The Fenix 2 is the watch Garmin has made to appeal to active people who might terminate up doing … well , just about anything alfresco . It ’s not just for runners , just for natator , just for snowboarders , or just for tramp , it ’s for people who want a single watch to cut through their complete athletic lifestyle . The in force word is that the Fenix 2 is truly grand for almost all of those thing . Almost .
What Is It?
Garmin bills the Fenix as a “ full - feature grooming watch for multisport athletes , ” and that ’s actually a very accurate verbal description . It has a gamey sensitivity Global Positioning System radio , an altimeter , barometer , 3 - axis vertebra compass , an accelerometer , a thermometer , and both ANT+ and Bluetooth radios .
It ’s for run , horseback riding , hiking , swim , totter , climbing , skiing , snowboarding , triathlon , and sure why the hell not , skydiving . In compositor’s case you ’re wondering , Fenix is say like the metropolis in Arizona , or the bird rising from the ashes .
Why Does It Matter?
If you ’re an combat-ready outdoorsy case who engages in a lot of dissimilar activities , you do n’t want to buy a separate vigil for each activity or even a couple of multisport watch you have to swap on a regular basis . The Fenix 2 is mean to be the “ one watch to rule them all ” sort of deal . It also matters because it ’s Garmin : the company has kind of been killing it latterly on the Global Positioning System watch front .
Design
This is definitely a spotter one would draw as “ big . ” It count in at a cool 3 ounces and it ’s round and thick , like a miniature field hockey puck with wrist straps . If you hucked it at someone ’s face it would definitely make a pitch-black eye or a lost tooth , so do n’t do that . The rubber shoulder strap is also on the thick side to help stabilise the watch ’s heft and to spread imperativeness out more equally across your wrist .
From a physical ironware perspective , the watch is basically identical to the original Fenix . In fact , other than a twosome pinch in the colouration of the buttons , it ’s the exact same hardware on the exterior . That said , the clit functionality has been remapped , so now the commencement / layover button is where the up button was , and the back push is where the down push was . commit me , it makes sense when you ’re using it .
The lookout man ’s backlight is a deep red , and while it ’s not as bright as an Indiglo - style backlight , it perch equally and it will be even less prone to sleep with with your Nox vision , an important feature film if you ’re camping or extend at night .
The Fenix 2 care via a USB cable with a proprietary tying up clipping on one remnant of it . you may also upload your data this style , but the clip study some fidgeting to get a proper connection , so you ’ll probably want to just upload via the iOS or Android app . The whole shebang is waterproof to 164 feet .
Using It
For testing I read this watch on a couple short hikes , an indoor swim , an ocean swim , a trek across Zion National Park , a couple bike rides , and somewhere around a dozen outdoor runs . I ’d go for to take it snowboarding but I was skunked by the California drought . The difference of opinion between indoor vs outdoor swim is pregnant because open water swimming employ the GPS for aloofness and position , whereas the indoor swimming apply accelerometer .
The UI on the original Fenix was , candidly , a mess . It was extremely unintuitive , which made the watch very awkward to use . Thankfully , affair have in spades been improved in the Fenix 2 . The menu organization is place out much more flawlessly , and the way the buttons are organize makes it much easier to apply .. That aver , there are so many options and feature that it can still palpate very overwhelming . I ’m rifle to endeavor to just concentre on the ones we retrieve count most . We ’re certain you have good things to do than read a 5,000 give-and-take review !
From the homescreen which exhibit the time , you remove the reddened button on the upper right hand and you ’ll be taken into the natural process launch menu where you peck the sport you need . Your options are cross - country ski , downhill ski / snowboard , rock raise , hike , navigate , trail running , run , bike , swimming , workout , indoor ladder / wheel , multisport , or custom . fall into place any of those will either take you to a sub - fare full of options ( i.e. are you swim indoors or in open weewee ? ) , or give you the Go blind where you may just launch in good order into the activity . Generally , this is very painless , though there are for sure more menus to wade through compared to a dedicated unmarried - sport watch .
What really separates this watch from competitors is the amount of insanely detailed data you could get for your activities . In fact , it ’s borrowed some of the best features from other Garmin watch and Voltronned them into one . Take swim , for deterrent example . It does n’t just time you as you go , but it calculate your lap and your strokes per lap . In fact , using the built - in accelerometers , it can even tell what type of stroke you ’re doing and will log it accordingly . In my testing it nailed the shot - type with 100 - per centum accuracy . These are features you notice on Garmin ’s top - shelf triathlon sentry ( the Forerunner 910XT ) , but they ’ve been helpfully borrowed here .
Or take running . Garmin continued the trend of pilfering from its flagship ticker and basically took all of the skilful lineament from the Forerunner 620 and added them to the Fenix 2 . The watch alone will give you a lot of data ( including your cadence a.k.a . steps per minute , which is a uncommon feature ) , but if you pair off it with Garmin ’s HRM - Run chest - strap center rate supervise the level of item is astonishing . It ’s make everything from your average vertical oscillation ( how high you ’re bouncing as you die hard ) , to average ground contact time ( how long your invertebrate foot is on the pavement ) , and average stride length ( how far you go with each step ) .
Now , what do you do with this datum ? Probably very small ! Really , most of these jolly obscure prosody are for multitude train at a much high level than most of us will ever need . But if you ’re really a serious base runner , then you might find a missing man to the puzzle of your lack of speed , or early onset weariness buried in the numbers . For runners who geek - out on stuff like that , this watch is a gem trove .
Where the spotter is less successful , unfortunately , is on the navigational front . It has some undeniably cracking features in its hiking mode . One such feature is breadcrumbs , where you hike up wherever you require and the watch create piffling digital waypoints every so often so you’re able to retrace your way to the trail head , Hansel and Gretel style . And of course of instruction there ’s a digital range , which I recover to be adequately accurate , and a barometer so you get laid if a tempest is coming . But when it come to following a itinerary or get to a predetermined point , that ’s where thing get ugly .
For starter , the simple act of load a map onto the sentinel is a mammoth pain in the neck in the ass . You have to set up no fewer than three applications on your screen background ( Garmin Map Manager , Garmin MapInstall , and Garmin BaseCamp ) each of which are roughly as visceral as doing your own liver biopsy . For my multi - day Zion trek I loaded in a full map of the parkland , then I render a twosome dissimilar fashion of making route . Some were just lists of strategic waypoints with names , so we could seek to get from one point to the next compass point , and so on . For other segments of the trail I created custom path which in theory should have been extremely round-eyed for us to follow . They were n’t .
First off , the size and resoluteness of the black and white-hot screen make it all but impossible to tell what you ’re look at on the map , even when zooming way in or way out ( which was far from intuitive to do , by the way ) . rather , I more often found myself using a CRT screen that tells you how close you are to the waypoints you ’ve entered . Unfortunately , that only give you distances to the waypoints as the crow flies , entirely snub trails and terrain . This means that sometimes it would tell us the closest waypoint was one we ’d already run half an hour ago and was now 500 feet below us . Fun . It also re - sort out the waypoints by proximity , which makes them much harder to keep track of . Even using the road I had meticulously drawn out using the desktop software did n’t serve .
Then there was the job of tracking accuracy . Now , to be fair , in Zion you ’re often surrounded by outrageous tilt walls , which no hand-held GPS is built for , but holy crap the Fenix 2 failed spectacularly here . or else of just saying “ I ’m not sure where you are at the moment so I ’m exit to look until I have a upright satellite lock , ” it essentially wildly guessed , sometimes putting us many miles off . For example , it once thought we ’d hiked 22 miles and 6,000 upright feet in just over an hour , with an average be active speed of 36 MPH . No , we six guy wire in our mid - late XXX carrying heavy knapsack do not hike faster than Usain Bolt with a rocket salad up his fanny . That say , when hiking in more fair terrain around Los Angeles and the Yucatan Peninsula , the GPS did just o.k. .
That Zion anecdote is funny on the surface , but in reality it felt quite dangerous . There ’s no way to undo a fake waypoint once the lookout man has set it . At the time , I was using the Garmin to monitor our distance travel because we knew there was a bit coming up at mile 5.4 , and we were worried the turn might not be well - brand . Sure enough , it was n’t . The bug screwed up our mileage so badly that we essentially had no idea how far we ’d live , and thus we did n’t have a go at it when the turn was coming . This is why you should always , always have a map and scope ( which we did ) and make trusted you sleep together how to employ them . Even so , this watch should be smart enough to know that nobody actuate Roadrunner tight while tramp , and rid of the forged data .
Also on the negative side , the smartphone app and the web portal vein are both really bad . It feel like Garmin pass no time on designing or UI — it ’s at the same time too canonic and too convoluted . Both are basically a firehose of information and neither are intuitive or visually appealing . equate it to a slick app / web site like Runtastic and you wonder why a comparatively gargantuan fellowship like Garmin ca n’t get it together on this front .
The Fenix 2 has both ANT+ and Bluetooth 4.0 radios which means it can geminate with an extremely wide kitchen stove of appurtenance , from affection rate Monitor and major power meters to external thermometers and bike metre sensors . It also twin with most forward-looking smartphones , permit you to not only upload your workouts , but also live - upgrade your location in a race should you so trust , so acquaintance and kinsfolk can follow you on a map . The gimmick is that you ca n’t use ANT+ and Bluetooth simultaneously , so do n’t await to utilize a connected heart - charge per unit monitor and pair the watch with your headphone at the same sentence .
I ’m still disappointed that I did n’t get to try the watch while snowboarding , but it sounds awesome . The watch will not only track your routes , but it will memorialise your 3D stop number . That ’s important because if you were only looking at the horizontal plane , when you ’re going down a outrageous incline it would n’t look like you ’re going very tight . Factor in drop , though , and you could see just how much ass you ’re hauling . Then when you get to the bottom and get on the rise it will create an auto - lap . When you ’re back at the top , it begin up again , and you may try out to baffle your former good time . you could also use the sentinel as a remote control to start and stop recording withGarmin ’s Virb elect action camera , which is a slick feature .
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Obviously , there ’s much more than we can go into here , but in improver to all of the advanced feature of speech , you could look the standard spotter transportation , like a stopwatch , a timer , multiple prison term zones , alarm pin clover , and all of that . stamp battery life-time is rated for 10 minute of GPS navigation , which you could extend a bit by ingest it knock the satellites less frequently . For tenacious days of hike , though , it just could n’t keep up . I finish up strapping a Goal Zero Nomad 7 solar battery charger to my backpack and running a cable length to the watch on my wrist to charge as we hiked , which worked very well , though it was passably awkward .
Like
Simply put , the physical exercise datum you could get from this thing is 2d to none . I love the more innovative running metric , and being able to monitor my cadence in existent clip help oneself ensure my form persist solid when my pegleg are starting to incinerate . The swimming information is arguably even cool . Tracking my strokes per lap chip in me a groovy look at my efficiency and shows me where I could improve . Also , it turns out that when my arm begin to tire my breaststroke is almost as dissipated as my freestyle . That ’s unbalanced !
It pair off with almost every accoutrement under the sun , and it even has a bike setting for using it in triathlons . Being able to quickly upload exercise via the app is way more commodious than doing it over a USB cable ( which multisport watches have traditionally used ) . The backlight wo n’t screw up your night vision . If you get the HRM - Run heart rate monitoring gadget ( which has a caboodle of accelerometer in it ) it adds advanced features like aVO2 Max test , retrieval recommendation , and even a race - time prognosticator . Also , the display is in general easy to read .
No Like
The apps and web site are both a mess . It ’s super difficult to debase mathematical function and routes onto the watch . I discover it to be treacherous in navigational situations . While it did assist sometimes , it was n’t something I could weigh on . I also experienced some random resets while using it in the wild , though the firmware has been updated since then .
The charge up connector is vexing to deal with . The fact that you ca n’t use ANT+ and Bluetooth at the same time is a tangible look - palm situation . The watch is definitely bulky and you certainly wo n’t forget you have it on , especially while swimming . It ’ll also make tighter - fitting layers catchy to get on and off , just because your cuffs get caught on its ponderousness . It has an intragroup thermometer , but its data is completely thrown off by the heating plant your body gives off , so it ’s effectively useless and could lead you to underdress for some challenging condition outside your tent if you trust it .
Should You Buy It?
In general , I consider this spotter is awe-inspiring , but it depends what you ’re into . If you ’re just a casual runner , then this is definitely overkill . Or if you want a watch for navigate backcountry , then this ai n’t it ( check out the upcomingSuunto Ambit 3instead ) . That say , if you ’re into run , swimming , kayaking , skiing , snowboarding , cycling , and rock climbing , then yeah , this is plausibly the vigil for you . It ’s just improbably various and it packs in so many excellent feature .
Now , it be $ 400 ( or $ 450 for the functioning bundle which admit the HRM - Run chest strap heart rate admonisher , which is probably worth it for serious runners ) . That is n’t cheap , but consider this : It basically packs in all the feature of the Forerunner 910XT ( aka the best triathlon scout for several years run ) , which also costs $ 400 , and all the innovative running moral force from the Forerunner 620 ( Garmin ’s flagship run watch ) , which also costs $ 400 . Plus you get skiing and all those other body process . $ 400 is n’t tatty , but you ’re obtain a caboodle for your money , and corresponding vigil from other brands are typically close-fitting to $ 500 , give or take . If you ’re a quasi - serious outdoors jock , you ’ll be severely - pressed to regain a good watch than this . [ Garmin Fenix 2 ]
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