Garmin Forerunner 35 vs Amazon Halo

Well, we're pretty much all my workout gear. The risk based heart monitor to me was a major selling feature. I want to be able to learn the maximum I ...

The halo view checks a lot of the boxes. You'D want from a basic fitness tracker, especially for less than a hundred dollars, but the big question is ...

I used the quick-release wristband because I would go back and forth between my road bike. I don't think I'll ever rely on it again because this is the second time it's disconnected accidentally, and certainly the last time since there's no hope of finding it along the 10 mile trail of rock and mud.

Garmin won't be able to sell the Forerunner 35 for $200 for too long. $150 seems like a better price point. I'm sure a Forerunner 35-level watch will be selling for only $100 or so in a couple more years. The Forerunner 35 wears pretty nicely

If I had to spend $100 to get the device today I doubt I would pull the trigger. If I have to start paying for the features I like in the Halo app, forget it. I'll just get a Fitbit.

Are you a runner looking to take training to the next level, but can't afford a really pricey device? Wondering why in the world you'd even need one? I was in your shoes! As an activity tracker, the Forerunner 35 is very nice. I give it 3 stars because many of the features that a runner would use don't work, and I feel it's deceptive to sell a device with these features when they're not really usable for training. Essentially, this is a good activity tracker posing (ineffectively) as a training tool. Many reviewers mention that the Forerunner 35 isn't for "serious runners", and I took that to mean that they believe "serious runners" need all the complexity of a very expensive watch

There are a lot of other color screen fitness bands out there. You can look for them on amazon, for instance. Well, the halo view is going very compet...

I use it primarily as a device to help family at home feel comfortable with me being off grid.

The corrective exercise videos are relaxing and enjoyable. Physical therapy doctor Kelly Starrett leads you through the exercises while explaining the purpose of each move and demonstrating proper form. You perform each move twice, for about 30 seconds per round. 

I think as long as you can run comfortably at a conversational pace, your HR shouldn't matter too much. That's not to say you shouldn't strive to get better at running, but there are so many more metrics than just HR to tell you if you're on the right path. Happy running :)

Other sleep stuff:
I’m a good sleeper already, so I don’t pay a ton of attention to the sleep aid stuff they have, but my husband uses it when he can’t fall asleep even though he doesn’t wear the band! Seeing the sleep stats each morning is pretty interesting to me though, and I look them over when I eat breakfast.

No face:
I don’t like smart watches, and I don’t want a watch face.

Comfort:
Other negative things I’ve seen claim it’s bulky and has to be worn super tight or it clanks around. Absolutely not true

95 at Fitbit)(Opens in a new window) , which gives you the option to send a canned response, emoji, or voice-to-text reply.

It communicates with your phone via Bluetooth, and it should work equally well with both iPhones and Android phones. The three main band colors that will be sold are onyx (black), mineral (light blue), and rose gold (pink-ish).

While I have found getting these alerts on my wrist pretty useful, this particular feature falls short of what the Pebble offered. There's no queue or timeline for reviewing notifications as there is on the Pebble and I find I miss the ability to simply scroll back through previous alerts. BATTERY LIFE The Forerunner 35's battery life is outstanding. I get between 8 and 10 days between charges, and a full charge takes only a few hours

One of the primary drawbacks from the Active was the short battery life. Having to take off your smartwatch and charge it every day or so makes it hard to get into the habit of actually wearing the darn thing. If you don't use the Tone feature (more on that in a moment), the Halo lasts a good 3-4 days per charge. That's fine, but with no display of any sort, no GPS, and a lack of other common sensors, it seems as though Amazon's engineers should have been able to get a week out of this thing, at least

What I don't like: ------------------ Phone integration for text and call notifications is spotty. Sometimes they work and sometimes they don't. It's a nice feature when it works. The phone downloads slowly but reliably to my Moto G7 Power

I can only imagine what that does to your battery. What would be great here is a little vibraty notification on the device itself when you go negative. Some sort of subtle reminder that hey, maybe your tone isn't what you want at the moment. That would be so much more useful than hours later being told you did something wrong

The first of the three times I got up to pee the Garmin showed that my ARHR had by that time dropped to 44, indicating that even though customer service told me that ARHR is an average over the last 7 sleep periods, my ARHR when I went to bed was close to 44 - which tracks with readings of the previous night, which also dropped intranight to 44. However, last night, except for those 4-5 brief intervals, which totaled about 10 minutes across the duration of my 6:30 sleep period, the graph of my HR shows a resting pulse that ranged from 34-44, with the average for the night being about 40. Yet at the end of my sleep period my ARHR had gone back up to 45! How did customer service explain this anomaly? Apparently the device ignores any resting pulses below 40 as artifacts, and since my RP was in the 30's for about an hour and a half, and since this wasn't even counted in averaging over the night (which gave more weight to the brief periods when my RP was in the high 40s and 50s) there was no drop in my ARHR, and in fact, over the last 6 months I've only briefly ever gotten it down to 44, even though my actual RP for the night is typically around 10-42, except on the nights after intense training sessions. Despite these evident software design flaws, my overall impression of Garmin, and even of the Forerunner 35, is positive

(Doing this by body composition alone I am not sure is a good measure of health)

Also you can not stream the labs to a TV, so watching them on your phone sucks to be honest. Also the workouts in the labs you can probably find for free on youtube if you really wanted to.

I think one design improvement is to have a swap-able battery so you can charge one and have one on the band. Although this is not a huge deal for me as the charging is pretty fast but some might find it important

SUMMARY As disappointed as I am in the Apple Watch as a running watch, I'm not switching to the Garmin until they address at least the first two items under CONS above. I feel certain the CONS I mention above are purely in the software, so hopefully they'll enhance some of those capabilities in a future update. If not, maybe Garmin needs to release a Forerunner 40 that handles those features better. The higher end Garmins may already cover those complaints, but they're too expensive for a running watch and not sufficiently capable for a smart watch

I had to factory reset it after all, which did clear out any data collected since the last time it synced but fortunately everything else on my profile appears to have been restored. There was a firmware update immediately available for the Halo, and it applied successfully. I'm not sure how often it updates itself in the background (e.g