The map of the tracked ride is not included, just a strange Garmin visual, so I found myself sharing the rides that I had tracked on Strava through that app, and not through the Garmin Connect. You can share the tracked rides on social media through the Garmin Connect smartphone app, but Garmin has put little effort to make the sharing a nice experience. I tracked a lot of MTB rides and a number of mountain hikes and that worked really well. Alternatively you could track your stroke count and rate to measure your effort. So it proved to be slightly useless for this kind of swimming. The GPS tracking really seems to get confused by the water somehow: starting the taking of distance quite late, and continuing count long after you have stopped. There is an exception, I ran in to, though and that is for the tracking of open water swimming. As you would expect from a device by GPS this tracking is really spot on. It will track an amazing amount of data points, mainly based on gps data collected through the GPS/Glonass antennae built into the steel watch frame. I have no clue why they would use the term “app” for a preprogrammed setting for Running, Swimming or MTB but besides that these settings work fairly well. You can track a lot of different sports activities, a number of which are preprogrammed as “apps” on the watch. It must be set a separate chest strap still, generally is the most accurate monitoring system. Moreover, many fitness trackers now enable heart rate tracking through the device itself, no separate sensor needed, a feature I hoped the Fenix would have. But I did not have one available to test. You can connect the watch to a heart rate monitor that would add a lot of daily fitness and activity information to use. Fitness or workouts that don’t take you anywhere as far as steps are concerned, will not been tracked. Unfortunately that is about all it tracks as far as your general activity goes. Distance traveled on a bike for example, is also tracked as sites taken. It feedbacks you on the level of activity based on the steps you have taken during the day.

Shoddy workmanship is certainly not a problem with the Fenix, it is a very well constructed watch, with premium materials, and even the watch face has yet to show a single scratch.Īnd as a fitness tracker it works ok. A pity though that the Fuelband has screws that rusted and batteries that leaked. And having a sedentary job does’t help getting you active enough. Because the foundation of my level of fitness is exactly that. I was interested in the ability to “quantify myself” quite early on and loved the way the Fuelband helped me become conscious of my level of activity (or inactivity) on a day to day basis.

One of the first fitness trackers I wore was the now discontinued Nike Fuelband.

Garmin basecamp software review