When judging the Garmin Fenix 5, it’s best to compare it with similar models offered by Garmin. Check out the table below to easily compare products and make your decision. He oversees all evergreen content and oversees the Homes, Smart Home, and Fitness/Wearables categories for the site. In his spare garmin fenix 5 time, he also tests out the latest drones, electric scooters, and smart home gadgets, such as video doorbells. Before his tenure at Tom’s Guide, he was the Reviews Editor for Laptop Magazine, a reporter at Fast Company, the Times of Trenton, and, many eons back, an intern at George magazine.
This extra brightness helps to make the screen more visible, especially when viewed from an angle. Next up, the next piece here is Satellite features via Garmin inReach-like functionality, when out of cellular range. The call will then complete using the microphone/speaker on your watch, to their Messenger app. Unlike text messages, for calls, the other person needs to have the Messenger app on their phone. In this case, the voice call quality was good enough, even on 2/5 bars of LTE.
- Still, TomTom’s watch lacks the customizable faces, weather tracking and smartphone notifications that the fenix 5 offers.
- To take watch faces one step further, fēnix 5 watches are compatible with the Face It app, so users can set their favorite photo as their watch face.
- Notifications looked good on its display, offering enough detail for me to decide whether to pick up my phone or not, without detracting from the Fenix 5’s premium feel and active bent.
- It’s always been looked at as the display equivalent of dual-frequency GPS, in terms of ‘solving’ some of the AMOLED battery concerns.
- For those people, a wearable must be built like a proverbial outhouse, measure every activity, statistic and variable known to humankind, and look ruddy good doing it.
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The fēnix 5, 5S and 5X are announcing in conjunction with the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Nev., and will be showcased at the Garmin booth #35811. Additionally, fēnix 5S has been named a CES 2017 Innovation Awards Honoree in the wearable technologies category. Not only is ithighly dependable but you get a bunch of features that will make your fitnessjourney easier than ever, and make achieving your goals a breeze. If your activities are more confined to running or biking, the much less expensive TomTom Spark Cardio 3 or Garmin Forerunner 235 would be better suited to your needs.
The price and product strategy are telling
Garmin has eschewed touch screens in favor of a series of buttons on either side of the display. While not as newfangled as touchscreen-only smartphones, I like this the sensibility. When you have sweaty or gloved hands, It’s a lot simpler to navigate an interface with buttons. Built tough, the fenix 5 is also water-resistant to 100 meters, compared to just 40 meters for the TomTom Adventurer. Unless you’re an Ironman, wearing the Fenix 5 means knowing you’ll never truly test its full feature set.
Garmin Fenix 8 vs Garmin Fenix 8 Pro: design and display
While there’s nothing wrong with how the TomTom looks, it feels a bit out of place if you’re wearing it in a more formal setting. Why you can trust Tom’s GuideOur writers and editors spend hours analyzing and reviewing products, services, and apps to help find what’s best for you. This is a five-star product, then, but one that should, arguably, only be bought by those who eat triathlons for breakfast – or those who don’t mind paying big bucks for the smartest, and smartest-looking, multisports watch around. Thing is, using the Fenix 5 as a standard daily tracker is a bit like flying all the way to Argentina just to get a Burger King.
With these features, users can enter how far they’d like to run or ride, and their watch will suggest appropriate courses to choose from. During an activity, easy-to-read guidance cues for upcoming turns are displayed as banners on the watch so users are always aware of their route. Additionally, fēnix 5X users can use the Around Me map mode to see different points of interest, waypoints and other map objects within the user’s range to help users be more aware of their surroundings.
Garmin Fenix 8 vs Garmin Fenix 8 Pro: price
I also have some pre-canned messages I’ve added to it, for use across my inReach devices. To begin, getting things set up requires setting up an account within Garmin’s inReach platform. This gives you 30 days free, after which it is $9.99/month for unlimited LTE stuffs, and emergency-only Satellite bits. Beyond that, there are additional fees for satellite check-ins/texts that I’ll cover below (or, a higher-priced plan). Finally, getting to thickness, things are definitely thicker and bulkier. Building a MicroLED watch is actually similar to MIP watches in that they have to bond a touchscreen layer on top of the display, whereas in AMOLED, it’s all built into a single panel.
It has every feature we can imagine in a GPS/training watch, and its feature set is essentially identical to that of our Editor’s Choice, the Forerunner 935. The 51mm MicroLED model, specifically, features a titanium case and bezel, a scratch-resistant sapphire crystal lens, and a dive-rated case with leakproof inductive buttons. Aside from that display change, it looks identical to the Fenix 8 51mm. Yet, unlike that watch, this is only available in one version (which features a gray case, black band with orange sensor guard). Nonetheless, with the Fenix 8, this is specifically coming to the model variant called “MicroLED”, and only in the 51mm variant.
Rugged Design
- Admittedly, the various functions of the individual buttons (there are five) will take a little while to get used to – in particular, what each one does in specific menu and activity situations.
- In fact, they feel like Garmin kept things very much under control, as if a conscious decision was made to offer basic integration of notifications and productivity features, without over-complicating the situation.
- Too often, I pressed this icon trying to access settings for the fenix 5.
- The standard Fenix 8 doesn’t offer any of these features, so you have to carry your phone or another device with you if you need connectivity.
- However, if you spend every weekend in the woods, on a mountain or in the ocean, the fenix 5 could be just what you need.
These include Running Tolerance, Step Speed Loss, and Evening Report, and debuted on the Forerunner 970 and were subsequently rolled out to the Fenix 8 and Venu X1 just last week. The new inReach and LTE combination, meanwhile, has the potential to turn the Fenix 8 Pro into a powerful standalone communication device for adventurers, enabling messaging, calls, and emergency SOS, both on and off the grid. Please logout and then login again, you will then be prompted to enter your display name.
Satellite Connectivity Features:
Nick Harris-Fry is an experienced health and fitness journalist, writing professionally since 2012. He spent nine years working on the Coach magazine and website before moving to the fitness team at Tom’s Guide in 2024. Nick is a keen runner and also the founder of YouTube channel The Run Testers, which specialises in reviewing running shoes, watches, headphones and other gear. The standard Fenix 8 doesn’t offer any of these features, so you have to carry your phone or another device with you if you need connectivity.
In our survey of the market for a GPS training watch, this compatibility was a significant advantage. If you don’t already have brand loyalty, however, the gap narrows. The Ambit Peak models are about equal to the Fenix in terms of interface.
For a fully featured, reasonably sized GPS watch, the Fenix 5’s battery endurance is remarkably good. In day-to-day use, with occasional normal-length (1-2 hours) training sessions, we have been able to go just under a week between charges. When we tracked a continuous GPS activity until the battery died, the Fenix 5 lasted just over 20 hours — impressive, but again, slightly less impressive than the Forerunner 935, which lasted over 21 hours. If you’re willingto invest a decent amount of cash into a stylish watch, and you’re serious aboutmonitoring your performance and having a great battery life, why not choose afitness-tracking smartwatch like the Garmin Fenix 5?
LTE Cellular Connectivity:
In terms of wearables, Garmin is making a massive stride forward for the industry. Sure, everyone else has had cellular connectivity for years, and now Garmin is finally joining that camp on their flagship devices. But more critically, Garmin is leading the way on satellite messaging & connectivity. Still, if you’re outside cellular range (or Bluetooth range to your phone), then when you go to send a text message from the watch, it’ll prompt you to go into satellite mode. This will first have you double-check the compass, which is then leveraged to point towards the right satellite location.
Too often, I pressed this icon trying to access settings for the fenix 5. As with the running, my ski runs were viewable on the watch itself, as were details such as elevation loss and gain and the length, speed and time of individual runs. I also took the fenix 5 for a long weekend skiing in Banff, Canada, where the watch dutifully tracked my runs around Lake Louise and Sunshine Village. Even high up in the Canadian Rockies, the fenix 5 was quick to acquire a GPS signal, and smart enough to know when one run ended and another began. For each run that you do, you get a training effect, which gives you a score for both aerobic and anaerobic activity.
In extensive use of both comparably featured devices, we found the battery life of the Fenix 5 to be just a little better than the Suunto Ambit3 Peak. This is especially notable considering that the Garmin is smaller and has the optical heart rate sensor working all the time. Comparison to all the other devices is inappropriate, as the rest have considerably fewer features. The $599 fenix 5S is the smallest and lightest of the three Garmin watches, at 1.7 inches in diameter and 2.4 ounces in weight. It also has a smaller, 1.1-inch display with a resolution of 218 x 218 pixels and the shortest battery life, at up to nine days in smartwatch mode and up to 14 hours in GPS mode.