Couple of questions for Fenix 3 HR Users:
Yes, I picked it over the 920 since I work in an office setting. I actually have the non-HR version.
The alarm is very neat, you can set it just to vibrate, and the noise alert for the alarm isn’t that loud.
If you set your phone for no notifications at night, the same will go for the watch. I also set mine for no notifications while I am in an activity. I hear my phone ring when I am on my bike (it is in a saddle bag for emergencies), but the watch does not get interrupted.
Works as an every day watch and has all the functions of a normal digital watch.
As noted, the alarm is great on vibration mode. It can be set to vibrate, tone, and/or light. With vibration alone it will wake me up and my wife sleeps right though it. You can have a number of different alarms, like one for weekdays and another for weekends and setup one for getting up extra early tomorrow. You can also just use a phone to setup alarms and they will go through the watch.
You can “disconnect” as well. That is a very useful feature as the first week or two I was woken up once or twice in the middle of the night by things like the Amazon app letting me know they shipped a package at 1:30 AM.
I have the regular Fenix 3 Sapphire. Have worn it all day and night since the day it arrived in March of 2015. It is great for an everyday watch and works great for training as well. I find myself using it for other activities such as flying small aircraft, hiking, daily activity tracker, finding my way back to the truck while hunting, river rafting, etc. I prefer the heavy metal band that came with the sapphire version, looks better for everyday use and I like the weight, some people don’t, but you can put any band you want on it.
Yes as mentioned the alarm works great. I set my iPhone to not disturb from 10:30pm to 6:00am so the watch doesn’t do anything at night either.
When I first went to buy a watch the Fenix 2 and the Suunto Ambit 2 were the options in 2014, I went Suunto because the Fenix 2 was getting bad reviews for crashing and losing data, also I didn’t care for the look. Problem with the Suunto was you had to have access to a computer to upload any workouts, couldn’t use a phone or plug into a tablet. The Fenix 3 is much improved over the 2 and I have been very happy with it. If you want a do all watch, the Fenix 3 is the one to get.
I read that the Fenix battery runs out before 10 hours when in gps mode. But only the Fenix HR (which is the one with the optical heart sensor?). When this is true it would be useless for Ironmans.
Mine lasts a lot longer than that. Rainmaker has the battery live for the HR at the same as the regular 3. Garmin knows not to make a watch that can’t last at least 16 hours in GPS mode.
Have mulitple sensors, bluetooth, GPS, all the bells and whistles draw the battery down a bit, but it can definitely handle an Ironman.
My F3HR has gone 15:10 before the battery went critical and I heard the beep (this is what happens when you forget to hit stop after a long ride and then drive around with it on your arm for a while). So my guess is that I would have gotten to 15:20-15:30 before it died (it was in GPS mode).
A friend of mine who does trail ultra’s put hers in ultra trac mode and it was above 50% after 19 hours.
I wear mine as an every day watch, though it does look really big and clunky on my super skinny wrists (I’m a fairly petite women and need to wear the watch with the strap on the tightest hole in the band in order for it not to slip around). The only time that I take it off is when I’m dressed up to go out or I need to charge the battery, and the frequency of the latter varies greatly depending on how long I have the watch on GPS mode. I like that when I head to the pool early in the morning, or go down the to the gym in my office building for a weight workout at lunch, I already have the watch on and just have to start the appropriate app; otherwise I’d probably forget to move the watch from swim bag to gym bag and back more often than not. In terms of battery life for an Ironman, mine lasted me for 15+ hours at Whistler this year, though that was with the power meter and all other bike sensors turned off (I had an Edge 510 on my bike that I used for this data) as well as with the bluetooth and wife turned off. I did have the backlight turned on for 8 sections with a gesture or manual activation, and had data recording on every second, so I imagine the battery could’ve lasted even longer is set differently.
I love mine, have worn it everyday since it arrived in march. And the battery has been phenomenal. I can’t remember exactly, but I raced the Vineman full and I think the batter drain was only like 60% for me after ~12hrs of GPS (11 of which running the oHR). This watch has been everything I wanted in a training/racing watch.
I wear mine as an every day watch, though it does look really big and clunky on my super skinny wrists (I’m a fairly petite women and need to wear the watch with the strap on the tightest hole in the band in order for it not to slip around). The only time that I take it off is when I’m dressed up to go out or I need to charge the battery, and the frequency of the latter varies greatly depending on how long I have the watch on GPS mode. I like that when I head to the pool early in the morning, or go down the to the gym in my office building for a weight workout at lunch, I already have the watch on and just have to start the appropriate app; otherwise I’d probably forget to move the watch from swim bag to gym bag and back more often than not. In terms of battery life for an Ironman, mine lasted me for 15+ hours at Whistler this year, though that was with the power meter and all other bike sensors turned off (I had an Edge 510 on my bike that I used for this data) as well as with the bluetooth and wife turned off. I did have the backlight turned on for 8 sections with a gesture or manual activation, and had data recording on every second, so I imagine the battery could’ve lasted even longer is set differently.
I see you’re avoiding a chapstick moment
I don’t want to hijack your post, but I thought it was close enough to the topic to ask. How do Fenix 3 HR owners like the optical HR feature? I heard Garmin recently tweaked the algorithm and was wondering if that resolved some of the accuracy issues during activities.