Altitude widget?

It doesn't have an altitude widget unfortunately. The only way to see altitude is to go into an activity and see the elevation data field. It does have a barometric altimeter that works as well as the Fenix 5 and 935, but Garmin has restricted the software on the 645 so it can only be viewed inside an activity. They have also restricted navigation options to within activities. You also can't do things like change position format. They have only recently enabled altimeter calibration, but you have to pull up the sub-menu on the elevation the data field.

Very annoying and I hope Garmin rectify this in a forthcoming software update. I hope Garmin read this.

Here's a ABC widget: my ABC. There are others too.

And many CIQ watchfaces will also show you this. Where some will show a history graph of your altitude.

I tried that My ABC widget but deleted it because it made scrolling through my widget list slow. It would hang for a second on that widget before I could scroll down further. The Garmin one on the 935 / Fenix doesn't do that.

I honestly don't know why Garmin doesn't put out an update to address this. The watch is advertised as having a barometric altimeter and surely it's false advertising if you have to go to the effort of starting an activity just to quickly check your elevation. Come on Garmin, it's been 10 months now. Do the right thing for your loyal customers.

As I said, there are also a number of watch faces that will show altitude.

Try myABC again on the 645. There was a general slowdown with CIQ on some devices a few months back, but that has been corrected now.

The 645 and va3/va3m all have baro altimeters but none have an altitude widget, so it's not unique to the 645.

As I said, there are also a number of watch faces that will show altitude.

Try myABC again on the 645. There was a general slowdown with CIQ on some devices a few months back, but that has been corrected now.

The 645 and va3/va3m all have baro altimeters but none have an altitude widget, so it's not unique to the 645.

I'm still annoyed that my new £400 watch can't even show you on the spot elevation readings despite it having a barometric altimeter... If I wanted a Fenix I would have brought one. But there's no technical reason why the "running" watches can't do this as the hardware is already there.

I tried the myABC yesterday and there is still a slight lag when you view the widget and just want to get to another widget. I tend to avoid downloading things from the Connect IQ store as it slows down the operation of the watch IMO.

The watch is advertised as having a barometric altimeter and surely it's false advertising if you have to go to the effort of starting an activity just to quickly check your elevation.

Does the 645 have a barometric altimeter or not? If it does, it's not false advertising because you can't utilize it the way you want.

But there's no technical reason why the "running" watches can't do this as the hardware is already there.

You're correct. There is no technical reason. It's about marketing and money for Garmin. Feature omissions on devices has been discussed and explained in countless threads throughout these forums. It's Garmin's choice what features go into their devices regardless of what we as consumers feel belong there. As consumers, we can use Garmin's product request site and request features, or not buy their products and go with another manufacturer.

You're correct. There is no technical reason. It's about marketing and money for Garmin. Feature omissions on devices has been discussed and explained in countless threads throughout these forums. It's Garmin's choice what features go into their devices regardless of what we as consumers feel belong there. As consumers, we can use Garmin's product request site and request features, or not buy their products and go with another manufacturer.

I think we all know that all of these new watches have the same internals, albeit different battery sizes and face designs, and are marketed differently to target different consumers in order to maximise sales.

I think we all know that all of these new watches have the same internals, albeit different battery sizes and face designs, and are marketed differently to target different consumers in order to maximise sales.

Yes, we all know that. Do you have a better business model in mind? Would you like to go with one hardware model like Apple Watch, and rent features by the year? It's pretty trendy these days to rent everything. FirstBeat is literally $50 per year -- I wonder how many people here would like rent their sportswatch features.

Yeah, if you think this is bad, imagine how VA3 owners feel about having to have the same number of fields on every data page, and having the top and bottom fields constrained to a subset of available fields. Pretty much makes full-screen CIQ data fields useless, since you're forced to have 1 field on every other page.

That, along with the lack of buttons, means that no runner should ever buy the VA3. Do I think those restriction are ridiculous? Yes. Do I think there's a chance in hell Garmin will change it. Nope.

I don't understand why there's a distinction made between hardware omissions and software omissions, or why it matters that there's no "technical" reason something can't be done. Many people thought it was ridiculous that the 735XT (tri-watch) had no baro. Is that somehow different because it's a hardware omission?

Would you be surprised that faster, expensive CPU chips are manufactured by same process as slower, cheaper CPUs? They test all the chips: the higher-quality ones are placed in the "expensive" bin, and the ones with poorer quality are thrown in the "budget" bin. Cost of manufacturing expensive CPU = cost of manufacturing cheap CPU.

Or that sometimes even hardware is artificially limited? Instead of physically removing a component on a cheaper device, they just physically disable it at the factory, because sometimes it's cheaper to manufacture all the boards in the same way. Like the difference between a very expensive "pro" graphics card and a cheaper "gamer" graphics cards is that maybe a few components are disabled on the board, and the pro graphics card gets better drivers (which aren't supposed to work with the consumer card).

You have to let go of these ideas of "fairness" and "because something I want is possible in software, therefore Garmin is obligated to deliver it to me". You're free to voice your displeasure, but I don't see Garmin changing their minds.

OTOH, they do tend to trickle down high-end features for the next generation.... 645 has so many things the 630 didn't, like navigation, unlimited data fields, etc.

Does the 645 have a barometric altimeter or not? If it does, it's not false advertising because you can't utilize it the way you want.

It definitely does have a barometric altimeter. It's what the little hole next to the start/stop button is for. I've done some proper testing of this on Dartmoor using UK Ordnance Survey mapping data as a reference, and I can confirm that the barometric altimeter works very well. You can climb a hill and when you are on the summit it will give you the correct altitude to the nearest one or two metres, and then you can walk down to the car and back up to the summit and it will still give you the same reading, assuming the atmospheric pressure hasn't changed.