Feedback: Garmin Forerunner 10 GPS Fitness Monitor

I have one

Pros:

* Cheap

* Small, only slightly larger than a regular Timex (I have the smaller F10)

* Easy to use

* Accurate

Cons:

* Can take a while to sync, even outside under clear skies

* Mine has started to have some connection problems with the USB adapter

* Twice mine has completely eaten runs; the file just doesn't exist on the watch

* The watch itself doesn't record altitude data; you need to upload to Garmin Connect, and then export the file to get a GPX with altitude data

Overall it's been a good purchase I think.

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I bought one in spring for my first GPS watch.

I liked that it was really simple and cheap (I paid 105 with online coupon code from blog).

You can only display one type of speed at a time, i.e. instantaneous speed, overall average speed, or 1 mile split speed.

instantaneous is difficult because the speed only updates every 5 seconds, so if you are doing accelerations and trying to hit a specific pace for a specific period of time, it's tough to find the pace because the watch always lags (then you find yourself running too fast and you have to slow down, etc).

And the timer is just a simple elapsed time. There is no stopwatch or lap timer, so it's not really feasible to use for track workouts. I ended up buying a super cheap ironman watch for my track workouts (my old watch had broke, hence the upgrade to GPS).

In retrospect, I wish I had bought the next model up with more functionality. But if you asked me a year ago, I was not doing track workouts and average/split speeds would have been sufficient.

(One other complaint I've seen is the battery only lasts 5 hours, so for beginner runners they can't run marathons, but this doesn't bother me).

No problems getting satellite lock, or other functionality issues.

Also when you check out reviews, be sure to note many of them focused on the original release of the watch which only offered one speed option. They updated the firmware and added all 3 different types of speeds. But even though you have two screens to pick fields to display, you can only pick one type of speed measurement (i.e. you can't display instant speed and avg speed at the same time).

You can set your back key to manually start a new lap:

I bought one for my girlfriend about a month ago. I have the 110, and she had used it to train for a couple halves. We're both training for a marathon in the fall, so I took mine back. She seems to like it. A lot of our runs start at the same time, so I see how long it takes her to fix to satellites vs. mine, and it's pretty similar. I saw a few reviews saying it took a long time to fix, and I wonder if that's due to a few bad units. She doesn't seem to be longing for anything she had with the 110 that she doesn't with the 10. To the point about not having a lap timer, typically when you're doing a workout you're working with known distances (or fartleks where the distance isn't as important). While being able to load the workout into Garmin Connect or mapmyrun is nice, and satisfies the compulsion to have all your workouts in one place, it's not really necessary. Also, while the Garmin watches end up recording pretty damn close to what shows on a map, you may lose some accuracy with GPS watch on a track compared to a stopwatch over a known distance.

I finally bought one. It's my first GPS watch and I really like it.

It's about the size of a regular running watch, so I really like that. It gives me the basics which is all I need.

For track work I dont use the GPS function, I just use it in timing mode and go. (Why use GPS on a track? You know how far and how fast you are running.)

Having it uploaded is nice and you can go back and look things over, but for me it's all "nice to know" stuff. I'm not going to obsess on the data more than "distance covered in X time."

I'm glad I bought it. Would buy another.

jimmy fallow wrote:

You can only display one type of speed at a time, i.e. instantaneous speed, overall average speed, or 1 mile split speed.

Also when you check out reviews, be sure to note many of them focused on the original release of the watch which only offered one speed option. They updated the firmware and added all 3 different types of speeds.

This is interesting. I had borrowed a more advanced Garmin model from a friend and liked that you could see your speed at the moment, for the current split or for the whole run. I thought the Forerunner 10 did this, too, ordered it online and can only seem to see instantaneous speed. Can this be fixed?

Overall it's been a great watch, and the price point is excellent. I do think I'm relatively old-school compared with some Garmin users: all I really want is distance covered so I don't need to map runs out online to know what I covered. The speed feedback is definitely good for tempos and targeted long runs etc. I don't care much about exact info on altitude (I already know if it was hilly or not, don't care how hilly to the foot) and I can't remember the last time I checked my heart rate.

It does sometimes take a while to acquire satellites, but no longer than when I was using the higher model. I think that's just consumer GPS for you. Forces me to stretch a few seconds more than I would otherwise, so it's a built-in coach, too!

young master wrote:

This is interesting. I had borrowed a more advanced Garmin model from a friend and liked that you could see your speed at the moment, for the current split or for the whole run. I thought the Forerunner 10 did this, too, ordered it online and can only seem to see instantaneous speed. Can this be fixed?

Google is my friend:

With this update I think it's got everything I want!

Hi Uva, the Forerunner 10 is a solid watch, good for beginner runners.

The Pros are:

-small and lightweight.

-comes with some nice features (race/walk alert, virtual pacer, you can download activities to a computer) that aren't found on similarly priced watches.

-5 color choices (if you are fashionably inclined).

The Cons:

-battery life is ~5 hours. Not bad but most watches have around 8. Only an issue if you forgot to recharge it frequently.

-it doesn't support a heart rate monitor or a foot pod.

You can find out some more here:

http://athletesgps.com/garmin-forerunner-10/