Garmin Forerunner 405 Wireless GPS-Enabled Sports Watch 113541 Features: Monitor your time, distance, pace, and calories with a single sport watch-personal trainer as it stores all of the data so that you can review your improvement later Switch between monitoring your speed to viewing your GPS monitor by tapping the touch bezel Don’t worry, you’ll always get great reception for your GPS thanks to the unique design provides the antenna a larger view of the sky If you have to pause, or begin a new lap, you don’t have to spend time resetting everything to the Auto Pause and Auto Lap features take care of that for you Record up to 1000 laps worth of lap history and customize your workouts, with multi-sport, advanced, and simple workout schemes to track your energy output Your best workout buddy, it’ll give you warnings when you deviate from a set pace, and alert you when you’ve reached time or distance goals Compatible with power meters so that you can view data from 3rd party ANT+Sport-enabled power meters Share your data with other Forerunner 405 users easily with the wireless transfer capabilities or automatically download it to your computer with the USB ANT Stick Specifications: Weight to dimensions: 211 ounces to 188 x 278 x 0646 inches Barometric altimeter: no Display size diameter: 106 inches Battery to battery life: rechargeable lithium-ion to 2 weeks (power save mode); 8 hours (training mode) Waypoints to routes: 100 to 0
Customer Review: Works great, but has four negatives
I have been using this for awhile now and am posting this review of the Forerunner 405 in Black. Mine came with the heart rate monitor, the ANT+ USB stick, and the charger.
First the negatives:
1) the watch band may be uncomfortable for those with small wrists. The inch above and below the face are hard and inflexible. For most people, the fit will be acceptable. For those with thin or very thick wrists, the band will not fit comfortably. I would highly recommend you try this on in person before purchasing. My wife is a normal sized female and finds the band acceptable, but just barely so.
2) The altitude is inaccurate. It uses GPS to tell you the altitude, and that is used to measure % grade increases and decreases, and a handful of other measurements. I can only say that it is inaccurate - sometimes very inaccurate - to the point the information based on altitude is useless. It seems many others have found this same issue to be a problem. For example, I am running up a 1/2 mile long hill and a couple of minutes into the hill it still says the current grade is -2%. That can’t be correct.
3) The battery life is limited. The stats say the battery will last 8 hours with the GPS on. That is probably just about correct. Overnight, without the GPS on, or any activity at all, it loses about 30% of its charge. This means that you always need to keep the charger with you - even when traveling and competing in early morning races.
4) Why is this not waterproof? It just seems silly that they couldn’t give this a better waterproof rating. It is something like one meter for 30 minutes - swimming is not advised. Come on! One nice route I run has me end at the beach and I love to go for a dip at the end. A sport watch should be waterproof to at least 100 feet. Enough said.
The positives:
1) This is completely customizable. There are four customizable screens of information with three items available on each screen. You can choose exactly what you want and where you want it.
2) The technical glitches encountered by some were not experienced by me. I was able to load the software from the website and use all of the functions without issue on my XP SP2 computer.
3) The maping and statistical software on the computer end are really cool! I especially like the playback feature that tracks you along the map while providing all of your stats (and you can select which stats are shown).
4) The watch does not have maps and does not work like the GPS in your car. That said, you can load a “course” (need a fair amount of technical know-how to do this) and the watch will point you in the correct direction. It will also always point you back to the start of your run (as the crow flies). This is useful when running in parks and the like where you can get a bit disoriented on the trails.
Customer Review: Works great, good support, great to track progress…
I find this to work pretty well, it’s accurate enough. The HRM works well.
My wife has a Forerunner 201. In contrast this is smaller, which is nice, tho not small enough for me to wear daily. The 201 has a more traditional GPS map/track page, which this lacks. Given the screen size, I’m not sure it would be useful.
Compared to my past Polar HRM’s this is SO much easier to use. With the Polar I’d often not use the advanced features without looking back at the manual. The Garmin is really easy to use.
The touch wheel hasn’t been a problem for me yet.
The Ant+ upload is also fantastic. Compared to the polar sonic upload and their SW this just seems to work better. I’d suggest keeping records both in Garmin TC and Garmin Connect. TC has more detail and allows more features. But it’s harder to use. Connect is more user friendly.
Garmin support has answered all my questions within less than 24hr. Most faster.
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