Is there a better place to discuss activity modes that I assume are the same across many devices? I'm using a Forerunner 970 with firmware v15.16.
Found a couple of things that were confusing with the Indoor Climbing mode-
1. I have to enter the grade at the start of the climb. Would be nicer to enter it at the end of the climb because I already need to enter whether I completed or merely attempted the climb then.
2. After starting the climb the watch locks all of the buttons and I can't find any way to disable this. I wear the watch on my harness and don't have any issues with accidental button presses so needing to unlock the buttons before being able to interact with the watch is just annoying. That said it is often automatically unlocked when it detects me descending so that reduces the annoyance but I'd rather just never having to worry about it.
3. After finishing a route it asks whether I "Completed" or "Attempted" the route. It would be nice if there was a "Sent" option here as by definition that means there were no falls so then I wouldn't have to enter the number of falls after. Also the way most climbers think about a climb is whether they sent it or not, so it's more fun to get to explicitly enter that you sent it instead of Garmin figuring this because you enter "completed" and 0 falls.
4. After answering that question it asks how many times I fell and then asks me to enter the same number a second time. It seems like this would be straightforward to detect automatically so the best solution would be to just detect this automatically and not ask. But if the watch has to ask it would be more tolerable if it could just ask once.
5. I often go to the climbing gym and do some bouldering and some roped climbing as part of the same training session. I couldn't figure out a way to record routes with a different grading system within the same activity nor could I figure out I way to ever use bouldering V-grades under the Indoor Climb mode. I understand there's a separate Bouldering activity, that makes sense if you only Boulder but many climbers warm up on boulder routes before moving on to longer roped climbs in the same session.
One thing I really like is how well the automatic detection for starting and stopping a climb works. If there is ever a desire to reduce the sensitivity of this for people who wear their watches on their wrist while climbing I hope a mode setting can be added to maintain the current behavior for people who put the watch on their harness while climbing.
Would also be really awesome if there could be an Outdoor Climbing version of this activity one day. Something that basically worked the same but also tracked GPS and had an approach mode before entering the pitch counting mode and a descent mode at the end.