I have this product for ~3 months and I'd like to share my thoughts about it with you.
The good:
- it's super light, it weights just a few grams, sometime I don't even feel it on my wrist.
- it feels so well on your wrist, I tried vivoactive too and I think 735 feels better. Vivoactive seems a little bit uncomfortable.
- the battery life is great. BTW, I fully charge it on 1ts January and it lasted until today! Yep, that's 19 days! Today I've seen a new update but, TBH, I'm not very keen to do it, because I'm afraid it will screw the battery life :).
- I'm not a runner, but I'm using it for swimming. I really like the fact that it counts the laps very accurate! Though I can't say the same thing for the stroke type, but more on that matter on The ugly section.
- the design, is not impressive, but it's ok. Personally I like it and that was one of the reasons why I chose this model. The other reason was the Open water profile.
- overall I'm quite pleased about it.
The bad:
- The garmin connect express for windows sucks big time! I didn't seen such a poorly designed and implemented app since Nokia's client app for windows (I forgot its name):
* doesn't have a built-in fully apps manager. If you want to install some apps on your device it will open a web browser where, of course, you'll need to enter your credentials again.
* since last update, you can't run it as normal user (it just exists).
* if you're running it as admin, you'' have to login again because it's losing all the configs, you'll have another surprise, it doesn't download your settings (language, country, etc.) from the net! You'll have to fill them again :( ....
- The one for Android is a little bit more polished, but still buggy and stupid:
* it's dumb because when you first login, if you're using your google account to sign in, instead to use Android APIs to easily ask the permission to access the google account, they're showing you web page where you need to enter your google credentials again, which is stupid (and unsafe, because there is no way to know if that page is coming from google or not)!
* buggy, since last firmware and garmin connect updates, the My Day screen shows some random numbers in the Steps gauge :( ...
The ugly:
- as I said in The good section, I really appreciate the accuracy of the lap count. But it has some problems with the backstroke recognition! 90% of the time it sees it as "freestyle" stroke type. I can't see how on earth it's doing this mistake, because these strokes are in different directions: one is clockwise and the other one is anticlockwise!
- everywhere Garmin is using, IMHO, wrongly the term freestyle instead of crawl (or from crawl). Freestyle is a metonym for front crawl.
Even it looks like this product and the companion apps are buggy and you should stay away from it, is not that case at all, because all these issues can be easily fixed (if Garmin wants it ;) )!
