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I broke down last week and ordered a Garmin Forerunner 405 (the black watch above).  I’m not quite sure what to think of it yet. The 405 definitely looks a lot less dorky than my trusty 305 (red one above), but the 405 has its share of quirks and limitations.

Pros

• While still bulkier than the average watch, the 405 can actually be worn while not working out and people won’t wonder why you have a brick with an LCD strapped to your wrist
• The wireless syncing is neat (sent workouts to computer when I set it on my desk and even did a firmware upgrade that way)
• A few new options (like showing a graph of your heart rate)

Cons

• They definitely had to make some usability trade-offs to ensure the battery life isn’t completely horrible when in normal watch mode
• You perform many functions on the watch by touching the bezel (like an iPod).  Unfortunately like an iPod, you can’t be wearing gloves.
• The elevation accuracy appears to be much worse than the 305
• You have to push the ‘start/stop’ and ‘lap/reset’ buttons at the same time to lock the bezel.  I can see myself easily dorking this up during an event and either stopping the watch or adding an inadvertent lap
• I had a weird lock-up occur and had to dork with the watch for a few minutes to get it to come back to life

After uploading data tonight on the 405, I got a notice that a new firmware update was available and installed it.  Hopefully that will fix some of the quirks.

Note that even though the 405 looks less dorky, I am sure I looked like a complete tool tonight when I wore both of the the watches while running.  I lucked out in that it was almost completely dark out by the time I ran, thus hiding my gadgetry shame.  I did have a real goal though, I wanted to see how close the two devices would be for my run.  From a distance measured perspective, they were pretty darn close (and I’m sure I added a second or so on stopping and starting since I couldn’t hit them both at the same exact time).

Garmin 305: 5.03 miles (auto-laps of  8:00, 7:51, 7:40, 7:13, 7:03, :08)

Garmin 405: 5.02 miles (auto-laps of 8:02, 7:50. 7:42, 7:12, 7:03, :07)

(Side note, best run in months!)

From an elevation perspective, the 405 was chock full of fail.  It showed about 3 times the elevation variation that the 305 had (and the 305 isn’t super accurate elevation-wise to begin with).  I really hope Garmin is able to update the firmware to deal with the elevation better (or at least at their MB gravity service to Garmin’s Connect service).

Update: To be clear, if I didn’t already have a perfectly functioning device, I think an argument could be made for the 405.  If you do already have a 305 that works fine, it is hard to make the case for the 405 except out of love for gadgetry.

 

 

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 30th, 2008 at 2:36 am and is filed under fitness, running, shopping, technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.