235 battery life - post your experience!

Got mine yesterday. Fully charged then an hour run this morning and 24 hr heart rate and battery is down to 27% 20 hours later. It's possible it needs a few charges to calibrate the battery meter.

I'd say same for mine.

Will have to be charged every 3-4 days (used 30% battery on 1.5 day with one activity of 40 mins (gps without glonass, but 1sec sampling)

30 % in a day

I got down to 70% in one day:
- I did one run using GPS for 1 hour. (with Glonass but smart recording)
- Continuous measuring heart beat.
- Bluetooth on for about 4 hours.
- No smart notifications on.
- Light on when button pressed.

Received the watch last Thursday. Charged it overnight and starting using it Friday morning. Now it's Sunday afternoon and I'm at 23% battery. I've had it on 24/7 HR and have also done a 30 min. Run and 2 hour MTB ride.

I'm pretty happy with that.

Wow that's pretty bad actually. And way below the advertised battery for this kind of usage. You should be getting 7-11 days. As it is, you're going to have to charge it every 3-4 days.

Not really. Battery life is a hard one to quantify. Since taking it off the charger Friday morning, I've used the GPS and had external sensors connected for a total of 3 hours, plus lots of messing about with the new gadget setting up activity profiles etc.

The workouts using GPS and external sensors plus having 24 hr rate and activity tracking and I've gone 3 days without charging is fine by me. Garmin states 11 hours with GPS, so when you do a rough calculation of my usage, that's about right.

Not really. Battery life is a hard one to quantify. Since taking it off the charger Friday morning, I've used the GPS and had external sensors connected for a total of 3 hours, plus lots of messing about with the new gadget setting up activity profiles etc.

The workouts using GPS and external sensors plus having 24 hr rate and activity tracking and I've gone 3 days without charging is fine by me. Garmin states 11 hours with GPS, so when you do a rough calculation of my usage, that's about right.

I'm happy you're happy, no problem with that. But the claimed battery life is ~9 days with 24/7 HRM assuming 11 hours of GPS as well. That's not in line with the numbers you gave (3hrs GPS + <3 days 24/7 HRM). If the battery life matched the claim then I'd say that's a good thing (only having to charge every 7-10 days vs 3-4).

Others have expressed concern about this, including DC Rainmaker. Hopefully it's something that can be fixed via software.

I'm happy you're happy, no problem with that. But the claimed battery life is ~9 days with 24/7 HRM assuming 11 hours of GPS as well. That's not in line with the numbers you gave (3hrs GPS + <3 days 24/7 HRM). If the battery life matched the claim then I'd say that's a good thing (only having to charge every 7-10 days vs 3-4).

Others have expressed concern about this, including DC Rainmaker. Hopefully it's something that can be fixed via software.

While I agree that early reports indicate Garmin has overstated battery life, you are reading the specs incorrectly. Garmin states a FR235 battery life of "11 hours training, 9 days watch + activity tracking + notifications + heart rate". Note the comma versus the plus signs. You get 11 hours in training mode OR 9 days with activity tracking and no training. Not both, as you imply. That said, there is a big difference between 5-6 hours of training several people seem to be getting and the 11 advertised.

While I agree that early reports indicate Garmin has overstated battery life, you are reading the specs incorrectly. Garmin states a FR235 battery life of "11 hours training, 9 days watch + activity tracking + notifications + heart rate". Note the comma versus the plus signs. You get 11 hours in training mode OR 9 days with activity tracking and no training. Not both, as you imply. That said, there is a big difference between 5-6 hours of training several people seem to be getting and the 11 advertised.

Ok , fair enough. So if we say a full charge gives either 11 hours of activity (with GPS+HRM) or 9 days as a tracker (with 24/7 HRM), then ~5.5 hours of GPS activity should leave 4.5 days of activity tracking. A reasonable benchmark to go by using their numbers.

Smart vs. 1s recording

Does anybody know if the 1s recording setting also applies to the 24/7 activity tracking or just the activity recording function (when GPS is most likely also on)? It could be that this may be a factor affecting battery life when it is constantly set to 1s. If this is the case, then could Garmin provide for a quick access to the recording interval setting through the watch options (press and hold the up key) to make it easy to switch from Smart to 1s recording?