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Also: the Garmin Varia bike radar is absolute gold. I feel more unsafe without it than I do without a helmet.
Interesting, I didn't know such a thing existed. However, I'm struggling to understand the need. I ride my bike every day but I don't remember the last time I was surprised by a car approaching from behind.
Where in the world do you live / where do you typically ride your bike? In what situations are you glad to have that radar?
> Where in the world do you live / where do you typically ride your bike? In what situations are you glad to have that radar?
UK; It's handy for knowing when on town or country roads without too much traffic; it can typically spot fast moving vehicles before you can hear or see them in mirrors (let alone if relying solely furtive glimpses over shoulder)
Tbh, nice as it is to be notified about approaching vehicles, what I really like is that the light flashes at proportionately faster rates in response to the speed of the approaching vehicles. The changing rate does a better job of attracting the attention of drivers than constant illumination, and is also a psychological hack that makes the driver think they are being watched [0] and consequently behave slightly better when they do pass.
Cumulatively the light/radar combination is a winner because it makes cycling more pleasant _and_ reduces the chances of getting hit by drivers.
[0] In some of the newer units they are being watched as well, as they have camera's in them - apparently unit is a bit chunky and video quality in low-light is ropey.
The video quality is ok.. ish. It’s not good in any lighting conditions but is plenty fine for getting licence plates etc.
The main issue for me is how hard it is to get it off the unit wirelessly. It’s slow and frequently loses connection.
Removing the card and doing it that way is better but the card is clearly not designed to be removed regularly and it would be very easy to break the slot that holds it.
Variable-time/Random bicycle light flashing is a pet peeve of mine: I find it much easier to track the location and velocity of cyclists when the frequency of flashing is constant.
With a headwind I often don’t hear cars behind me at all, so I can see the use case
Not get rear-ended by a car? There's also model with a camera to collect evidence. I have the one without the camera, just the radar and a light.
> Where in the world do you live / where do you typically ride your bike? In what situations are you glad to have that radar?
Central and Eastern Europe. Whenever I share the roads with cars. Although I'm more relaxed on outdoor paths or gravel roads where I don't have to keep an eye on cars all the time.
For MTB you probably don't need it, but in road scenarios it's great.
I’m in New Zealand. I ride in the road in town and out in the hills at the weekend.
The way I use it is to look down, see if a car is behind, then look behind before pulling out. I don’t bother looking back if there is a car close (the range must be around 100-150m I think?).
It also yells louder if the car is approaching fast. The integrated light changes how it flashes when it sees a car.
In group ride with talking etc, it’s helpful too as it usually doesn’t pick up bikes (unless the guy behind is an absolute unit) and the squawk of an approaching car is helpful for the group.
Electric cars and busses no longer sneak up on me, it’s great use of tech on a bike.
So yeah, with "New Zealand" as context a device like that makes more sense.
Road trains a very big, move very fast and they don't stop for anyone on a bike. So knowing they are coming up on you from a distance gives you time to get off the road.
That's a very special usage case but I think any rural road with fast moving traffic would also benefit from the early warning even with just cars to contend with.
Do people with varia use headphones or something?
I don't have issues being aware about upcoming traffic, in either city traffic or rural environments. The only exception would be in heavy headwind situations
For running they're much better!
Coupd that make hearing cars easier somehow?
The Caria is good in noisy situations or with multiple cars approaching. Unusually fast car approach get an extra alert.
I have used it with headphones but usually don’t. You detect the cars far earlier than you do by hearing them.
Almost all delivery vehicles and taxis round here are BEV too, along with a good chunk of private cars. Can be very hard to hear them above wind noise and general background hubbub, especially when wearing a helmet.
Its steep price wise but if you are doing a lot of road cycljng on rural roads and fast traffic where one hit is the end its an easy to justify life insurance product.
I never knew I needed the Varia but once I tried it I can't cycle without it; best bike safety device ever -- especially if you ride in places without much traffic
Though an e-bike goes 25km/h. This is a lot more dangerous and people should definitely wear a helmet when driving one.
The data backs it up. Look at the deaths per capita in the Netherlands. You can see a steep rise with the introduction of e-bikes, but before that it was one of the lowest in the world. And that is saying something when it is the most cycling dense country of the world.
I mean, we can go back and forth here all you want. You can look up the data yourself or visit the Netherlands and look around ...
There are plenty of e-bikes that pass me, and I’d estimate they are doing 40kmh.
Not wearing a helmet would be mad.
e-bikes are usually 25km/h max in my countries (Benelux)
also, nit: you don't drive a bicycle
That bit is about e-bikes. I can get behind that phrasing.
bikepacking is a completely different way of cycling and has nothing to do with the way people in the netherlands use their bikes.
The Instinct is also easier to polish than the sapphire. I've tried to buff out blemishes on Fenix watches I've gone to sell and have had a hard time getting them back to flawless. I've not had the same issue on any Instinct.
That being said I'm really tempted by the new Fenix Pro. I have an inReach device I take with me for backcountry snowmobiling in the mountains and I've forgotten it a time or two. I never forget my watch and always have some extra battery with me.
I just wish I could get basically the same specs as Fenix in a non-color and highly efficient display like Instinct. The 2 Solar is my daily watch and the battery life + built in flashlight make it my almost perfect watch. I don't even care about LTE but if I could get Instinct with inReach that would be a perfect setup IMO.
Garmin does a lot of things right, but pricing is not one of them. Especially given they're moving towards subscriptions which is counterintuitive to their buyer market. I really don't want anything AI in my watch.
I found the same thing too - the instinct face gets protected while the Fenix is almost a brick and rock magnet :(
So far, I think it’s only the black Tacticals that look like they would hide more surface scratches… but I’ve never had one yet.
But, yeah - think if the Instinct 3 Solar came with Sapphire, I’d sleep better at night, so much so that it would probably be my forever watch!
well the reason its not common is because they cant charge you their subscription fee integration or something like that
The only thing that I think could be better (for me) would be a very rudimentary basemap view in addition to the existing breadcrumb trail functionality.
https://www.dcrainmaker.com/2019/06/competitor-software-inst...
my Fenix6 still doesn't work correctly, no more updates
People dropping $1000+ on a Garmin better understand that's just for a few years, not a decade
So, it is in fact worse than not getting upgrades, the software actually deteriorated over its lifecycle.
The fenix3 would be fascinating as an open-source test model
Yes!
But it seems they are getting more and more in the _smartwatch_ territory.
It took me more time than I wanted to disable any kind of notifications on my new Enduro 3. And a few weeks ago, with the latest update, I got the "morning thing" and "evening thing" enable automatically, so I had once again to get back in the settings to disable them.
Previously with the Fenix I set a watch face, activities screen and I hadn't to change a thing for years. It just worked as a watch and an activity recorder. Exactly what I want from this kind of device.
That said, I'm a distance runner and within our cohort almost none of us want to buy Fenix's anymore. Especially without MIP displays.
The Enduro series is now the traditional Fenix series.
Also this Fenix 8 Pro is not getting reviewed well by the usual people (des, ray, etc) it's not a good watch for the price. The sacrifices made for both LTE and the new display are too great.
I hate Garmin with a passion because their watches are effectively region-locked by language support, an insanely consumer-hostile move in this day. I was unable to use any features related to text or whatsapp messages because the watch shockingly could not decode messages in my native language.
Their software was also so flaky that I was woken up by a faulty vibration alert in the middle of the night multiple times during the few months I wore the Garmin Instinct Solar, and at least twice I was unable to fall back to sleep. That is, the watch was supposed to be in silent or DND mode, but the watch probably crashed or reset in the middle of the night, losing the silent or DND state, allowing an alert to go through. The sleep tracking was also very inaccurate, and sleep tracking is the single most valuable metric for me.
To this day I fantasize posting a video where I smash my Garmin watch to pieces alerting other people how bad it is. Still, the hardware was near perfect and it's hard to hate the watch itself. But because of the software issues, it was no better than a dumb watch to me. I hate Garmin the company.
A 20€ chinese smart band combined with Sleep as Android provided much more accurate sleep tracking than a 800€ Garmin.
The only 2 garmin specific features I use are (compared to what I had before):
1. LED flashlight, love always having a pretty good light on my wrist (I'm talking about the actual flashlight some Garmins have, not the "use display as a flashlight" feature) 2. GPS that does not drain phone battery 3. Looks
Everything else for me is worse than a cheap chinese smart band.
No, first time I'm hearing about it, I was talking about garmin vs Xiaomi Mi bands
Depending on your definition of “cohort”, that’s simply not true. I see plenty of late-model Fenix in the wild. And, yeah, there’s a vocal minority of folks that prefer MIPS (often based on outdated or flat wrong assumptions, like “AMOLED isn’t visible in sunlight”, which is how you know the speaker has never used an AMOLED screen).
As to the latest model, “not a good watch for the price” is a gimme when the thing costs two grand (U. S.). I’m at a loss as to what a watch might do to make it worth two grand to me.
GPS uses battery. So having a watch that can last a month, for us means it will last a couple weeks of constant running/cycling/etc.
This is in stark comparison to a smart watch.
When Garmin says that they have a watch that can last 28 days, what that really means is "it could do like 50-80 hours of continuous activity tracking" or "you can easily record a 10 hour hike, and also not be worried that the watch will be dead if you need it for emergency satellite services". That's years beyond anything Apple, Google, or Samsung can do; none of the big tech companies are remotely close to this.
I tried AMOLED once - it lasted about 3 weeks and 200 miles before I sold it.
AMOLED is visible in sunlight, yeah, but even with always-on it only brightens when you lift your wrist...which is always infuriatingly late, coming moments after I look at my wrist. And because they want to minimize that annoying latency, it's constantly blinking on and off with false positives demanding attention like a strobe light. Maybe I have poor form with trekking poles or an over-sensitive/miscalibrated IMU, but I remember one particular foggy dawn hike when was triggering with basically every step. The silent morning light and the mist off the lake should have been magical, instead they just reflected the blinky light on my wrist.
I stare at glowing, colorful screens from 9-5 and struggle with distractions that similarly demands my eyeballs in the morning and evening. When I go into the woods it's because I want to leave those screens behind, not put an ever-larger, ever-more-vibrant one on my arm.
(My wrist will probably be dead and very cold someday when the weather changes and I try to push my ultralight 40F bag to lower temps than it is capable of and couldn't send an SOS because my F6P doesn't have sat comms. You shouldn't have to wait long, it's September...jk, don't worry.)
Probably going Coros or Suunto next, Garmin has lost the plot.
I've never owned the F8 OLED, but I do have an Apple Watch Ultra 2, and the AWU2 is actually more readable than the E3/F8S in all light conditions except high-noon ultra-direct sunlight (which I'm very rarely outdoors in, because, you know, skin cancer).
I ended up returning those, and got an Instinct 3 MIPS earlier this year, which is more readable outdoors across a variety of light conditions.
they might be able to narrow the gap with Apple wrt software, but I don't think (at least in the US) Garmin will ever gain marketshare vs. the Apple Watch, especially now with the Ultra for the simple reason that Garmin just cannot offer an equivalent experience on iPhones because of Apple.
We desperately need antitrust intervention to force Apple to open up iOS to allow other smartwatches to take advantage of the same APIs that the Apple Watch does.
If that happens I think Apple will quickly find that they cannot compete on an even playing field.
I do agree that Apple should be forced to compete on a fair playing field, but I don’t think they do a good job of taking advantage of it with Apple Watch.
If Garmin’s products are so amazing why aren’t they killing it with Android users?
From other people in these comments sounds like their own software quality is holding the back.
If not being on the iPhone was truly the main problem, they’d be doing way better.
Apple watch still remains the best selling watch of all times, not just smart watch, but of all watches.
But if Garmin isn’t killing it today, opening the iPhone won’t let them kill it tomorrow.
I see lots of Apple Watches. I see some Google/Samsung watches. I don’t think I’ve seen a Garmin watch. So I don’t think it’s fair to claim Apple’s policy is the only thing holding them back from being a dominant player.
I remember when one of their products was actually quite nice, until they lost the whole team...
The battery life thing is really compelling - however I need ECG and AF monitoring and Apple lead the pack here as far as I can tell.
Fitbit seems to come close, but having multiple doctors state the need for an Apple Watch is quite the endorsement.
The passive HR monitor, sleep tracking, SpO2, etc. are all shite compared to Apple but the ECG thing should be good enough I guess.
My main selling point is that it lasts forever (20+ days), and even when the battery dies it still works like a watch for weeks. It looks like a proper watch, it has notifications so I need to look at my phone less, and it does the tracking OK enough that it's useful to check it out. They also have a BP monitor with ECG and a stethoscope that automatically recognizes some heart problems - so if you're worried about heart problems might be worth looking into.
I would really like if they could get their HR sensor/activity tracking up there with Apple but it looks like no company out there is able to get into that league.
Wha? The watch part is mechanical?
Or you mean the smart part turns itself off way before you completely run out of battery, saving some power to keep moving the hands for "weeks" ?
>When the battery level reaches 10%, you will receive a notification. At 10% you can no longer run a Respiratory Scan. When the battery reaches 0%, your watch activates power reserve mode. Only the analog clock, step, and sleep monitoring features remain available, and only for about a few days. In power reserve mode you will no longer be able to start an ECG or oxygen saturation measurement on demand via the watch display.
It only happened once or twice, I was surprised that once you charge you still see the step tracking stats when it syncs. I remember using it in this mode for over a week when I was moving and couldn't be bothered to find the charger.
It is good to know the for measuring sleep, which is not a selling point of Garmin, it's far from being as accurate as Oura. But battery life is so incredible that makes you wonder how someone could wear other expensive smart watches (e.g. Apple/Samsung) for physical activities.
> Their software has traditionally been pretty rough. That’s coming from a customer and developer. Mainly that was because they had various software platforms for various families of device, so each feature needed to be built for each family of watch separately.
The software feels like a dumb terminal from the web, it doesn't work right without an Internet connection.
[1] "Accuracy Assessment of Oura Ring Nocturnal Heart Rate and Heart Rate Variability in Comparison With Electrocardiography in Time and Frequency Domains: Comprehensive Analysis": https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8808342/
I was now thinking to purchase a Coros Pace 3.
But I must say, I wish other appliances would be as intuitive as the built in fitness tracking apps and they controls. Somehow it's just consistent, does the right thing, and works reliably. With only 5 buttons.
Looks a bit like JavaScript with some extra c++ keywords :-)
I'm missing from Garmin usage of Inertial Navigation System (INS [1]). The sensors are in the devices, accelerometers and gyroscopes. We've using them in airliners for decades (very basic INS was available with the B707, high quality from the B747/A300 onwards), in cheap car navigation (that's why you can drive through tunnels) and most smartphones (you've probably noticed that also your phone handles five kilometer long tunnels well). As far as I know, high quality INS could bring a B747 over the atlantic. My Edge has an accelermoeter and gyroscope but I see often straight lines in the mountains, in the city-center, in tunnels and garages and when the cloud coverage + trees work together. And it not just the recorded route, it is also the current speed and distance and precise turn-by-turn navigation.
Garmin, Wahoo, Karoo keep adding more of GNSS. GPS, GALILEO, BAIDU, GLONASS, GLONAS 5GHz, Multiband and ground stations (that approach failed). That improved the signal remitance somewheat but the mentioned natural conditions still interrupt or reduce that GNSS quality. Because it is external! External navigation depends on external guidance. You cannot fix that by adding more. And hostile elements figured out, that is easy to jam or spoof[2] the GNSS signals.
Using INS in combination with GNSS should work rather well on a roadbike. Usually mixing the signals from INS and GNSS depending on quality. Except where GNSS is turned off for reasons like jamming/spoofing e.g. in eastern europe. But usually INS needs only to cover a gap of 30 seconds to five minutes. INS is probably less useful on a mountainbike (vibrations and impacts) but especially in the woods GNSS fails...so maybe even here it can help. I think Garmin uses the sensors for other kind of metrics on mountainbikes already (I think the call it grit/flow?).
My smartphone handles a tunnel well. My bike-computer also should do it :)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inertial_navigation_system [2] At least GALILEO has some protection against spoofing?
PS: The integrated LTE-Modem could also benefit security in cycling. There was a sad incident during the last roadbike world-championships in switzerland and a life lost. Cycling computers detect crashes and can send SMS with coordinates but they need a smartphone (radio isn't allowed and smartphones aren't robust).
Notif is delivered by OS itself, through ANCS.
But what Garmin can do, do really well.
I want to check, but not for exercise, for AF detection. Surely no one wears a chest strap full time.