No time to read? Then the short answer: in my opinion no.
Well, interested, then read on...
This post is written from my use cases point of view. Maybe there are other use cases which I don't have and a totally different pictture turns out. My use cases are doing some serious running, some bycicling and most of all day to day watch.
First of all the advantages over the FR935:
- Maps. I haven't tried out all features but it's pretty cool to have it on the watch. A use case could be finding new routes for running or bycicling, another could be sighseeing in the town or just find a bakery or supermarket during sightseeing. I don't know if all these use cases will work (still need some time to explore) but that is super cool to have it on the wrist. On the other hand we have a smartphone with an even larger display and a more friendly UI. I would give this feature at least one plus.
- Music. Hey, cool. Spotify on the wrist. Now we can hear our favorite music just via the smartwatch. But here again, typically we carry our smartphone with us, even during workouts I had my phone with me, mainly due to listening to music. I would give this feature anyway another plus.
- Performance: The FR945 is really fast. Scrolling through the widgets especially scrolling through third party widgets with a high memory consumption needs less time to load. Furthermore the perfomance increase brings us some nice animations. But performance means more memory as well. Saying this developers (like me) have less limits for our program code which means packing more features in a widget, a datafield or an app. I would give another plus for this feature.
- Software Upgrades: The FR945 has more accurate features like the calculation of VO2max and gives much more advices to improve. A lot of standard Garmin widgets are simply not available on the FR935. Another plus here.
But now to the downsides:
- Battery life: I loved the battery life of the FR935. I had to charge it every 4-5 days depending on the usage, even after 2 years. The FR945 needs to be charged every 2-3 days with the same setup. The only additional sensor is the oxygen sensor and I have disabled it since battery life is even more worse if it's enabled. Sorry Garminm, but you claimed to have increased battery life during workouts, but another big use case is day-to-day watch. The battery advantages during workouts don't compensate (in my opinion) the day-to-day disadvantages. I would give that feature a double minus.
- GPS: The sat fix lasts from my feeling twice the time of the FR935 (without having done a measurement, it's just my feeling). Maybe others out there comment this. Furthermore the accuracy of the GPS+Glonass is not as good as on the FR935. I would give that feature a minus.
- Hardware issues: The whites of the screen are not white during backlighting but the display has a violet effect in it (this isn't on my FR935 - don't know if other FR945 units have this), the buttons have a click (not so loud on my FR935) - the issue with that is I played around during night and my wife complaint about the clicks. the display size is slightly smaller so that my screen protectors of the FR935 don't matches (ok, not a big deal), but a bigger deal is, it's slightly thicker than the FR935 or in other words the sensor is higher which leads to that the watch doesn't adapts to my wrist as good as the FR935 does. Another minus here.
As you can see the FR935 follower has not only advantages. 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?
