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I've been rocking my Samsung Galaxy S3 Fitness Smartwatch for a few years now and it has been a bit of a love hate relationship. I really like the watch, I love the way it looks and feels, it has all the latest Smartwatch features I could want including an awesome screen, lots of downloadable Apps and even the ability to answer and take calls right on the watch via BT.
The problem I have right out of the box with the Samsung Galaxy S3 is there is no way to link an external Bluetooth heart rate strap to it in the settings so none of the installed Apps can us an external heart rate monitor, only the built in optical heart rate monitor can be used with the Samsung Galaxy S3. For some people that may be fine but for me I find built in optical heart rate monitors are very unreliable and inaccurate. Sometimes I don't even get a heart rate reading from the watch.
;)
I did find a work around that required me to use a watch face called Sporty Watch that was able to connect to external BT heart rate monitors and then record a workout and send that data to Strata where I could then sync my data with MyFitnessPal but this is a bit of a clumsy way to manage your fitness. For simple walks and other basic activity where I did not use an external heart rate monitor I would use the built in Samsung Fitness Apps with hit and miss results.
What I am saying is I could get my Samsung Galaxy S3 to work for me but there was a certain amount of work on my end to make that happen and this should really just be seamless and it's not. It can be very frustrating at times.
;)
The last straw was this past weekend when I wanted to record a bike ride and some walks only to have Apps crash constantly and lose my data and Strava decided when it did finally record a bike ride that it was not going to sycn the data anywhere...
That brings us to my decision to drop my Samsung Galaxy S3 and go with another option. I have always liked what Garmin is doing in terms of their Fitness Watches. Their focus is fitness first and being a Smartwatch second. Garmin is big into the outdoors but does support other indoor activities. Garmin also links with a ton of external Bluetooth and Ant+ sensors out of the box and what I really love about Garmin is the software. It has to be the smartest health tracking software out there mainly because it records your heart rate constantly and uses that data to figure out when you are active or not, this seems simple right but it is not a common practice with health Apps, most health Apps simply base your activity on steps which can be misleading because not all daily activity is step based and so if you're performing something that gets your heart rate up that doesn't involve a lot of steps you are missing out on those potential calories you burned.
So which Garmin Watch did I get? I decided on the Garmin Fenix 5X Sapphire since it was about half the price of Garmin's current 6 series lineup and for me it has all of the feature I need in a Fitness Smartwatch. I even got mine on sale $100 off for only $399 which is about $600 less than a similar 6 series watch from Garmin.
Once I have had some time to fully explore the Garmin Fenix 5X Sapphire I will follow up with a review with my take on it.