My Garmin fenix 6 Pro, which is about 3.5 years old, seems to be dying. It got hot during the last charge and hasn’t charged at all since then. I replaced the battery, then the cable and the power adapter, but nothing happened. To be honest, I’m very disappointed about this, but otherwise I was very happy with the watch.
I am now looking for a replacement from Europe, although it doesn’t have to be a 1:1 replacement for the fenix.
What is important to me…
- It should be robust
- Accurate measurements for indoor sports (heart rate, oxygen saturation, etc.)
- Accurate sleep analysis
- I don’t want to have to charge the battery every day or even every three days; it should last a little longer.
- Water drinking tracker
- A pedometer that is as accurate as possible
GPS and map functions would be important to me if they are responsive and intuitive and easy to use. Unfortunately, I didn’t find this to be the case with my Garmin fenix 6 Pro.
I have looked at watches from Suunto (Switzerland) and Polar (Finland). If there are other good European manufacturers, I am open to suggestions. I would be very grateful for specific model recommendations.
Withings has barely better than a guess heart rate correlation during activity sadly, so not great for sports. But they look nice!
What you can also do (that many people do) is get whatever fitness watch that has the features that you want, then get the Polar H10 chest strap for working out, which is the gold standard for heart rate measurement and much more accurate than PPG measurement.
I really like the idea, thank you. I even have a chest strap from Garmin, the HRM Pro Plus, which I bought at the end of last year because it was on sale. It’s a shame, of course, because now I can only use it to measure my heart rate if I don’t buy a Garmin watch, but I think it would be the same with Polar if I only bought the strap and not one of their watches, right?
How it works for some people is the chest strap would be detected by the fitness app (polar, strava, run keeper, opentracks, etc…) and then the activity would be recorded with the chest strap. Then the activity is either synced with google health connect or google fit, apple health, etc… So it shows up in your watch app overview.
“Smarter” smart watches I think can also connect themselves to the chest strap instead of the phone and the heart rate from the chest strap would “override” the watch’s that it then sends to the app, so you don’t have to sync with an external app. Though there might be more problems with compatibility even though all chest straps should use the standard Bluetooth “Heart Rate Service” to be completely interoperable.