First Garmin Watch - Love It!

wtches Garmin Forerunner 910XT GPS Enabled Monitor

I know that Garmin has gotten a lot of negative feedback about this watch, but I think a lot of it is unwarranted. Take the instantaneous pace for example. By the nature of GPS, this will jump around quite a lot, especially for something like a watch that is by design allowed to accept a lot of noise in the GPS signal. That being said, I think the biggest issue is expectations. Many users buying this watch were users of garmin's previous watches that did a lot of data smoothing to give a more consistent 'instantaneous' pace. That pace was actually not instantaneous, and that's why there's an expectation problem now. If you're a user of the 110 or the 210 and buying this watch, use lap pace, not 'pace' because that's what your old watch displayed.

It's still early, but so far this watch has done everything it's supposed to do (I've so far done 2 runs, 2 bikes, 1 open water swim, and 1 lap swim with it). It logs everything, it's waterproof, measures swim distances indoors and out with reasonable accuracy, and the auto-multisport mode works like a charm. I literally received this watch on a Friday evening and used it the following morning in an olympic distance tri and had zero issues with it. I'm a software guy by trade so maybe that explains part of it, but I found this device to be extremely intuitive to use.

My only complaints so far is that it has counted a single extra length while lap swimming and that it doesn't easily display the time of day while it's not being used. Neither issue is something that really takes away from my experience. I'll update this post if the lap swimming feature becomes an issue - at this point that is my biggest concern.

Update: I've swam with this device 12 times now. 5 of those 12 sessions, the 910 incorrectly counted a single extra length. I do open turns (versus flip turns), and push off strong and glide. The interesting thing to me is that I haven't been able to correlate any event with the extra lengths. It doesn't happen when pushing hard for the last 50, or when I accidently smack the lane line. The only consistency is that it seems to happen during longer sets 300yds +. This is slightly annoying, but in the end not a huge deal. It still helps me understand how I'm doing pace wise, and still helps me with intervals/sets/lap counting.

The rest of the features are golden. I've never had a problem while biking or running. This thing is packed with features and I'm still discovering ways to use it to better my training. Love the 910xt, best piece of gear I own.

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