock unreliability]. 935 was working perfectly
- Sunset alert did not work on 945
- Heart rate monitor is no better than 935. In some cases even worse. Not just the accuracy. It will keep switching between 'measuring' and "---" and never lock on to heart rate unless I restart the watch. Sometimes it seems to work perfect. Then all of a sudden it goes way down till I stop and start the heart rate option
- Unreliable bluetooth connection to connect app on the iphone. Lot of times, it will keep 'disconnected' and 'connected' repeatedly eventhough I an sitting close. Half the time, when I open the garmin connect app, I don't see 945 [always saw 935] and I have to kill the app, turn blutooth off/on etc to get it connected.
- Whole other metrics become useless if you don't have a good heart rate monitor data.
- Missing button clickiness. Sometimes I will skip through screens thinking that I didn't press it properly.
These are to name a few.