Make Me a Marvelous Multi Sport Watch
I am open to any sponsorship or quality control opportunities available for multisport watches.
Disclaimer: None of the watches below were provided to me by a company to review. They were purchased by myself and used in my own training.
I kill Multi Sport Watches. I have a long history of killing them. I know there are some more expensive and probably better quality watches but I’m not made of money so struggle to justify the cost. To tell you the truth, I’m not sure spending big money would get me much further.
Don’t get me wrong, I take care of them. I just use them a real lot and it seems, use them to death.
Not all of them died, some of them just couldn’t keep up. Here is my honor role over the past 5 years.
This post was writen by Vince Sesto, a health and endurance entusiaste who writes for Tri Swim Coach, RunningHeroesAU and Open Water Magazine
Timex Sports Watch
I still have this watch. It was the first one I bought. I didn’t have much money at the time and don’t tell Timex, but I was able to get it for $32 on ebay. To tell you the truth it has been the best value for money out of any watch I have bought over the past 5 years. It basically only has time and stopwatch functions. No GPS, heart rate, etc. But having said that, I did my first IRONMAN this year with it.
There was no way I was going to be detracted by heart rate, or power meters, I just raced by feel and smashed it. To tell you the truth, there would be nothing more detracting than my watch loosing power towards the end of a race.
Garmin 310X
It promised so much but delivered so little. When I returned it, I at least got the satisfaction in having Garmin change their web page to show that it doesn’t allow you to track open water swimming distance. The GPS gets messed up each time you put your arm in the water, like many other GPS watches. You could attach it to your googles strap, but the simple fact was this watch was just not very good.
It tool ages to connect to a satellite and when it did there was no consistency in the distance you were running. I have met a few people who have owned one, but none have been happy with it.
Soleus GPS Sports Watch
Was it bad, it was ok, it just wasn’t great. The interface with my PC felt like it was made in the early 2000’s, and the GPS would take an eternity to connect. As well as feeling amazingly average, it couldn’t really track any multi sport activity so it was difficult to justify but the cost was very cheap compared to similar watches.
Garmin Swim
Yep, killed this watch too. I had a Garmin Swim to track all my pool time, which I know can seem counter intuitive as it means having numerous watches, but it seemed to late for that. The Garmin Swim did a great job though of tracking my laps and distance in the pool and did it a lot better than any GPS Mutlisport watches, and I have since you not found one that will work well in open water as well as in the pool. It was nice having your weekly total presented to you when you look at your watch.
At the end of the day, I only got two years of life out of it as it simply stopped saving data. It would track my progress for the training session, it would no longer save my sessions and it didn’t matter how many batteries I changed or resets I performed, the watch was screwed. The thing is, I always wanted a swim watch where I could simply start and then forget, only needing to stop it when my training session was over. No messing around with pausing when I wasn’t swimming or setting drill timers…AGH!! One day maybe.
Megellan Switch
To tell you the truth, this has been the watch I have defaulted back to when ever the watch I was using died. I remember buying it cause it was pretty cheap, but it actually did quite a bit for the cost. The configuration and operation of the watch was a little overly complex, including trying to use it for a full triathlon, but it would work happily training outdoor when swimming, biking or running.
Battery life was not very good, there was no heart rate monitor and I needed to manually transfer data to Strava as Magellan refused to have software compatible with Linux or Chromebook. The GPS was a little crap, and would drop out whenever I went under a tree.
TomTom Multi Sport
This was a great watch. Honestly…but it died.
I got a good 18 months use out of it and trained for my first IRONMAN, which included 20 hour training weeks with 6 hour rides at some points. The GPS worked well and was consistent, and connected to a satellite faster than any other GPS watch I have used before. It was comfortable and smaller than other watches and had a great interface was easy to use. I was wearing it when I got hit by a car out riding one day, and it even noticed I was not moving for a while and stopped the session for me.
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Once again had a lot of trouble in the pool, it would miss laps as I swam, and it’s multi sport setting for triathlon races, grouped all legs as the same sport. In the end, the watch simply started to get funky…heal itself, work for a few more weeks, then die. Sad, very sad.
Polar M400
Meh…is about all I have to say about this watch. It was really nice to wear as a day to day watch and was a complete activity tracker. The functionality was a little limited though. The interesting thing is it seems like it had the functionality but lacked the software to bring it all together. Something makes me feel like this was done on purpose by Polar to try and get people to upgrade to a more expensive watch. For example, the watch could count stride and cadence, but was not able to use this during treadmill training. I simply upgraded to a cheaper more feature rich watch.
Suunto Ambit3 Sports
The price came down a lot and was too good to parse up. I have never had the need to customize my watch, but the Ambit3 gives you and unprecedented ability to customize and even comes with the ability to script and program the watch functions…A real shame is the documentation is very limited, which I think stops the ecosystem from growing as much as it should. The Suunto movescount website you download your data to also has a great feature that you can create a video of your workouts.
The interface is a little confusing but think this could be to try and squeeze in all the functionality. It is very big and bulky and found it really easy to scratch the screen.
FitBit Flex2
How does it know I am cycling? That’s just how good it is. This tiny little “bit”, seems to be able to pick up so much. Its accelerometer seems to be so sensitive, that it is able to pick up so much from riding a bike to swimming. It allows you to set notifications and alarms and the dashboard is really nice.
Even though it picks up cycling and running, it doesn’t actually present the distance you have run or cycled, but it does for swimming. It has not screen and the only information you are able to receive is from 5 tiny lights and vibrations. It also doesn’t do treadmill running, but does a great job of sleep tracking and is very inconspicuous.
Wish List
Lets get a wishlist of all the features we need to have a great multisport watch:
- Heart rate monitor, possibly built in as an optical sensor.
- Definite segregation between multi sport, sports.
- Ability customize, possibly even program with relevant documentation to do so.
- Open water swim tracking.
- Pool swimming with the ability to just track the training session with automatic stopping when you stop…and please tracking of drills.
- Treadmill running, this can’t be difficult?
- Connection to both Bluetooth and Ant.
- Clear and concise visual interface which can be customized.
- Batter life to run at least for 15 hours.
- Cost less than $400 AU
- Nice, usable dashboard…Garmin, I’m looking at you.
