Garmin Fenix 7 Sapphire Solar 47 mm, Slate Grey/Black (010-02540-21)

Product Information

The Garmin Fenix 7 will integrate with your smartphone and act as an auxiliary device in the same way as other less sport-orientated wearables, such as the Apple Watch. Watches in the Fenix 7 line have transflective memory-in-pixel (MiP) displays, while the Garmin Epix has a color AMOLED screen.

But, inversely, everyone’s 2-5% features are different. I use sports features every day that others never use, and vice versa. It’s fundamentally why they lead this category. And perhaps more importantly, over the last few years the software quality has increased substantially, largely through open firmware beta programs that go on for months. As expected, the Fenix 7’s optical heart-rate monitor lags behind the chest belt for short bursts of intense activity, and its performance for maximum heart rate isn’t quite as good, either, with a difference of 4.3% over those same runs. It’s certainly good enough for most workouts, however. While not perfect, Garmin has continued to make strides here, and I find generally good correlation in most cases between my perceived energy levels and what it estimates. Just because I went to sleep, doesn’t mean I’ll automatically wake up with 100% Body Battery. In fact, that’s exceptionally rare. Sleep quality will drive how much body battery you wake up with. The scenarios I find it tends to have trouble with are exceptionally hard/long days, or days with exceptionally poor sleep. It’ll usually estimate correctly on the poor sleep, but then has challenges figuring out how to give you a crap score, and then still give you an even crappier score by the end of the day. You can’t go below zero. Still, I think at that point both you and the device are aware of the situation: You feel like crap. Must Read: Lumen Review – the Fat & Carb Metabolism Burn Monitor links to your Fenix Garmin Fēnix 7 – What’s New?

Garmin Fenix 7 Sapphire Solar GPS smartwatch details and specifications

I will say that while the colour screen helps highlight detail on the maps and enables you to see which heart rate zone you are in at a glance, I did find it slightly less clear than the monochrome display on the Garmin Instinct 2. Battery life and solar charging Another of the key improvements for the Fenix 7 is battery life, which has been boosted across the board compared with the Fenix 6 series. The screen size doesn’t hinder following routes a great deal, though, with the screen’s clarity and the turn-by-turn helping you discern which way to go. Undoubtedly, Garmin will eventually come out with an LTE Fenix/Epix series. Where that’s just an Epix LTE, an Epix Plus LTE, or down the road in a Fenix 8 or Epix V3 (or whatever they call it). I don’t know, but as you’ll see – what’s here today is undeniably cool. But it’s also hard to reconcile this missing bit with one’s purchasing considerations.

was the original fenix size until the fenix 5 redefined it as the 5X size. The f5 being smaller was a big marketing feature but it also messed up the RF — you may recall Stryd dropout and other accessories not working. The motherboard is connected by pins to the bezel which is part of the antenna system. They used to talk about the EXO antenna design and the diameter of the antenna was tuned for GPS reception. Only Sapphire models have the dual- frequency GNSS reception from the Airoha chip (MediaTek). All models have dual- constellation but that’s always been the case. Perhaps non-Sapphire models retain the Sony chip? (Edit: dc rainmaker sources confirm only Airoha, as expected) The world of fitness wearables is a complicated, varied place with products aimed at users of all stripes. If there’s any watch that appeals to everyone, however, it’s the Garmin Fenix 7. At first glance, the watches in the Garmin Fenix 7 line look very similar to the Garmin Epix. Both are chunky and rugged, with metal-fronted resin cases. There are five physical buttons, with a metal guard around the start button on the top right to protect it from damage and accidental presses I use TrainingPeaks LT2 estimate (not Garmin’s) and the Joe Friel zone calculations, not Garmin’s. I have decided that Garmin is much better at collecting data than giving training advice. I think Polar is better as a first party but TP is the gold standard, unless you are going down the rabbit hole of Golden Cheetah and Kubios.Notably absent though is there’s no wrist-based running power like COROS and Polar have. If you want running power, you’ll need some sort of external sensor – either from a 3rd party (Stryd), or paired with Garmin’s HRM-RUN, HRM-TRI, HRM-PRO, or RD-Pod units – for Garmin’s own running power data field. Nothing has changed there. I appreciate the technology behind GPS, I realize the problems with overpasses, tunnels, canyons and the accuracy of maps. But you cannot blame overpasses, maps, the weather if other watches are consistently more accurate. If you were to go out with a running group and your F6 is the only watch that shows the problem you question why. So you look into it and find out there are a lot of people unhappy with the F6. It is an expensive watch so as you would appreciate it is somewhat unacceptable that it should be less accurate than a cheaper watch, especially other cheaper Garmin watches. If other watches are always more accurate then do we assume the F6 either has a defect or that it just was not designed very well?