Feature Requests and Suggested Improvements

Sleep monitor is a joke.

It's just totally useless - It's probably the thing I most miss from my Fitbit Surge,

Completely agree - my Fitbit HR was admittedly very impressive in its ability to tell if I was sleepping but the 235 is a joke. Last week it logged that I fell asleep at 6:45pm and had a fitful sleep until 12:30am. It really should have been able to work out that I wasn't asleep from 6:45pm to 9:30pm as it was also logging my HR and GPS on the cycle run and then gym session that I was actually having at that time. I had a good work out so I when I got to bed at 10:30pm I fell asleep quickly and slept soundly till 6:30am.

How can it record an activity with avg BPM of 147 and 10miles+ of movement at same time as it logs sleep.

Absurd!

Completely agree - my Fitbit HR was admittedly very impressive in its ability to tell if I was sleepping but the 235 is a joke. Last week it logged that I fell asleep at 6:45pm and had a fitful sleep until 12:30am. It really should have been able to work out that I wasn't asleep from 6:45pm to 9:30pm as it was also logging my HR and GPS on the cycle run and then gym session that I was actually having at that time. I had a good work out so I when I got to bed at 10:30pm I fell asleep quickly and slept soundly till 6:30am.

How can it record an activity with avg BPM of 147 and 10miles+ of movement at same time as it logs sleep.

Absurd!

It sounds like your configured sleep times are incorrect if it thinks you started to sleep at 6:45pm. Are you sure you don't have am/pm switched on one of the value? Maybe sleep/wake reversed (you meant to configure sleep from midnight to 6am, you have 6pm to midnight by mistake).

"sleep" is actually processed by Garmin Connect and not the watch. The watch just saves movement - and that movement could be steps or tossing and turning. GC then uses your sleep times to figure things out.

Sleep detection getting worse

It sounds like your configured sleep times are incorrect if it thinks you started to sleep at 6:45pm. Are you sure you don't have am/pm switched on one of the value? Maybe sleep/wake reversed (you meant to configure sleep from midnight to 6am, you have 6pm to midnight by mistake).

"sleep" is actually processed by Garmin Connect and not the watch. The watch just saves movement - and that movement could be steps or tossing and turning. GC then uses your sleep times to figure things out.

Jim,

Thanks for the suggestion but your hunch is wrong: in Garmin Connect on my iPhone it says ""Normal Bed Time: 22:00" and "Normal Wake Time: 06:00"

This is getting crazy - last night it has me going to sleep at 17:48 and sleeping for 11:14hrs. Admittedly it did spot my wake up time accurately this time and it did flagg as restless the period when I was driving across town!

Any more suggestions or should I log a fault?

Any more suggestions or should I log a fault?

Are the time zones set the same as your watch in GC and GCM? You can also validate your watch has the proper sleep times by going to Settings>Do Not Disturb>and then look at the option for "Sleep Times", as it shows your times.

Audio alerts on connect mobile for intervals, hr zone and pace zone

I always run with music with headset, so the interval announcements on the watch are too silent and I can't always feel the vibration

I would like to see more audio alerts configurable on connect mobile
Yesterday I already noticed that you can enable audio alerts for pace and heart rate every lap or x minutes . Nice feature, but it doesn't work (yet?):confused:
It would be great if you could get alerts for new intervals (announcing your desired hr zone and time in interval), alerts for going out of zone.
An alert telling you you're halfway through your workout would also be nice

Especially now these days it's cold and my watch is underneath my sleeve...would be great if I didn't have to look at my watch to see my data;)

I don't know if it's a limitation of the hardware or the firmware, but only being able to track two custom screens/pages of data is potentially limiting. I appreciate that there may be a limit to how many different metrics it can track at once and more pages potentially means wasted cycles in the chance that you might want to use one of them, but I like to emphasize different things for fast vs. long runs vs. races and there's no way to satisfy all of those considerations without rebuilding a screen. Maybe being able to configure several custom screen arrangements but then choose a subset to load when starting the activity would be a reasonable compromise. It's the only complaint I really have...it's a fantastic device overall.

Pace alerts during normal runs

I tried out the pace alert feature during a steady state run tonight just to see how it worked. I set the range I wanted to run in and off I went. I t worked quite well until I got to an area where the GPS went a bit mad (don't know why - there were low trees on one side and water all around so maybe it was that). I kept getting pace alerts every 5 seconds and couldn't see any info on the watch face.. One second it told me I was doing 9:30 and the next 6:50 (I wasn't). I also made the mistake of pressing the back/lap button to dismiss the notification, but it just recorded a new lap. Is there any way of setting the pace alerts to lap pace or overall average pace instead of instantaneous pace like it appears to be? This would be much more useful. Also how do I dismiss a lap notification or time/pace alert notification? My old watch had seperate back and lap buttons and pressing the back would dismiss the alert notification, so I just though pressing the back button on the 235 would do the same.

One more thing just occurred to me - a low battery notification configurable from either within the watch of GC. So you could set the watch to alert you when there was only e.g. 10% battery left or 15 % etc.

Yes, but all 24x7 activity trackers in the market has this design fault.

One is a mishap, the other is a design fault.

I think it comes down to this: the design fault is in eschewing a third status for “I don't know”, but ill-advisedly taking a Boolean approach to reporting whether the user is asleep. There will always be times when the device just cannot determine with a reasonable level of confidence whether its registered user – who may not be even wearing the device at the time – is asleep, even if (the availability of) heart rate data and battery charging connection status are used to provide some level of sanity-checking.

Name another fitness device that records sleep when you remove it?

TomTom Spark, from my first-hand experience (on which I posted evidence on the TomTom discussion forum, but I won't link to from here).

I just bought myself a Garmin Forerunner 235, after returning my TomTom Spark Cardio+Music to the store, and I certainly hope the former will perform better in so many ways and is more sophisticated in how it guesses whether I'm asleep without the use of EEG sensors. However, it's unreasonable to expect it won't ever be wrong; you're simply expressing a preference for your device to err on the side of under-reporting, mishap or no.

<EDIT>
I attached the charging cable to my FR235 at 01:45 today, and only remembered to disconnect it this morning at around 11:05. The snapshots in Garmin Connect is now showing I was sleeping that entire time (but nothing before and after). Hmmm.