Apple has just announced its Apple Watch-related updates that’ll be coming as part of WatchOS 27 later this year. As a quick refresher, Apple has changed their operating system naming (e.g. iOS, WatchOS, iPadOS, etc…) to match the year upcoming (2027 for next year, like car models). These platforms were announced today at Apple’s Annual WWDC event in San Francisco (Worldwide Developer Conference), and are available immediately in early access private beta to 3rd party Apple developers. Remember, this event isn’t (nor has ever been) about announcing all the new Apple Watch features that’ll come in September. On average, about 30-50% of those new features don’t actually announce until Apple’s September event.

In any case, typically in early-mid July we see Apple release it to public beta, when anyone can download it. Finally, in September, after Apple’s annual announcement event of new phones and watches, it’ll go to final release state, and be made available to both new and existing devices. In the case of iOS, that’s iPhone 11 and newer, and in the case of Apple Watch that’s Apple Watch Series 9 and newer, Apple Watch Ultra 2 & Ultra 3, and Apple Watch SE3. That’s a notable shift to exclude Apple Watch Ultra 1 (2022), Series 9 (2023), and SE2 (2022). [Note: Apple’s materials previously said Series 10 and higher, that’s being corrected, it should Series 9 and higher.]

With that backstory, this year was expected to be pretty low-key for Apple Watch-related WWDC announcements. In fact, if we look at Apple’s platform announcements overall, they lean very heavily on improvements to existing features. Many of them were performance-related or privacy-related. And of course, lots of AI-related features that don’t really apply to Apple Watch (at least at this point/time).

In this post, I’ll quickly cover all the new features, but expect more hands-on details in the July timeframe (or whenever the public beta release), where undoubtedly we’ll find more things than Apple has announced in their keynote (usually only a handful of things make it to the keynote).

What’s New in iOS for Fitness/Sports/Health:

Now, as always with watchOS, much of it starts first on iOS (the phone app), to support many of the new watch features. So, there are a number of smaller things coming to iOS that support the watchOS features. They are as follows (in Health, Fitness, and Fitness+ apps):

– Added irregular cycle tracking
– Added Perimenopause and menopause symptom logging in the Health app
– Added Perimenopause and menopause education in the Health app
– Added Fitness+ workouts for perimenopause and menopause
– Added Sort by completed Fitness+ workouts
– Added Support for timezone changes in Sleep
– Faster data updates in Health App
– Synced step count in the Health and Fitness apps

Here you can see the new features related to irregular cycling tracking, perimenopause, and menopause tracking in Apple Health:

Beyond this, there’s a whole slate of Siri-related improvements that are on your phone, a small sliver of which is accessible to the watch. I won’t dive into all those here, since they’re more general than sports/fitness/health related. Do note though that the revamped Siri AI won’t be available in the EU at launch however. When and what things look like is fuzzy there.

What’s New in WatchOS:

Next, let’s look at the list of WatchOS-related items, coming to WatchOS27 specifically.

– Workout Buddy no longer requires your phone with you (this is a big one!)
– Better battery efficiency on Apple Watch (though, this is undefined)
– New dedicated Siri app on the wrist
– New Dynamic app grid in watchOS (including direct Siri Support)
– Added single tap gesture WatchOS to open Smart Stack
– Added cycle tracking deviation alerts on WatchOS
– Improved distance accuracy during treadmill runs/walks
– More accurate step tracking on Apple Watch
– Improved Wi-Fi connectivity in watchOS
– Consolidated Find My app in watchOS
– Faster app extension launch in watchOS
– Siri improvements in WatchOS (tied to tons of Siri AI improvements on iOS)
– New Smart Stack suggestions in watchOS
– Faster media/music playback in watchOS
– View card balance in Wallet on WatchOS
– Guest Key in WatchOS
– Transit and ID cards in Smart Stack in WatchOS
– Redesigned settings in the Apple Watch app
– Adding Workout Buddy in Spanish
– Adding new insights in Workout Buddy
– Adds new Workout Zones API
– Adds new Menopause API

As you can see, a whole slate of very minor changes, mostly small improvements. Here’s a look at the Dynamic Home Grid, which basically acts like a memory for your most recent apps on WatchOS (similar to what we’ve had on iOS for years). You’ll press the Digital Crown to see this, and it’ll show up to 5 apps.

However, the biggest one is probably that Workout Buddy no longer requires your phone to be with you. Up till now, it required both your phone be with you, but also have connectivity. This appears to get rid of at least the tethered phone requirement.

Likewise, Workout Buddy is now in Spanish, as well as adding more insights. Hopefully, those extra insights will also come with improved accuracy of said insights (it often still makes up things for me).

Next, there’s the new dedicated Siri App, where you can re-visit your conversations directly from the wrist (even ones started on the phone):

Likewise, there’s more details now coming from Siri on the wrist as well, with the updated Apple Siri Intelligence.

And here’s an example of cycling tracking deviation alerts on WatchOS27:

So much so that Apple didn’t even have a section covering WatchOS. Instead, these updates were sprinkled throughout the presentation in other places. I can’t remember the last time Apple didn’t have a section about WatchOS within the presentation…it’s been a long while!

Wrap-Up:

Obviously, if you were waiting for a big WatchOS update, this will probably feel pretty disappointing. I don’t think anyone would really deny that. But at the same time, as the saying goes: Don’t count your chickens before they hatch. In this case, these chickens don’t actually hatch until mid-late September, in conjunction with new devices. It’s at that time we’ll find out what other new WatchOS features Apple is working on, just like we always find out about other new WatchOS features during that September event.

Likewise, the exclusion of Apple Watch Series 8 (2022), Apple Watch Ultra 1, and Apple Watch SE2 (also announced in 2022) will probably be unexpected, especially since Apple is actually including iPhone’s all the way back to iPhone 11 (2019). I would have expected both of those watches to remain in for another year, so perhaps there’s something else coming later in September to WatchOS requiring more power that’s justifying that transition. Again, we’ll have to see. [Note: Apple’s materials previously said Series 10 and higher, that’s being corrected, it should Series 9 and higher.]

Otherwise, stay tuned for me poking at the new offline Workout Buddy bits, once they become public beta in July. I use the Apple Watch every day, and will load the beta later tonight to start seeing how those pieces work.

With that – thanks for reading!

This was the review you didn’t know you needed. But then again, neither did I till I saw a Lego set that identically matched my road bike. Thus, I did what all rational cyclists did: Buy more cycling-related things I probably didn’t need.

The Lego Icons Road Bike set officially started shipping about a week ago, though I ordered it about a month ago. It’s priced at $129USD/119EUR, which is sorta in the lower-mid range of some of Lego’s fancier ‘Icons’ sets, that are targeted more at adults than kids. Or more specifically, adults with expendable income…just like most fancy cycling gear.

What’s notable here, though, is that unlike many of Lego’s other Icons sets, there isn’t a brand partnership associated with this one. Unlike sets with Land Rover, Ferrari, or Star Wars. This isn’t a Canyon-branded bike, or a Trek one, or a Specialized one. Instead, it just a red road bike. Despite having a Canyon red road bike, I kinda appreciate the generic aspect here. Had it been a model of a specific other brand of bike that I didn’t own, I probably wouldn’t have bought it. And given the somewhat geographic attachment that many cyclists have to a certain bike brands (e.g. Europeans often to European branded bikes, Americans often to American bike brands, etc…sometimes simply because of availability/support), their decision here has some rational.

In any case, let’s get into things!

In The Box:

Inside the box, there are 8 bags of parts, with many of the bags having secondary, smaller bags (of smaller parts) inside them. In addition, there are two tires floating in the box, plus the manual:

In total, Lego says there are 1,015 pieces in there. Obviously, I’m not about to count them – so we’ll just take their word for it. Likewise, unlike a typical unboxing photo, I’m not going to perfectly line up each and every one of the 1,015 parts for a components shot. Else, this review would never get done.

Building It:

In my case, I didn’t take photos along the way during the build itself, but rather, videoed it from a bunch of different angles for the video at the top of the page. I then consolidated this into various tidbits that I thought were interesting during the video.

Overall, this took me a little under 3 hours to build, but as usual with most things that I film/shoot, it’s going to take me a bit longer to ensure camera angles are correct/etc. I also stopped for lunch briefly within that, and was watching some YouTube off to the side. Point being, a focused builder could probably knock this out under 2 hours.

Essentially, you build the bike from rear to front, in this order:

1) Rear trainer/stand
2) Rear wheel
3) Chainstay/Seatpost region
4) Downtube & Toptube
5) Front Fork/Headset
6) Front wheel
7) Handlebar Assembly
8) Water bottle & Rear Light

I think by far the most impressive part to build was actually the wheels. It uses a carbon-looking wheel segment piece that is rotated 180* each segment you build, which then ensures when you attach the spokes, they form a separated/split pattern such that they go to the outer rims of the wheel/rim, rather than aligned on the center. It’s super clever.

The first few pieces you do of the wheel might feel a bit confusing (and error-prone), but once you get cooking, it all works out. Plus, it’s kinda impossible to do wrong, because you’ll run out of pieces if you do it wrong (flipped order). In fact, I’d say the only portion of the entire 227-page build manual that’s a bit wonky is attaching the spokes to the wheel hub. Specifically, the way you position a very small plate in the center, has to be done a certain way, else some number of steps later it’ll all fail. The manual does show a correct/incorrect pop-out box, but even then, the nuances of that is mostly impossible to tell (until you fail later). I just sorta got lucky the first time, and then realized what it was trying to say the second wheel.

In any case, overall, the entire build was pretty straightforward. I didn’t have any “oh fudge, I need to totally rebuild everything” moments due to misunderstanding some piece 30 steps prior.

The manual also highlighted a number of both new-to-Lego pieces (such as the crankset), as well as old-to-Lego recycling (such as the handlebar drops are actually dragon horns from many years ago). As one who has primarily built smaller sets with my sub-10 year old kids, they don’t seem to include these details. One of these days I’m gonna buy the Concorde set, as an Avgeek, in honor of the couple of Concorde flights I took many years ago.

Oh, and once built? I used a real bike scale to weigh in, coming in at 620g:

This is, of course, well under the UCI limit for road bikes, but it doesn’t seem like they are very good at measuring that anyway.

Comparison to a Real Bike:

So, let’s take a look at things, part by part, in terms of realism…as well as how they compare to my actual bike.

First up is the non-bike thing, the trainer/stand. Technically speaking, the manual describes it as a “Training Stand”, which is apparently what you call it when you can’t decide which one it should be. This ‘trainer’ lacks any wheel or hub resistance unit, though, so it doesn’t provide any training resistance. However, that does mean you can pedal it within the stand, and it’ll roll for a surprisingly long time.

I appreciate that it even has a little dual-lock mechanism (one per side) so that you can keep it locked in the stand itself. This locks over the world’s most incorrect thru-axle length (actually, it kinda reminds me of the axle on this GoPro mount I reviewed many years ago, sadly, nothing like that for thru-axle these days that I know of).

Next, we’ve got the rear free hub, cassette, and rear derailleur (I’ll cover both wheels later). The bike features a rear derailleur, but it doesn’t move or have any extra gears. Instead, the RD acts as a chain tensioner, albeit an immovable one. But the real magic here is the free hub, which enables for forward pedaling operation, but also allows for the chain to spin backwards as if you were backpedaling (without interrupting the wheel). In other words, this isn’t a fixie bike.

Here’s a side-by-side comparison to my bike (where a spider has made a web over the last few days):

Moving forward, we’ve got the chain. This chain has 72 individual links in it (which you get the pleasure of building). Surprisingly, it didn’t take as long as I thought it would; it comes together at about 2 seconds per chain link.

That said, as-built, the chain was WAAAY too loose and hung down all sad. So I removed 3 links, it was perfect. I put those in the ‘leftovers’ pile, in case I need them someday.

Meanwhile, up front we’ve got the 1x chainring. This is, of course unusual for a road bike, which typically have 2x (small and big chaining), but if Lego had included a 2x system, it’d have been far more complex (and would have required shifting). That said, I do appreciate the minor touches here, such as the fake/implied front derailleur just above the chainring coming off the frame.

Meanwhile, the crankset and pedals are great here. Even building the crankset is exactly like real life, in that you build the drive-side (with chainring) first, and then push it through the bottom bracket to the other wide, where you attach the non-drive-side crank arm, then attach the pedals afterwards.

The pedal essentially mirrors a road bike pedal, and you can decide whether that’s Look or Shimano (or, with a bit of a stretched imagination, Time). It’s definitely not SpeedPlay, however.

From there, we’ve got the frame of the bike itself, which is super realistic and well done. The dimensions on the top-tube and down-tube are nailed, as is the tapering on the downtime. Very clean and smooth.

Of course, there’s also that water bottle too, which if you crack it open, you’ll find water inside:

Of course, I’ll have to figure out how to make some DCR-branded water bottles for it:

Meanwhile, back up on the seat post is the saddle and rear light. The lights actually look a lot more like a Garmin Varia Radar than it does most bike lights. What’s cool here though is that the light does rotate/adjust up/down a bit, to find the right position. Further, the underside of the saddle actually has saddle rails.

My only (minor) complaint here is that the nose of the saddle feels a *touch* bit long. Like 10-15% long, versus most saddle noses, though you wouldn’t really notice it from far away. Maybe it’s just because the skinny portion happens a bit earlier than most saddles.

Up front, we’ve got the headset area, where things get a bit wobbly. There’s a lot of flux here (forward and side to side), but it does allow a slight bit of rotation (as if turning). One person commented that I might be missing a single piece somewhere behind the front fork, so I’ll double-check that. It’s not a huge deal if not, but could use some firming up.

As for the handlebars, I do feel like some bar tape would go a long way here, but obviously, that’s not quite the style. Still, it ends up looking great nonetheless. The shifters/brakes don’t work per se, but do have a little bit of play in them, so it kinda feels like your shifting if you move them slightly (but they make no click or such).

Still, there’s no denying the color scheme on the edge of the shifters is absolutely nailed here. Notably, the bottom portion of the hoods is apparently part of a dragon horn many years ago.

Getting up to the front wheel, it attaches via a quick-release system of sorts. The axle is effectively built in, but you can remove the bottom few pieces do separate pretty easily to remove the front wheel for whatever reason you might need to remove it for.

And of course, you probably noticed those disc brakes on both the front and rear wheels.

Meanwhile, the tires are my favorite part of the entire build. These snap on, and feel super realistic. There’s no tube inside, and they are effectively hookless wheels, but feel firm and spot-on.

Almost lastly, up front, there’s no front light up front. I think this actually makes sense. The vast majority of road/race bikes I see don’t have front lights on them (though many people have radars/rear lights), so I’m actually OK with this decision. That said, I’m a touch bit surprised there wasn’t a front bike brand name plate on the upper fork.

However, before we wrap-up, I do have to note one moderate omission: There’s no cycling computer on it.

You’d be hard-pressed to find this bike in the wild riding without a cycling computer of some sorts. I’d love to see someone make a 3D printed out-front mount and scale-appropriate bike GPS for it. That’d be amazing. Please?

Wrap-Up:

Ultimately, I’m super impressed with this set. Obviously, it’s not the cheapest Lego thing out there, but equally, it’s also not as expensive as many others. Priced at $129USD, it seems like a better deal than many of the higher-end kid-targeted sets that Lego sells in the barely sub-$100 price point. And likewise, many of the other Lego Icons series sets are priced far higher (e.g. Space Shuttle + Boeing 747 Carrier, Land Rover, Star Trek USS Enterprise, etc…). While as a kid I was a huge Lego builder, as an adult I haven’t really gotten into collecting fancy Lego sets (or building them). Of course, I build tons of smaller sets with my daughters, and we build lots of our own creations too with bulk sets of bricks and pieces of other sets.

In terms of the cycling side of things, I’m impressed with how well this was executed overall. In particular, the drivetrain is super well done, and the deeper rimmed wheels are spot-on (including the tires). The same goes for the frame of the bike, which really nails the road-bike aesthetic (and in particular, my Canyon bike).

There are a few companies that are already selling stickers for the side of the Lego Road Bike, for example, I saw one company selling my exact Canyon road bike. My Instagram ads have been abuzz with it since I mistakenly clicked on one of them. Perhaps I’ll buy it, perhaps not. Kinda undecided.

But I have decided this was a solid purchase! With that – thanks for reading!

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Hopefully you found this review/post useful. At the end of the day, I’m an athlete just like you looking for the most detail possible on a new purchase – so my review is written from the standpoint of how I used the device. The reviews generally take a lot of hours to put together, so it’s a fair bit of work (and labor of love). As you probably noticed by looking below, I also take time to answer all the questions posted in the comments – and there’s quite a bit of detail in there as well.

If you're shopping for the LEGO Icons Road Bike Set or any other accessory items, please consider using the affiliate links below! As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. It doesn’t cost you anything extra, but your purchases help support this website a lot.

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Thanks for reading! And as always, feel free to post comments or questions in the comments section below, I’ll be happy to try and answer them as quickly as possible. And lastly, if you felt this review was useful – I always appreciate feedback in the comments below. Thanks!

Buried deep in one of the longest press releases I’ve ever seen, with an unrelated title about cycling initiatives in India (and updates on Belarus & Russian athletes), the UCI has announced an update to the maximum cycling computer size. This new policy will cap the maximum size of bike computers going forward, from January 2028.

Here’s the full text of that relevant section:

“The UCI has also decided to update the article concerning on-board technologies. The maximum dimensions permitted for bike computers will be limited to 126 × 71mm, corresponding to the largest products currently available on the market. This limitation will enter into force on 1 January 2028. This decision was taken in light of the impact of on-board technologies on the cognitive load experienced by riders. Several studies have shown that the increasing volume of data available to riders during competition can contribute to an increased cognitive workload, a key factor in the occurrence of accidents. Limiting the size of bike computers is intended to prevent an excessive increase in the amount of data available during races, which could significantly compromise rider safety. Members of the UCI Management Committee also emphasised the importance of engaging with the relevant stakeholders to gain a better understanding of how riders interact with the various data streams available to them during competition.”

So in short, the new size limit comes into effect January 1st, 2028, and is 1mm larger than the Wahoo ACE, the current largest cycling GPS on the market (it’s roughly the size, weight, and aerodynamic properties of a brick). They say they are doing this for safety reasons to reduce accidents, due to “increased cognitive workload”.

But…man, the UCI tries so hard to make up excuses for its rules. And certainly, since the very next paragraph discusses its recent sprawling legal loss to SRAM on this front, it had to be aware that it now *legally* needs actual relevant and situation-appropriate evidence before making up rule changes.

Instead, I wish the UCI had just simply said “big computers above this size are simply stupid looking”. In the same way, they do that for plenty of other cycling-related rules, such as sock height.

The problem with shifting this to safety is that one would actually argue a larger screen size probably *increases* safety. It’s simply easier to glance/see the data fields on a larger display than a tiny Edge 130-class/sized device that Garmin refuses to update, but pro teams still use. So if the rule was really about safety, we’d actually have a minimum screen size spec. And we’d have a rule about where the device was placed on TT bikes (such that it wasn’t behind someone’s chin point, making it nearly impossible to see).

(I took this photo 18 months ago as part of my Wahoo ACE review. Absolute Cycling has since gone out of business, but JESPR appears to still be around, and would seem to be slightly bigger than the Wahoo ACE, though on paper it says they’re only 122m long by 69.5mm wide. The Edge 1050 is 118.5m x 60.2mm)

Likewise, if the rule was about safety, we’d have rules about distracting features on the bike computer, or we’d have locked-down modes like some orienteering/adventure races have (these modes allow for data recording, but no access to the data itself during the event). But again, this isn’t about safety. It’s about whatever else the UCI is trying to achieve here.

And in fact, the UCI seems to freely admit that it hasn’t done any actual safety work here, as it says it wants to engage with the stakeholders to determine if there’s anything distracting here:

“Members of the UCI Management Committee also emphasised the importance of engaging with the relevant stakeholders to gain a better understanding of how riders interact with the various data streams available to them during competition.”

Why then would you create a rule before you decide if a rule was needed? Again, didn’t you just lose what might have been one of the most consequential sport-rules cases ever, for this very thing? (That case loss has massive/sprawling effects for other sports, including things like swimsuits in swimming, and every other sport federation).

Look, I personally don’t have an issue with limiting the size of bike computers for aesthetic reasons. Or heck, even saying that if a Wahoo ACE broke off a mount, went flying, and hit someone in the head, it could do serious damage. But saying that someone’s overall device size (not screen size) of a bike computer is a safety concern because it’s somehow distracting? C’mon, do better.

With that, thanks for reading!

[Err…update: It has been brought to my attention that this new UCI rule may actually have a massive benefit: It would theoretically ban the Flitedeck handlebar 2,249EUR bike computer project that’s been swindling people’s money for a few years now by a pair of OnlyFans ‘creators’. That particular pretend unit is well beyond the allowed size (180mm), which I guess does prove what they probably already know: Size matters. Albeit, so does actually shipping a product. As a result, I take back everything bad I said about the UCI.]

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At the end of the day, I’m an athlete just like you looking for the most detail possible on a new purchase. These posts generally take a lot of time to put together, so if you're shopping for the Wahoo ELEMNT ACE or Garmin Edge 1050 or any other accessory items, please consider using the affiliate links below! As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. It doesn’t cost you anything extra, but your purchases help support this website a lot.

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Google has opened the floodgates on asking 3rd party companies to release Fitbit Air accessories, bands, and anything else you can think of to put the little Fitbit Pebble in (which is what the pod of the Fitbit Air is officially called).

This will enable companies to create 3rd-party bands/straps of all varieties, similar to what we’ve seen for other companies. However, unlike other companies, Google is just putting the specs out there and mostly saying “go forth!”. Hopefully, that ‘forth’ results in a bicep band ASAP.

Google’s page on the topic is basically split into five sections:

1) General life-guidance on designing bands that humans want to wear
2) Branding things to not make Google upset (don’t call it “Google Fitbit Air Wannabe Whoop Clasp”)
3) A link to the actual CAD drawings (PDF file)
4) A list of technical rules to keep in mind (basically, don’t block the sensor, and release retention thresholds)
5) A list of policy rules around materials that Google has (e.g., lead-free, no PFAS, etc…)

Most of the things Google lists in those rules all make sense/etc… The PDF itself basically has three pages that show the pod from different sides, and then all the dimensions.

That said, I do find two things mildly notable. I’d assumed they’d have simply included/attached the actual CAD files, rather than the PDF’s. And secondly, I note at the bottom, they left the Google Confidential bits. Also, I feel like the ‘Not to Scale’ piece probably doesn’t belong here either.

In any case, hopefully, this quickly opens the door to cheap bicep bands galore!

Now, that said, if someone wants to create a combo Apple Watch fabric band + Fitbit Air holder on the opposite side, I’m all ears.  The same goes for any other combination of bands. I like having long-term platform data on multiple devices (though I generally only do accuracy testing on proper straps/placements). So minimizing the number of straps I have to wear would be handy. Just throwing that out there.

With that – thanks for reading!

In a move that shows the power of competition, Garmin has just announced that inReach satellite communicator device subscribers who have suspended their plans will continue to get emergency SOS access for up to 12 months. That’s a pretty massive shift for Garmin, who has long maintained that inReach devices must have a paid subscription even for SOS purposes. This covers devices like Garmin’s inReach Mini 3 series that came out last fall, as well as numerous other devices that have inReach plans.

Here’s the statement from Garmin’s Connor Hoffman:

“Garmin is introducing an update to its inReach suspend option offering free SOS access for up to 12 months even when a subscription is suspended. Because when it matters most, every second counts. When you’re beyond cellular range, Garmin inReach helps keep you connected to emergency help when you need it the most. The device enables two-way satellite messaging with family and friends from anywhere in the world, and can send an interactive SOS alert to Garmin Response℠, a 24/7 international emergency coordination center.”

As a brief bit of background, Garmin inReach devices require subscriptions that have various tiers covering all sorts of features. Generally speaking though, the higher the subscription, the more texts/photos/audio snippets you can send, and the more tracking points you can send. For most people owning an inReach device, the benefit is a blend of anywhere communications, combined with true global emergency SOS access (whereas most Apple/Google phone/watch plans that offer satellite communications work only in specific countries). But of course, in the case of Apple/Google, those satellite SOS features are entirely free.

Garmin’s inReach plan costs are (left to right): $7.99/$14.99/$29.99/$49.99 (monthly):

Garmin was already forced about a year ago to shift its thinking on plan suspensions, which previously required a silly expensive reactivation fee. But they did away with that almost exactly one year ago (June 5th, 2025), and plans no longer require an activation fee, as long as they are resumed within 12 months.

This all makes inReach devices *far* more appealing to seasonal users of the device (be it winter or summer), who may use the device for 3-5 months, and then it might sit on a shelf. For a skier who might have suspended the subscription for the summer, this might mean they’d grab it for a hike purely for SOS purposes.

Now, Garmin hasn’t quite finished updating all their pages. For example, this one here with tiers doesn’t have all the tables updated yet. Or this one here talking about suspensions. It sounds like that should be happening shortly, though. [Update: As of a day later, these are now updated]

The list of applicable devices is here, the main notable exclusion is the inReach Mini 1 (announced in early 2018), which isn’t included. I suspect this is because it performs a subscription check of some sort, and would require a firmware update that Garmin isn’t willing to do. But the Mini 2 and plenty of others are included on it.

Likewise, I asked how this impacts wearables – such as the Fenix 8 Pro series, which has inReach-style satellite communication capabilities (albeit with different underlying technology). Currently, that requires a subscription as well (which includes LTE coverage baked into it). In checking with Garmin, they noted that this will be applicable to those watches as well.

In any case, all of this is unquestionably the result of companies like Apple and Google making emergency SOS style assistance available on phones and watches, for free. Sure, they have limitations on range that Garmin mostly doesn’t have, but for the overwhelming number of users, those range/country limitations aren’t applicable. Which isn’t to say that Garmin inReach devices don’t serve a purpose, they very much do. There are boatloads of features they have around tracking, updates, etc… that simply aren’t offered on phones/watches at this time. And people (including myself) will continue to pay for those features.

Finally, I do wonder if Garmin will ultimately ditch the 12-month requirement too. That just seems like it’s fraught with ways it can go wrong (expectation-wise). Though I’m sure some accountant has decided that’s the line in the sand to make this work (for now). Who knows. In much the same way that Apple (and Google) refuse to define an end date for their free emergency SOS, despite years of saying eventually it won’t be free.

With that – thanks for reading!

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Above is my complete GoPro Mission 1 series beginners guide, covering the GoPro Mission 1 & Mission 1 Pro cameras (my full in-depth review video is here). In this guide, I cover everything from what’s in the box, to how to use all the hardware bits, a walk-through of virtually every software feature in there (especially the newness), and plenty more. I think it’s a good guide for not just beginners, but really anyone who wants to get the most out of their camera. Just the same for all the other long-form guides I do. There will be a few of them coming up over the next week or so.

Here’s a look at all the main chapters (but obviously, there are tons more smaller sections within these):

0:00 Quick Overview
0:58 What’s In the Box
2:02 Hardware Basics (Buttons, Mounts, Ports)
7:41 Pairing to the app, initial setup
8:43 GoPro Mission 1 base vs Mission 1 Pro
10:23 User Interface Walk-Through
15:02 Starting/Stopping/Viewing Videos
16:11 Understanding video modes
18:20 Video Mode Settings (aka all the tiny options)
20:03 Digital Lenses Explained (Linear, Wide, SuperView)
21:42 Horizon Lock Explained
22:44 Hindsight, Scheduled Capture, HyperSmooth, and Many More
26:33 Image Tuning (Sport, Face, Underwater, and more)
27:22 10-Bit, Bit Rate, and Log Options
29:15 Open Gate Mode
30:03 Low Light Video Modes
31:11 Slow Motion Options
33:11 Timelapse & Timewarp (New) Features
36:40 Night Effects (Star Trails, Light Painting, Vehicle Lights)
38:20 Subject Tracking (Follow-Me Mode)
39:19 Photo Modes
41:34 Battery & Overheating
43:25 Underwater & Waterproofing
44:04 Dive Mode
46:13 GoPro Quik App Core Features
49:24 Accessories I actually use/buy
55:58 Pairing Microphones & USB-C Mics

As always, the point of the long-form beginner’s guides I produce is to cover both the basics as well as more advanced tips. I also try really hard to squeeze it in under 1 hour (this one started at 1 hour 45 minutes of filming time, and sliced and diced it a bunch). Anyways, enjoy!

Oh, and I’ve got a written review for the Mission 1 Pro coming. Obviously, given it’s an action (video) camera, I’d really just suggest watching the video instead, but there’s a lot of text stuff I’d like to cover as well. Till then, I suspect we’ll just continue the recent loop of G-named posts the last few weeks: Google (Fitbit), GoPro, and Garmin. Fear not, though, there are a few other letters of the alphabet coming soon.

With that – thanks for watching!

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Hopefully you found this review/post useful. At the end of the day, I’m an athlete just like you looking for the most detail possible on a new purchase – so my review is written from the standpoint of how I used the device. The reviews generally take a lot of hours to put together, so it’s a fair bit of work (and labor of love). As you probably noticed by looking below, I also take time to answer all the questions posted in the comments – and there’s quite a bit of detail in there as well.

If you're shopping for the GoPro Mission 1 Pro (with Grip) or any other accessory items, please consider using the affiliate links below! As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. It doesn’t cost you anything extra, but your purchases help support this website a lot.

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Thanks for reading! And as always, feel free to post comments or questions in the comments section below, I’ll be happy to try and answer them as quickly as possible. And lastly, if you felt this review was useful – I always appreciate feedback in the comments below. Thanks!

The Fitbit Air will be a turning point in wearable technology, in much the same way that Whoop was for certain population segments. But I’d argue it’ll do so for different reasons. In the case of Whoop, it was mostly pioneering a new concept (screenless trackers, though the Jawbone Up technically beat it years earlier, but without Bluetooth connectivity). Whoop’s data itself wasn’t really unique; plenty of other companies had been doing basically the same thing for years in watches. It was the fact that it was screenless that was unique. However, Whoop’s pricing has long made it inaccessible to true mass-market sales. After all, Whoop’s own numbers boast a mere 2.5 million subscribers, compared to some 30 million+ for Fitbit.

Whereas with Fitbit, the turning point they are likely going to be remembered for with Fitbit Air is making the hardware accessible to the masses at a friendly $99 price point (with no subscription required). In fact, my wife has been using it without a subscription, just so I can demonstrate the differences. But perhaps more notably than the price will be Fitbit’s AI-first app experience. After all, everything you do with a screenless wearable is driven by the app (for better or worse). And nobody in the sports/fitness-tech realm is anywhere close to how Fitbit leverages AI for every bit of the app. To say Whoop uses AI, would be to compare a toddler to college graduates. Fitbit is simply in a different league.

But all of this is setting the stage for what I really want to dive into in this review: Does this actually work? Is this actually providing value, and at what true cost? Having the cheapest band and a suite of AI tools is only useful if the data is correct (both hardware data and AI insights). Simply being from Google/Fitbit does not guarantee being either correct (or useful). It’s an aspect I fear many reviews might overlook in the coming days.

With that, note that Fitbit sent me two loaner Fitbit Air units to review. I’ve already gone out and purchased my own, which should arrive any day, and these will go back to Fitbit.

The Key Specs:

Here’s the key hardware/etc specs of the unit, keeping in mind that at a functional level, it’s essentially taking a Fitbit Charge 6, and removing the display. Meaning that virtually every feature of the Fitbit Charge 6 exists here, just in a screenless form factor.

– $99USD, no subscription required (though there’s also an optional Premium subscription option)
– Two-part device: The main pod (“the pebble”), and then the band
– Pod is “polycarbonate and PBT plastics”
– Swappable Bands vary by type/material purchased
– Three core band types: Active, Elevated, Performance (see colors below)
– Battery life of 7 days
– Recharging time: 5 minutes quick charge is 1 day usage, or 90 minutes for a full charge
– 7 days of memory for detailed motion data (though oddly only 1 day offline of workout data)
– Tracks sleep, steps, and daily activity
– Has automatic workout/exercise detection
– Tracks training load (aka Cardio Load), includes Daily Readiness
– FDA-certified background Afib detection (but not manual ECG)
– Saves heart rate at 2-second intervals
– Optical heart rate monitor, plus a red and infrared sensor for SpO2 monitoring
– Skin temperature sensor
– Internal sensors include: 3-Axis accelerometer + gyroscope
– Includes vibration motor for smart wake alarms, regular alarms, and low battery alerts
– Small LED for battery status and pairing
– Does not contain nacho cheese dispenser
– Bluetooth 5.0
– Heart Rate Broadcasting to certain equipment/devices (same as Charge 6)
– No GPS inside, but will leverage GPS from your phone (e.g., Connected GPS)
– Water resistant to 50 meters
– Weight – 5.2g without band, 12g with band
– Both Apple iOS & Android supported (minimum Apple iOS 16.4, minimum Android 11.0)

In terms of the premium subscription option, it’s $9.99/month or $99/year if billed annually. However, if you’re an existing Fitbit Premium subscriber, then you get to keep your $79/year annual pricing.

In the Box:

With that, let’s quickly run through the box contents, which is pretty straightforward. Above, the boxed products, and below, all the pieces laid out. This is the Performance band edition.

In the box you’ve got the following bits:

A) The band/strap
B) The ‘pod’ (aka the pebble), that is the sensor itself
C) The charging cable (different than any previous Fitbit/Google cable)
D) Some paper junk

Here’s a closer look at the unit itself:

And then the charging cable:

Unfortunately, as noted before, this is yet another new Fitbit/Google charging cable. I don’t really understand why the company can’t keep a charging cable for more than a single generation. The thing is, what companies like Apple & Garmin have learned, is that by having a single charging cable long-term, it just makes a user’s life a crap-ton easier long-term when they forget a charging cable while traveling, they’re easier to find. Sigh.

At least it charges quickly, though – 1 day’s worth in 5 minutes.

Size Comparisons:

Here’s how it compares side-by-side with a few different bands on the market, first on my wrist:

And then on my wife’s wrist:

Then here on the table, though realistically, that’s a bit harder to really have perspective:

And finally, here’s the actual measured weights of all these as they compare:

While all of these size/weight comparisons heavily favor the Fitbit Air, I think it’s somewhat important to keep perspective: In this non-bedroom scenario, size does not actually matter. Or at least, matter much. Sure, it’s nice that it’s slim and lightweight, but equally, literally zero people ever complained about the size/weight of the Whoop band prior to the Fitbit Air coming out.

In fact, as you’ll see later, there are some very real tradeoffs to be made around heart rate accuracy due to the thinner band. Simply put: The thinner a band (or watch) is, the more outside light leakage makes it into the optical heart rate sensor, which can dramatically decrease heart rate sensor accuracy. This is not a new problem, and companies have been trying to solve it for years by changing the shape of the watch/etc to be notably wider than the sensor itself. In fact, we’ve previously seen Fitbit struggle with this tradeoff in the Fitbit Charge 6, due to its more oblong-shaped body letting excessive amounts of light in.

But, we’ll save those accuracy challenges for later in the review. With that, let’s talk about day-to-day usage.

Daily Usage:

Let’s first start off with putting the band on, which may sound kinda obvious, but seems like a logical place to start. You’ll simply open up the Velcro band (assuming the default Performance band), and then hold down the pod/pebble to your wrist to make it snug, before attaching the Velcro back to the band.

This has proven very secure. I’ve not once had any issues either daily life, or sporting life. That’s included openwater swimming, running, cycling (road, gravel, and MTB), and even efoiling (most notably, including falling repeatedly from efoil at 30KPH). Oh, and cannonballs. Because, science.

Ultimately, like a Whoop band, you just forget it’s there. However, unlike a Whoop band, it hasn’t started to stink yet. Admittedly, it’s only been a few weeks now, so perhaps the stink will come later. But Whoop’s fabric bands are infamous for quickly developing a stench, as well as taking forever to dry. The Fitbit Air dries quickly, and doesn’t stink, even with 2+ workouts a day, constant immersion in the ocean or pools, and general sweatiness of living on a hot Mediterranean island.

With those band bits out of the way, everything pretty much slides back to the app. After all, there’s no display on the Fibit Air, and the singular LED that’s on there for various battery/pairing/troubleshooting messages you’ll pretty much never see. Not once did I have reason to look for it.

So, the app it is. The Fitbit app has been renamed the Google Health app, and fully embraced what was the Fitbit Public Preview changes from last fall (which means some Fitbit features have disappeared forever). Google says the reason they shifted to naming it Google Health is that you’ll be able to use any data source you want (even an Apple Watch) to power the Google Health app experience. Meaning, no Fitbit device required. But that’s a different post for a different day.

As you can see above, the top of the app summarizes your metrics, akin to a dashboard. You can swipe left/right through this if you want, to lightly customize it. Though, it could use a lot more data field options (which, Google says are coming shortly).

Whereas the bottom half is all-AI, all the time. This is where you’re going to see summaries of your activities, as well as sleep data. Generally speaking, the more active you are (workouts especially), the more little AI snippets you’ll receive. Whereas the less active you are, the less you’ll receive. Here is, side-by-side, what it looks like between free (at left), and Premium (at right with ‘Premium’ listed at the top). Obviously, two different accounts/data (myself and my wife):

Notice how at left, it just shows her sleep data, whereas on the right, it summarizes my sleep data in premium.

You can scroll down this timeline more or less forever, seeing past AI snippets and summaries of sleep and workouts. Some of them allow you to open them up for more data (such as tapping into a workout, more on that in a minute), and others allow responding to the AI for deeper insights, or to provide answers.

If you move towards the next tab, you’ve got the Fitness tab, which is just a bowl full of a disorganized, talkative mess. At the top is an AI summary of your fitness goal progress, then you’ve got a bunch of checklist-style things that basically repeat exactly what it just told you, after which it has a whole slate of structured workouts you can do.

When it comes to organization, this feels like the Fitness team got told ‘Somehow fit all your stuff into this one tab, may the force be with you’. Rather than (logically) having one tab for your actual fitness stuff, and another for all the coaching stuff, they just jammed it into one. Whereas if you compare that to the next two tabs, Sleep and Health, they feel logical, separate, and organized. All of this below is still within the Fitness tab.

So, here is the sleep tab. At the top is the usual AI summary, followed by some sleep scores and durations for the week:

When it comes to the accuracy of this sleep data, that’s two buckets. First, is whether or not the times I fell asleep and woke up are correct, and then second is whether or not sleep phases/stages are correct (plus things like HRV). For fall asleep/wake-up times, those seem pretty much spot on in all my testing. Somewhat interesting, there are cases where it’ll ‘update/fix’ the wake-up time maybe an hour or so after I woke up, in particular if I briefly woke up around 6-7AM, and then went back to sleep for another 1-2 hours. It’s always sorted itself out, but I have seen it can take a short bit of time to do that.

The next bit then, is sleep phases/stages. As I’ve noted multitudes of times, the so-called ‘gold standard’ for comparison here is pretty lame, at merely mid-80’s percentile accuracy (in a best-case scenario). We’d never compare heart rate sensors to a ‘gold standard’ that was wrong 20% of the time (again, in a best-case scenario). Not sure why some do it here for sleep. Thus, I don’t.

Next, what about naps? The Fitbit Air will measure any naps at least 20 minutes long (which is a reduction in time from some Fitbit devices that required an hour-long nap). I took one for the team and tested this twice (just to be sure), and in both cases, the naps were very close to that 20-minute threshold (just over), and it detected them properly.

That said, it did take *hours* for these naps to show up in the Fitbit app, despite syncing and such. So there’s clearly some background processing that takes a while to happen.

Lastly, on the sleep front, there are the alarms. You can configure these from the Fitbit app, and can create both manual alarms for an exact time, as well as smart alarms. Further, it supports one-off alarms, as well as scheduled alarms on certain days of the week.

It allows up to 8 alarms to be set, which will trigger a vibration alert on the band itself. It was strong enough to wake me, though as always, that might vary by person. It can also be configured to snooze for 9 minutes.

The next tab you’ve got is the Health Status tab. This tab summarizes both your ‘Vitals’ (the top 5 trending health metrics they’ve selected, similar to Apple, Garmin, and Whoop), as well as your ‘Key Metrics’ that are more customizable. All of them are shown as a 7-day plot.

This page can have quirks, like you’ll notice my SpO2 reading is oddly missing for a week last night, yet not any other metric. Obviously, the band populated every other data point, so not sure why that one failed.

Below the summary data are more metrics you can keep an eye on, as well as things you can enable, like FDA-certified Afib detection, as well as High/Low Heart rate alerts. Plus, you can stick in medical data from other sources. In the case of ECG, the Fitbit Air does not have any way to manually take an ECG on-demand, though it can still show ECG data from the Irregular Rhythm notifications, in the event those trigger.

Now, before we wrap up with the basics section, we have to talk about the AI snippets. These are available with the Premium app only; if you’re in the free version of the app, you won’t see any of them (for better or worse).

In the vast majority of cases, the AI tidbits are genuinely useful and provide really good insights. However, that’s overshadowed by typical AI issues where it locks onto something and really sticks with it, no matter how consequential. Any time you tell it something, it just repeats it over and over again at every turn. Whether it be a planned trail race, Haribo, the name of a nearby mountain range, or more.

And there’s no better example of this than one Saturday evening, 10 days ago, when I decided to (somewhat sarcastically) ask what it thought of my recovery nutrition: Nacho cheese, chips, and a few glasses of rosé wine.

From that moment forward, every single night, it asked if I had my queso and rosé yet, even proactively suggesting when I should have it. Mind you, I never again mentioned queso/rosé after that initial mention. Instead, Google was seemingly driving me nightly to be an queso-fueled-aspiring-alcoholic at every turn. Here’s a smattering of just *some* of these screenshots:

Obviously, this is mostly funny, but equally, it’s such a good example of how AI often latches onto something and can’t break free of it. This is hardly new; these sorts of things have been going on for years, but I’m not sure that’s what we want in an app designed to make you healthier.

Finally, in terms of battery life, Fitbit nailed the battery life claim, which is 7 days. In the case of one 7-day period, I charged it to 95% at 4PM on a Thursday, and by the next Thursday at 10:30AM, it was at 10%. Meaning, it would have easily lasted till 4PM had I not charged it then (especially if I had fully charged it to 100% initially). This time period included 2-4 hours of workouts per day, which, according to Google, has no meaningful impact on battery life.

So, let’s talk about those workouts.

Sports Usage:

Google’s approach to sports is much more impressive than perhaps the historical Fitbit brand might lead you to believe. Over the last few years, Google has substantially increased the number of sports and training features via the Pixel Watch specifically, and those are now largely available within the Fitbit Air too. For example, Cardio Load, which is a training load-like feature, is front and center within the Fitbit Air.

To begin, when it comes to the Fitbit Air, there are two core ways it’s going to record your workouts:

Automatic Detection (Background): This happens automatically, all the time. When you go out and do a workout, it’ll detect that higher-heart-rate event and create an activity in the app after you’re done sweating. It’ll automatically categorize a handful of activity types as well (run, walk, bike, rowing, elliptical). But this is woefully behind Whoop’s 45+ different activity types that it can automatically detect and log. In the case of Fitbit, if it detects a higher HR activity (e.g., Football/Soccer), and doesn’t know what to call it, it simply asks you what it was. This happened during an e-foiling session I did.

In my testing, I found it was really good with automatic workout detection for runs, triggering it immediately when I started/ended running. However, for cycling it was more variable. For my commutes, which start downhill and are on an e-bike (cargo bike with kids), it tended to be about 5-6 minutes until it detected. Whereas for my gravel/road biking, it detected virtually instantly, like running.

Manual Workouts: In this case, you can manually create a workout and select from a slate of different types. This is useful for two different reasons. The first is that for outdoor workouts, it’ll show a GPS map afterward (and include things like distance/speed for cycling and other non-running sports). The second is that it lets you get very precise start/ending times, which is important for workouts that might not have a really clear movement or heart rate spike. For example, yoga or certain strength training might not initially be obviously different to the sensor than putting away dishes.

To create a manual workout you’ll tap the ‘Start’ button, then choose a workout type (or, one of your custom workouts), and then from there you’ll see your distance/heart rate/speed/elapsed time shown. Obviously, if it’s not an outside workout, you won’t see those speed/pace/distance bits.

I talk a bit more about it in the bugs section, but manual workouts have been a solid struggle-bus for me, primarily on the GPS side. I’ve lost numerous workouts (the GPS data) where it simply stops tracking. The underlying heart rate data is still saved, and an activity is also still saved, but there’s no map/GPS/distance/etc data. It’s not awesome.

In any case, once your manual workout is finished, and assuming it doesn’t crash along the way, this is what you’ll see:

Above is the single non-commute cycling/running workout that managed to record my map successfully.

In terms of the differences between free and Premium, in a post-workout setting, the only difference is the AI text you’ll see. Here’s an example of my wife’s screen (free), and mine (Premium), after this gravel-ish ride. You’ll see mine has a bunch of text, hers just said she went for a ride, and to tap to see the details (seen above). I had manually set mine as MTB.

One of the key metrics you’ll see in that is ‘Cardio Load’, which is basically Fitbit’s version of Training Load. This is great because it roughly falls in line with what you’ll see from other reputable endurance sports companies. Even more notable is that Fitbit measures cardio load 24×7 – which means even activities that aren’t manually recorded are captured (such as doing yard work for 6 hours, or moving your house, or chasing the kids around, or making new kids. After all, it’s all high-higher rate activities that are going to add strain to your training load, even if not explicitly listed as a workout.

You’ll see this in a space of places within the app, including the main homepage itself, and then you can tap on it to get more details:

I do wish some of this was displayed a bit better though, in particular against your existing/normal training load. It used to be better in the older Fitbit app when they first launched it with the Pixel Watch, showing ranges (very similar to Garmin’s Acute Load), and from a sports standpoint it just made so much more sense (because load/fatigue doesn’t disappear in your body each Monday, whereas it seems to with this redesign).

Next, there’s Readiness. This is roughly akin to Garmin’s Training Readiness score, except Fitbit was actually first many years ago with ‘Daily Readiness’, and that’s since been simplified to just ‘Readiness’. The idea here is to look at your recovery and fatigue elements, and score you on how ready you are to take on the day (or take on additional workouts):

I find this piece takes a bit longer to stabilize in the Fitbit ecosystem, but once you’ve got at least a few weeks of stable data in there, it simmers down and produces reasonable results.

Finally, there’s broadcasting of your heart rate from the band. The Fitbit Air does technically support that, but via their proprietary secure-Bluetooth-ish connection. This means it only works with certain devices/platforms, rather than following the proper Bluetooth spec like Whoop/Amazfit do (or Garmin/etc on other watches). You can toggle this on within the app:

You can find a list of these compatible devices here. In short, it works with Zwift/Peloton, but not with a Garmin bike computer. I find this all bizarre, since Google says they’re trying to make Google Health universal across platforms, and they’re spending a crap-ton of development effort to do this (impressively so). The fact that Whoop and Amazfit’s bands just follow the proper standards is really key for some people, and there’s simply no good justification for Google to keep on doing what they’re doing here.

With that, let’s shift to heart rate accuracy.

Heart Rate Accuracy (Sports):

Let’s start off with something easy, a relatively steady-state and also very chill 25-minute run. Nothing crazy here, just some loops on some local trails. Had the Fitbit Air on one wrist, and the Whoop 5.0/MG on the other wrist. Plus the Amazfit Helio & Polar Loop on my biceps, and then finally the Garmin HRM-600 chest strap on my…well…chest. Here are those results:

As you can see, this wasn’t awesome for Fitbit. And in some ways, this is one of the worst examples, but also not entirely unusual either. As one who tests these things for a living, I’m hyper-aware of ensuring the bands are tight/etc on my wrist. Atop that, my very light skin with almost relatively thin/minimal blond arm hairs means I’m sorta the easiest person out there from an accuracy standpoint: If it can’t get me wrong, everyone else is hosed.

Still, many of my other activities went better.

Here’s an hour run I did, this time pavement with my wife. In this case, there were some easier intervals (for me, they hurt my wife more), though, you can’t really tell that from the Fitbit data. This was arguably one of the worst heart rate examples I had. But ultimately, for as much flak as Whoop gets, Whoop did far better here, plenty of errors as you can see (especially early on), but nothing compared to Fitbit.

Next, we’ve got a trail run, one that’s actually pretty challenging from a variability standpoint (lots of short/steep up/downs), along with often very hard/unstable rock surfaces that can easily cause cadence-lock more so than softer trails. Still, despite the GPS on the app going haywire on this run, the actual heart rate was largely quite good. There are a few moments to quibble about, but this wouldn’t really impact things like Cardio Load and such meaningfully. Here’s that data:

As you can see, overall, a very solid performance there, on what should have been one of the more difficult tracking jobs. Also note in blue that the Whoop 5.0/MG did make a similar number of errors in both similar and other locations on this run.

Next, let’s look at an indoor trainer (cycling) ride. The first of two. This one had basically three main interval sets as you can see, plus a bit of a warm-up. While there were some slight bobbles with the heart rate here and there, it did easily outperform the Whoop strap, where you see more issues (especially in the 3rd/last interval). Note that the colors are changing here, so Fitbit is in orange/yellow this time:

Here’s another workout, this time things went pretty sideways. Somewhat interestingly, workouts that were earlier in my review period seemed to struggle more than workouts later. I’m not aware of any firmware updates to the unit itself, but that doesn’t really matter in a world where many companies post-process data after the fact, to clean up issues. This workout was done prior to the one above (which handled better):

So what about heading outside for real riding then? No problem, got that covered too. In terms of difficulty, outdoor rides present one of the biggest challenges for wrist-based optical HR sensors. The reason is that your wrists are typically stretched tight, and road vibrations from the bike shudder through them. Whereas optical HR sensors placed higher-up (such as on your bicep like the Polar & Amazfit units on this ride), can have some of the best accuracy possible, often beating chest straps in fact (chest straps on outdoor rides, especially cooler rides, can be susceptible to a different set of issues).

With that said, this result from the Fitbit (and Whoop) was actually pretty darn good. The two areas it struggled in were similar – downhill sections where speed increased, but heart rate rapidly decreased. The Fitbit struggled in both cases to maintain accuracy.

Still, on the whole, as compared to the many results I see from different wrist-based units while riding outdoors, I’ve seen far far more troubling results.

Finally, let’s look at a strength workout, this one mostly upper body focused.

Obviously, the scale is a bit lower here, as well as the intensity. Once the heart rate increased, it wasn’t more than a few seconds behind the chest strap, and usually following the pattern. At lower intensities, it was a bit more variable.

Overall, the accuracy across all workouts is kinda mixed. In some workouts, it’s basically the same as Whoop (mostly good, but a few minor errors). In other workouts, it’s better than Whoop (with minimal errors). And then yet finally, in some workouts, it’s really bad.

The challenge with the ‘really bad’ ones is that it’s often vastly overshooting my actual intensity/heart rate (by 20-40bpm), which in turn will result in far higher cardio load. That then results in the app assuming my workout was harder than it was, which will cause incorrect recommendations (telling me to take easier days than I should, or thinking I’m working harder than I am). This is, of course, true of all sport platforms that depend on heart rate and have training load & recovery type recommendations.

I suspect some of the accuracy issues they’ll be able to solve with post-processing fixes, as their competitors also do. But other aspects will simply be hard to fix given how thin (width-wise) the band is, meaning that substantial light leakage can occur even when worn in the tightest possible scenarios. Further, some of my indoor trainer rides that had errors were done at night with the lights basically off (out on a deck/porch area). Meaning, it’s not just light leakage that’s the issue, but other artifacts as well.

The point being that while I think the Fitbit Air’s accuracy is probably good enough for many people, at the moment, Whoop is beating it in a wrist-to-wrist comparison. Note that I wouldn’t compare the accuracy of the bicep-worn Amazfit or Polar units here, because Whoop also shows near-perfect accuracy when worn on a bicep. And I suspect that Fitbit probably will as well, once bicep bands become available from 3rd party companies.

(Note: All of the charts in these accuracy portions were created using the DCR Analyzer tool. It allows you to compare power meters/trainers, heart rate, cadence, speed/pace, running power, GPS tracks, and plenty more. You can use it as well for your own gadget comparisons, more details here.)

The Bugs:

Long-time readers know that when this section appears in a review, it generally means I’ve encountered a high-enough threshold of issues that it’s just easier to roll them into a single section. Normally in reviews when I encounter issues, I just sprinkle them throughout (even if substantial issues). But when I have so many bugs (even if minor), it’s easier to put them in one place so I can find them later and note whether or not they’ve been fixed.

It’s clear that Fitbit is a bit behind on where they want to be with the app in particular. The hardware is largely great, but the app simply has a lot of quirks. Some of them are blatant bugs/gaps/errors where someone said, ‘Sigh, we just can’t fix this today’ (like showing zero elevation gain for every activity). Others are more quirky in nature (like the AI’s odd insistence that I eat nacho cheese dip and rosé wine every night prior to falling asleep). And others are technical issues that illustrate not having enough time to get to the bottom of edge-cases (for which I’m famous for finding).

For the most part, nothing on this list is a deal breaker by itself. And to their credit, they’re fixing them at a crazy-fast rate. One of the lead Google/Fitbit Air program managers even came to Mallorca to go out for a run with me and run into issues side-by-side. But that doesn’t change the reality that issues do very much exist today.

Here’s where things stand:

– Manually started GPS activities repeatedly fail to capture GPS data: This has happened over and over again. Fitbit says it’s potentially due to the number of Bluetooth devices I have, but that doesn’t really answer why the GPS portion (which is handled fully on the phone), keeps failing so badly/often. Nonetheless, Fitbit says they’re working on a fix.

– Elevation ascent data always shows ‘0’ (zero): No matter how much elevation is shown, or despite the fact that the elevation graph is actually properly shown.

– Random AI Hallucinations: It said my Sunday 2.5hr ride was my longest ride ever. In fact, when I responded back to the coach that it wasn’t, it magically found my 6hr ride from two months ago.

– Sleep Quality Score keeps temporarily disappearing (as does Health Status): You can fix it by logging out and back in again, but that’s annoying. A fix is coming in the next app update.

– Enumeration of certain metrics on iOS can take upwards of 10 seconds: Google says they’ve got a fix coming for this shortly. This doesn’t impact Android.

– Some Strava outdoor activities simply don’t have maps with them. It’s unclear why.

For most of these issues, Google has given various timelines ranging from tomorrow to next month, to get them fixed. And if the past week or two is any indication, things are being fixed very quickly. So, hopefully I can cross things off on this list as they happen.

Update: Google has published a very extensive post that details the many bugs they’re working to fix quickly. This is actually kinda impressive for a company to do this. I believe it covers all of the items I’ve listed above, but of course, they still need to actually implement it.

Wrap-Up:

After putting this device through a literal pounding of workouts, non-workout sports activities, and everything else in between, it’s clear this unit will pose significant issues for Whoop. I’d argue this band has likely single-handedly sunk Whoop’s rumored near-term IPO, short of Whoop drastically shifting its business/pricing model. For the vast majority of consumers, the Fitbit Air will do exactly what a Whoop band does, for a fraction of the cost, and in some cases, even do it better.

Which isn’t to say the Fitbit Air is perfect, or even perfectly ready. In fact, there are a lot of quirky bugs in the app, and some accuracy issues that Fitbit needs to address. For the app issues, these are mostly more minor than not (except the GPS track recording problem), and I suspect if Google keeps moving at the same speed they’ve been moving on fixing issues, they’ll be resolved quickly. Meanwhile, for the accuracy bits in the heart rate, I suspect for most people it won’t matter a ton. Still, aspects beyond just bugs are a notable gap to Whoop, especially around automatic activity detection/exercise types. This is an area that Fitbit needs to move quickly on.

As for the need for Premium, I don’t think most people will need it. Certainly, it does provide legitimate value and insights, and often can actually provide good training and general wellness recommendations (well, when it lays off the rosé wine). Still, I think Fitbit would be wise to allow better/more customization of the main Google Health app dashboard, since it’s clear feedback from both free and Premium users really want more data (over AI text) shown. If Fitbit wants to court both sides, they need to find some middle ground there. Hopefully, they can do that.

Either way, for $99, this is an easy-button recommendation for the vast majority of people who would have otherwise selected a Whoop. It also sends a signal to other companies looking to get into the screenless wearable space what is needed in order to succeed, both in terms of pricing and features.

With that – thanks for reading!

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It’s been nearly 5 years since Garmin’s last budget Forerunner came out, the Forerunner 55. And with its successor, the Forerunner 70, it’s arguably one of the biggest upgrades Garmin has ever made in its watch lineup. I can’t think of a single jump between two watch generations that pack as many new features, or foundational changes, as the jump from the Forerunner 55 to the Forerunner 70. All while keeping the price as low as you’re going to expect from Garmin, at $249 (which is virtually identical to the inflation-adjusted price of the Forerunner 55 some 5 years ago).

The Forerunner 70 packs in some 50+ new sport profiles, a new optical heart rate sensor, better GPS, new Quick Workout features (not seen on any other Garmin watch yet), and most critically: The same underlying software platform as seen on Garmin’s higher-end Fenix & Forerunner watches. This means that you’ll get the benefit of literally hundreds of tiny tweaks/updates in those watches, passed down to this budget watch.

Of course, that doesn’t mean you get every feature. Garmin still gatekeeps specific features (like ClimbPro, or offline maps, and even certain sport modes), based on whatever complex spreadsheet they have for determining which models get which features enabled.

Nonetheless, both my wife and I have been putting both the Forerunner 70 & Forerunner 170 through their paces over the last little while, and in this in-depth review, I’ll dive into the least expensive unit first.

Lastly, this is a media loaner from Garmin. I’ve already ordered my own unit at the regular price, for long-term usage purposes. As always, I don’t accept advertising from any company I review, and no company sees my reviews before you do. So, if you found this review useful, consider becoming a DCR Supporter, which gets you an ad-free site, plus the behind-the-scenes video series between both myself and my wife on everything that happens in the DCR Sports Tech Cave/universe.

What’s new:

Now, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that this is not Garmin’s first Forerunner 70 watch (seen above in blue). In fact, the first one came 15 years ago, all the way back in 2011. You can read my review about it here. Obviously, though, things have changed a lot. That one had a coin-cell battery in it, and lacked GPS as well as most other features. It was basically designed to work with an ANT+ footpod. So, I’ll save you 12 reams of digital paper trying to compare that.

Instead, we’re going to compare it against its actual predecessor – the Forerunner 55 (the Forerunner 60 was from 2010, and basically the same watch as the Forerunner 70 except with a new band). The Forerunner 55 is shown above with the black band.

With that, all the differences compared to the Garmin Forerunner 55:

– Switched from 1” MIP display to 1.2” AMOLED Display
– Switched to a 43mm case size (was previously 42mm)
– Added Touchscreen (previously was buttons only)
– Upgraded from Garmin ELEVATE V3 HR sensor to ELEVATE V4 HR sensor (but V5 is latest)
– Completely revamped/changed user interface
– Added Watch Focus Modes (e.g., sleep, theater, activity, etc…)
– Added HRV Status/tracking support (at night)
– Added Smart Wake Alarm
– Added Sleep Coach feature, including sleep recommendation factors
– Added Nap detection support (new to Garmin, finally!)
– Added Morning Report feature
– Added Evening Report Feature
– Added Daily Summary report feature
– Added Daily Health Snapshot Feature
– Added Health Status tracking
– Added Lifestyle Logging (journaling, on-device & Garmin Connect)
– Added the ability to switch between small fonts and larger fonts for text
– Added quick-access Flashlight feature (using screen, not dedicated LED flashlight)
– Added photos in text messages (Android only)
– Added ‘Shortcuts’ feature (configuring buttons for quick access to features)
– Added Alternate/Secondary Time Zone Widget/Option
– Added the ability to create Widget/Glance Folders
– Added Battery Widget (shows what’s driving battery usage)
– Added Countdowns
– Added Calculator Widget
– Added Garmin Messenger integration
– Added Moon Phase Widget
– Added Pulse Ox Tracking
– Added Sleep Score
– Added Sports Score Widget
– Added Stocks Widget
– Added Sunrise & Sunset Widget
– Added Weight Tracking Widget
– Added Timers/Alarms/Stopwatch/etc Widget
– Added Connect IQ Store (on-device)
– Added Low Battery Alert (e.g., 1 day left)
– Added Color filter option (for color blindness accessibility)
– Added Hourly Alert/Chime
– Added Battery Saver Feature (and now battery life estimates)
– Added ~60+ new sport profiles/apps (see list below)
– Added the ability to configure watch activity profiles and data fields from your phone
– Added Training Readiness (and all underlying metrics)
– Added Training Status (and all underlying metrics)
– Added Acute Load (including historical load trends/tunnel)
– Added VO2Max Trending
– Added Load Focus, Load Ratio
– Added Recovery Time (live widget/etc…)
– Added Running Dynamics support (Ground Contact Time, Vertical Oscillation, Vertical Ratio, Stride Length)
– Added Native Running Power (wrist-based, and native data fields)
– Added Running-power specific training zones
– Added Automatic Run/Walk/Stand detection within a workout
– Daily suggested workouts can now be seen into the future, configuration of long-workout days, more settings, etc…
– Daily suggested workouts can now be tied to future calendar race events, automatically creating workouts for that distance/course
– Added equipment tracking on-device (e.g., shoes, bikes, etc…)
– Added Primary Race Widget
– Added New Race Calendar & Race Details/Countdown Widgets
– Added Race Time prediction (within Race widget)
– Added Workout Benefit feature (tells you what the benefit of a given workout was)
– Added ability to create lap alerts on proximity (e.g., passing the same place)
– Added Course/Route following
– Added ‘Up Ahead’ feature for distances to predefined markers like aid stations, climbs, etc…
– Added Aid Station/Rest Break Timer/Counter in Courses (e.g., Trail Runs)
– Added Time Cutoff Feature in Courses (e.g., Trail Runs)
– Added Garmin Share (to quickly share workouts/courses/etc…)
– Added ‘Workouts’ app/quick access menu
– Added Pack Weight Support (in Running/Hiking activities)
– Increased data fields per page from 4 to 8
– Increased number of custom data pages allowed
– Adds support for up to 4 CIQ data fields concurrently (versus 2 previously)
– Added muscle map feature in strength workouts
– Added Secure/Encrypted Bluetooth sensor pairing feature/option
– Added Cycling Lights, Cycling Radar, RD Pod, Tempe sensor support (ANT+ & Bluetooth Smart, see full list below)
– Increased GPS/GNSS types: Added Beidou & QZSS to multi-band list (but not dual frequency)
– Smartwatch battery life is 13 days (5-days always-on)
– GPS battery life per the chart below up to 23 hours
– Weight is 40g
– Waterproof rating is 5ATM/50-meters

Holy moly, that took a long time to put together/figure out (and yes, I literally manually go through every single item to come up with the above list – Garmin doesn’t provide any such list to me). Of course, the reality is there are still tons more features buried in sub-menus and such, but I think the above covers most of it.

When it comes to the full list of sport modes, it’s sprawling, and essentially lines up with most of Garmin’s other watches made in 2025/2026. For the most part, the only differences to a higher-end Fenix series watch are that those watches also have both high-speed watersports (e.g., surfing) due to increased water resistance designs, and low-speed underwater sports (e.g., diving) due to other increased water resistance as well. In any case, here’s the full list:

Forerunner 70 Sport Types: Run, Track Run, Treadmill, Road Bike, Walk, Cardio, Strength, Pool Swim, Trail Run, Bike (Outdoor), Bike Indoor, Virtual Run, Indoor Track, Obstacle Racing, Ultra Run, MTB, eBike, eMTB, Cyclocross, Gravel Bike, Bike Commute, Bike Tour, Mobility, HIIT, Yoga, Pilates, Elliptical, Stair Stepper, Row Indoor, Walk Indoor, Boxing, Mixed Martial Arts, Jump Rope, Hike, Rucking, Mountaineering, Disc Golf, Horseback, Archery, Inline Skating, Ski, Snowboard, XC Classic Ski, XC Classic Skate, Snowshoe, Ice Skating, Snowmobile, SUP, Kayak, Row, Snorkel, Soccer/Football, American Football, Basketball, Baseball, Softball, Volleyball, Cricket, Lacrosse, Rugby, Field Hockey, Ice Hockey, Ultimate Disc, Tennis, Pickleball, Padel, Racquetball, Squash, Badminton, Table Tennis, Platform Tennis, ATV, Snowmobile, Overland, Motocross, Motorcycle, Horseback, Breathwork

In case you’re wondering how it differs from the also-announced Forerunner 170, that watch has Floor Climb (because it has an altimeter), Openwater Swimming, and Meditation (guided). It does not have multisport/triathlon modes.

Lastly, when it comes to supported sensor types, it supports the following:

Sensor Supported: External HR (ANT+/Bluetooth), Footpod (ANT+/Bluetooth), Lights (ANT+), Cycling Radar (ANT+/Bluetooth), RD Pod (ANT+), Speed/Cadence Sensor (ANT+/Bluetooth), Tempe (ANT+)

The Forerunner 170 adds in cycling power meter and cycling smart trainer support.

Finally, for battery life, here’s where things stand:

Smartwatch mode: Up to 13 days (5 days always-on display)
Battery Saver Smartwatch mode: Up to 28 days
GPS Only GNSS Mode: Up to 23 hours
All-Systems GNSS Mode: Up to 16 hours

Got all that? Good, let’s get into some of the bigger-ticket items.

In the Box:

The Forerunner 70 box doesn’t contain a whole lot, so this section is pretty easy. Above is the outside of the box, and below are the box contents:

Inside, you’ll have the watch, a standard Garmin charging cable (USB-C on one end, Garmin charging connector on the other), and then some paper junk. It’s that simple.

See, the unboxing is done – told you it’s simple.

The Daily Usage Basics:

In this section, I’ll dive into the basics of using the watch day to day, including activity tracking, sleep tracking, smartwatch features, and more. Whereas the section after this dives into the sports and workout pieces.

The Forerunner 70 uses Garmin’s standard 5-button layout common on Forerunner, Fenix, and Instinct devices (whereas Venu/Vivoactive devices usually have 2-3 buttons). In addition to these buttons is a full touchscreen. Garmin’s general philosophy here is that you can use either touch or buttons to accomplish most tasks, depending on your preferences.

Some tasks, such as starting/stopping a workout, do require buttons, and inversely, if you want to disable the touchscreen, you can do so either on a per-sport profile basis, or entirely. There’s lots of flexibility there.

Speaking of which, being an AMOLED display, by default it’ll be in gesture-based mode. Which means when you put your wrist down, it turns off the display to save battery. However, I prefer always-on display mode, which burns more battery life, but means the display dims when I put my wrist down (so I can always see the time, no matter my wrist position). You can change this in the settings:

When it comes time to display visibility, like other AMOLED displays made in the last few years, there are no issues seeing it in bright sunlight. I live on a Mediterranean island, and there’s simply no problem seeing the display on the sunniest of days (or, inversely, this same display on a snowy mountain-top).

In any case, starting off with the watch face, you can customize this however you’d like. I actually like the default watch face here, but you can either choose from a slate of ones pre-loaded on the watch, or literally thousands from Garmin’s Connect IQ watch face app/store. You can even make your own watch face with photos/etc…

Additionally, each of the data bits on the watch face (called ‘complications’), can be customized. Though the definition of ‘each’ can vary a bit between the watch face itself. For the default Forerunner 70 one, not all of the data fields are customizable, but most other watch faces do allow it.

Tapping the down button brings you to the widgets/widget glances. These little snippets are the widget glances, and then you can tap into them to see full-size widgets. Like everything else, you can customize these, the order, grouping, and download 3rd party ones too.

Each of them then expands into more details about that particular item, such as more details about your steps, or your sleep, or moon phases, sports teams, etc…

Again, there are lots of options here, and this is an area where Garmin has expanded the widget realm in the last year or so, focusing a bit more on general smartwatch-like widgets (such as ones for stocks, sports teams, etc…).

When it comes to sleep tracking, the watch will automatically track your sleep (including naps). There’s really nothing you need to do except fall asleep. When you wake up each morning you’ll see your sleep data on a slate of different sleep details:

One of the widgets you’ll have is the ‘Sleep Coach’ widget, which pretty much constantly reminds you to sleep more. Within that, there’s also the ‘Sleep Factors’ widget, which will list some of the reasons why it says what it says. If you take a nap, that’ll show up in a few different places related to sleep/Body Battery, but also just on the dedicated ‘Nap’ widget, if you add it.

The Forerunner 70 has the Body Battery widget, which effectively tracks your body’s energy level throughout the day. I generally find it pretty accurate. It’s going to give you a starting value based on last night’s sleep, and then your day will decrease it (faster or slower, depending on what you’re doing and your stress levels). For example, going for a hard interval run will drain it faster, whereas you might actually recoup a bit sitting watching some TV.

Again, there’s a listing of the factors that impacted it within the widget.

In fact, stepping back towards sleep slightly, the watch will track your HRV (Heart Rate Variability) each night while you sleep. After 19 nights of sleep it’ll start to populate the color coding system you see here, which are personalized ranges for your normal baseline of a 90-day trailing/trended window. Every person is different (my wife’s numbers and my numbers are about 15-20ms apart on average), so don’t overthink my specific ranges too much.

In general, when your HRV numbers plummet, it’s a likely sign of fatigue or impending illness (typically my HRV numbers will drop from ~50ms down to ~30ms the day before I get/feel sick). That said, HRV numbers will also drop due to alcohol, drugs (good or bad), heavy training fatigue, lack of sleep, stress etc…. The key isn’t just numbers going up/down, but your understanding of why they are going up/down.

You’ll see the HRV used in a variety of places, including Training Readiness, which I’ll cover in the next section. However, it’s also one of the metrics shown in the Morning Report each day when you wake up.

The Morning Report is customizable, and essentially summarizes last night’s sleep, as well as the day ahead from a calendar (both your phone’s calendar and your workout schedule), as well as weather and other readiness tidbits.

You can customize the Morning Report in the settings, and likewise, you can customize the Evening Report.

The Evening Report is basically a look back at your day from a workout/activity standpoint, as well as recommendations for sleep ahead.

Finally, shifting towards some general smart bits, the unit can display notifications from your smartphone (text and emoji). In the case of Android phones, it can also display photos and respond to text messages (Apple doesn’t permit either for non-Apple Watches at this time). But on both platforms you can read the message, as well as clear it.

Beyond that, the Forerunner 70 doesn’t have Garmin Pay or offline music, that’s on the Forerunner 170 (and other Garmin watches). So with that, let’s dive into the sports usage bits.

Sports Usage:

For most people, the reason you buy a Forerunner is to…well….run. But the reality is the Garmin Forerunner now supports basically just as many sports as any other Garmin series sport watch, with the only real exception being it lacks triathlon modes & openwater swimming support.

However, what it lacks there it gains in a slate of other sport profiles, and more specifically, Training Readiness, a feature I didn’t exactly expect to see on Garmin’s budget watch yet, which is a huge feature to help manage training fatigue. That said, I cover that in the next section, just since all the Training Load/Status/Recovery features, as well as  calendar-type features ended up making this section a bit too big. Likewise, accuracy is the section after this.

First up, to start a sport/activity, you’ll tap the upper-right button, which opens up the sports/apps menu. You can customize the list of pinned/favorited sports, as well as the order of them.

Here’s a listing of all the sport profiles available on the Forerunner 70 as of this writing. Generally speaking, we see Garmin add a few sport profiles every quarter or so (in their quarterly updates), though it kinda comes in waves (none for a few quarters, then a pile, then none for a while). Here’s what’s available today though:

Forerunner 70 Sport Modes: Run, Track Run, Treadmill, Road Bike, Walk, Cardio, Strength, Pool Swim, Trail Run, Bike (Outdoor), Bike Indoor, Virtual Run, Indoor Track, Obstacle Racing, Ultra Run, MTB, eBike, eMTB, Cyclocross, Gravel Bike, Bike Commute, Bike Tour, Mobility, HIIT, Yoga, Pilates, Elliptical, Stair Stepper, Row Indoor, Walk Indoor, Boxing, Mixed Martial Arts, Jump Rope, Hike, Rucking, Mountaineering, Disc Golf, Horseback, Archery, Inline Skating, Ski, Snowboard, XC Classic Ski, XC Classic Skate, Snowshoe, Ice Skating, Snowmobile, SUP, Kayak, Row, Snorkel, Soccer/Football, American Football, Basketball, Baseball, Softball, Volleyball, Cricket, Lacrosse, Rugby, Field Hockey, Ice Hockey, Ultimate Disc, Tennis, Pickleball, Padel, Racquetball, Squash, Badminton, Table Tennis, Platform Tennis, ATV, Snowmobile, Overland, Motocross, Motorcycle, Horseback, Breathwork

You can check out my full comparison to the Forerunner 170 below, but in short, the modes offered in that watch that aren’t in the Forerunner 70 are: Openwater Swimming, Floor Climb (needs altimeter), and Guided Meditation (Music only).

Once you tap a sport profile in the menu, it goes into a pending screen where you’re waiting for GPS (if outside), accessories (like cycling sensors), or heart rate lock. It’s here you can change settings, add structured workouts, courses to follow, etc…

You’ll notice you can now do equipment tracking (e.g., shoes, cycling gear, etc…) right from this screen.

Before we start an activity, note that each sport profile can be customized in more ways than you can count. It’s sorta Garmin’s jam in life, heavy customization. You can do this from either the Garmin Connect app, or the watch itself (again, some people prefer one way or the other).

One of the notable things about the Forerunner 70 is that it’s basically adopting the same codebase as the higher-end Forerunner & Fenix watches, and there are tons of little benefits to that, such as now being able to have up to 8 data fields per page, and nearly limitless custom data pages. Plus a boatload of graphical data pages.

Meanwhile, back on that pending page, you can add a structured workout, add a course, create a structured workout, etc… Additionally, if you have Daily Suggested Workouts enabled, for running you’ll get a structured workout listed based on your current Training Readiness levels as well as any goals you might have listed. I dive a bit more into scheduling races and such in the next section.

In any case, with that all set, you’ll tap start, and off you go. It’ll show your data pages in real time, and you can iterate through them to see details as you run. All of this worked just fine for me, like any other Garmin watch, including pace stability and such.

Now, the Forerunner 70 did add the ability to follow a breadcrumb course/route. There’s no maps on the Forerunner 70, but instead, you’ll just follow a line (old-school style). It’s not ideal for super-complex trails in the woods (because of junctions), but for city/street routes, as well as relatively simple trail following, it works pretty well. You can push routes from Garmin Connect to the watch (or load GPX/FIT/etc routes), including routes from Strava, Komoot, and others.

What’s notable is that the Forerunner 70 actually supports Waypoints, including the Up Ahead feature, showing you exactly how far it is until the next waypoint (per the route distance, not as the crow flies).

Even more so, it actually supports Garmin’s new rest timer and time cutoff features, which are aimed at the ultra-running crowd. Again, this is kinda the trickle-down benefit of using the same platform as the higher-end Fenix/Forerunner watches. You can create these aid station timers and time/course cutoffs, and see them in real-time on the watch:

As for the navigation itself, if you go off-course, it’ll warn you of such, and also show where you are on the breadcrumb trail:

It’ll show your elevation profile as well:

Lastly, for sensors, it does support pairing to various sensors, including chest straps, cycling speed/cadence sensors, and more. It does not, however, support cycling power meters or smart trainers (the Forerunner 170 and above do, though). Here’s the sensor list:

Sensor Supported: External HR (ANT+/Bluetooth), Footpod (ANT+/Bluetooth), Lights (ANT+), Cycling Radar (ANT+/Bluetooth), RD Pod (ANT+), Speed/Cadence Sensor (ANT+/Bluetooth), Tempe (ANT+)

In any event, once you complete your run, you’ll see a summary of your workout displayed, such as below:

Likewise, you’ll also see all this information displayed in Garmin Connect (mobile app or desktop), like below:

And of course, if you’ve set up sync to 3rd parties like Strava, TrainingPeaks, and more, it’ll sync off to those instantly. All of this is done via Bluetooth to your phone, and then the interwebs to those platforms. You can also use USB with Garmin Express on a desktop computer too. The Forerunner 70 doesn’t have WiFi.

Now, I do want to separate out one new feature on the Forerunner 70 that’s entirely new to Garmin watches, introduced here on the budget watch but soon coming to other higher-end Garmin watches, which is Quick Workouts.

New Quick Workout Creator:

Garmin has always reigned supreme when it comes to ways you could do structured workouts. Garmin has a manual interval creator (on-device), the ability to import workouts from Garmin Connect (yours or training plans), workouts from 3rd-parties and coaches (e.g., TrainingPeaks, etc…), pace/heart rate/etc targets, dynamic Daily Suggested Workouts, and many more options.

However, one thing it lacked was the ability to just request an on-demand workout of a given duration (time) and pain level, and then boom, give you a few options, and off you go. All on-device, without any AI-driven app or such behind the scenes. Now, it does.

Quick workouts is both simplistic, and frankly, awesome. You simply choose how hard you want to hurt (four different levels), then choose duration levels (30 mins, 45 mins, 60 mins). From there, it’ll spit out 1-4 structured workouts instantly that you can choose from.

As one who often decides what type of workout I’m going to do as I walk out the door, this is perfect.

Here, let’s take a quick look at how it works. First, you choose Run, then choose Training, then Quick Workout:

From there, you’ll choose the level of suffering. Again, super simplistic (if perhaps a touch bit stylistically dated):

Next, you’ll choose the duration. This doesn’t change, no matter how advanced you are. After all, any coach can make even the most elite athlete in the world hurt at any of these given levels.

Instead, the workouts it’s creating for you will vary based on your ability, driven by your workouts. As with most things on the Garmin watch, the more data (runs) you give it, the better this gets. I find that for most Garmin features, you’ll reach that optimal level of data about 4 weeks in, though this totally works straight out of the box too.

In any case, if you select the easiest level, these are almost always basically just blocks at an easy intensity. Whereas once you start increasing intensity, they start getting more creative, and you get more options:

Again, these are taking into account your existing training and ability levels:

The ‘cool’ part is that, unlike Daily Suggested Workouts, which will refuse to give you really tough workouts if it thinks you’re likely to get injured, the Quick Workout Creator has zero effs to give. Like asking for “native-level-spicy” at a Chinese restaurant, it’s gonna deliver probably beyond what you want to accept.

In any case, once you’ve picked your suffering, it’ll load up just like any other Garmin structured workout. So you’ll get prompts and countdowns as you iterate through:

Meaning it’ll tell you the target pace and time left for each section automatically, chirping as it goes along. Then, at the end it’ll give you an execution score:

Ya know what I like best about this? It just works.

No faffing about with some app on your phone driven by wonky AI that can’t put together a coherent workout. Instead, this is driven by the coaching principles that we’ve seen the rest of the Garmin platform leverage on workouts for years. Generally speaking, most people agree that the running workouts it generates once it has enough data are pretty solid (albeit usually a bit conservative, to avoid injury).

The point is, what I appreciate about this is that I can just decide how much I want to suffer as I walk out the door, without pulling out my phone, and then get right to business. Simple and effective.

Training Readiness & Planning:

In this section, I’m going to dig into some of the training features. At a high level, this includes:

– Race Planning/Calendaring
– Automatic coached workouts (for running and run/walk plans)
– Training Load (Training Status)
– Training Recovery
– Training Readiness
– Race Finish Time Prediction
– VO2Max Tracking

There are lots of other aspects that tie into these, but that’s the general gist of the core features.

To start, I’ll quickly cover race calendaring, noting that you do not need to put an event on your calendar for any of these features to work. You can simply not list anything at all, and the watch will automatically suggest running workouts for you to make you more fit, it’s just that those workouts won’t be catered to a given distance/event. Meaning, if you don’t tell it you’re running a marathon, it’s not going to suggest the weekly long runs that you’d associate with a marathon event.

To add an event, you can go to your Garmin Connect app and simply create an event, which can even search databases for the exact race (which is handy later as it pulls in the exact course/route, as well as weather conditions).

You can create multiple events, and prioritize events (e.g., A/B/C priority). These will then ultimately show up in your Race Calendar widget, which can predict your finish time (as of today). Note that Garmin’s higher-end watches can also do forward race time prediction (e.g., based on training, what your result might be in 5 months), though the Forerunner 70 can’t do that.

Now, regardless of what’s on your calendar (or not), Daily Suggested Workouts (DSW) will generate a workout daily to get you to that goal (or just to keep you fit). It does this based on looking at what it needs to do, while balancing your training readiness (e.g., sleep, other workouts, recovery times, etc…). In fact, it’ll even change in the middle of the day if you had exceptionally poor sleep, or went off and did some other high-intensity activity instead.

You’ll see these automatically when you open the Run app, and you can look ahead at your schedule as well:

But you can also change various settings related to it, such as specifying the day you do your long run, days you can’t run, and so on. You can also see these workouts going forward.

In general, I find the Garmin Daily Suggested workouts fairly conservative, which means they’ll err more on the side of avoiding injury than pushing you to the edge. They’ll still deliver very hard workouts, but they won’t ramp up mileage (or intensity) as hard as some coaches might.

Remember that Garmin’s coaching platform is just like any other coach and their coaching style, it has its preferences and quirks. I’ve had some coaches that are very aggressive in terms of ramping up mileage (because they know me as an athlete can typically handle that), and other coaches that are very conservative, preferring to avoid any injury at all (knowing that the most successful athlete is the one that gets to the start line).

In any case, one of the aspects that’s leaned heavily on here is Training Readiness, which looks at a few key metrics each day to figure out how ‘ready to train’ you are at any given minute in the day. This score shifts throughout the day, based on recovery time, if you just finished a workout, and so on. Meaning, you might wake up with a Training Readiness score of 60, and it might slowly climb to 71 by early afternoon (because your recovery time from the previous workout has improved). However, once you complete that hard interval workout, it might drop down to 12, because now your literal “readiness to train” again is very low.

Training Readiness is based on the following factors:

– Sleep (last night)
– Recovery time (from last workout)
– HRV Status
– Acute Load (training load)
– Recent Sleep scores (over the past 7 days)
– Recent Stress (over the past 7 days)

The score is most heavily weighted based on recovery time and sleep, meaning if you go out and do a marathon, it’s going to show a low training readiness score, regardless of your acute load, HRV status, etc… That is, unless your effort was low-enough intensity that it didn’t make a dent because you do marathons every day or such. Again, it’s all based on what the norm is for you.

Garmin has had Training Readiness for a few years now, and generally speaking, I find it a very good indicator of how ready I am to train. Which doesn’t mean I always listen to it, but I’ll use it as one tool in my shed. If I wake up and it’s showing a score of ‘8’, and I feel rough, it’s probably time to do something easier. Whereas if I wake up and feel good and the score is 20 or 30, I’ll likely rally. Again, remember Garmin skews conservative when it comes to trying to keep you uninjured. This is a big piece of that.

One of the metrics that make up Training Readiness is Acute Load, which is perhaps the best overall metric for looking at your Training Load. This metric shows your historical load range over the past 30 days as the green range, and then the last 7 days trending line atop that. It’s super helpful for figuring out how things compare to your baseline:

With that, you can see your Load Ratio, which shows whether you’re trending up or down. Generally speaking, you want to keep your upwards increase in training load at upwards of 1.2ish (meaning, you’re doing 20% more in the last 7-days, than the average 7-day period over the last 30 days).

Which then carries into Training Status. Training Status is more like a true coach that just focuses on whether the ‘type’ of training you’re doing is going to make you faster. Meaning, is it a balanced diet of easy workouts, hard workouts, etc… It mostly ignores factors like sleep/stress (except it does account for HRV). Whereas Training Readiness is looking at all those factors together.

Training Status is going to give you scores like Productive, Unproductive, Maintaining, Peaking, and Recovery. Generally speaking, I’d say that with Training Status in the last few years (new devices in the past few years), it’s now pretty hard to get into an Unproductive status unless you deserve it. However, I managed to, mostly because my zones were somehow set all wonky, and now getting out of this status has been near-impossible. In my case, it’s because it thinks every run is really hard, even really easy base runs. I’ve been having to fudge my HR zones temporarily the other direction to fix it, and I think I’m almost out of the woods.

You can see why it’s upset here, with my load skewed towards high-intensity, even though these were low intensity. This was because initially my zones were set incorrectly too high (and it was upset about that), so I lowered them, and it then made everything high intensity

In any case, generally speaking, for the last few years, I float between Productive or Maintaining most of the time, with occasional Peaking or Recovery if I’ve cut a lot of training load quickly (such as going on vacation, or before a race).

Of course, one really important thing to understand about Training Status (and correspondingly the VO2Max predictions) is that it’s heavily reliant on a varied diet of running, meaning longer runs, shorter-high-intensity runs, tempo runs, etc… If you’re only running a steady-state moderate intensity 30-minute run every other day, it’s going to struggle to be super accurate.

But I find that when I have that varied diet of training run types, it really does a good job at figuring out life and my VO2Max more accurately. And further, as a benefit, that’s generally speaking how you should be training anyway.

Heart Rate & GPS Accuracy:

The heart rate sensor is a Garmin Elevate Gen4 optical HR sensor, which isn’t their latest generation (that’s Gen5), but is generally good in the vast majority of situations. The Gen5 typically has an advantage in certain cases (like intervals on a cool but not super-cold fall day), though the Gen4 beats almost all of Garmin’s competitors anyway.

Meanwhile, on the GPS side, it lacks multiband GNSS, but as you’ll see, that doesn’t seem to stop it from throwing down really good tracks.

First, a quick look at an interval workout (the one I selected above in the Quick Workout generator, in fact). Here are both the Forerunner 70 & Forerunner 170, on separate wrists, compared to a chest strap and other devices.

You can see some slight variations here and there, interestingly more on the FR70 than the FR170, though that’s likely just simply luck of the wrist rather than anything.

Meanwhile, here’s a trail run I did. Well, it started off as a trail run for the first 45 minutes, then I did some intervals for the last 45 minutes. You’ll see where I held up my camera to get a quick snippet of b-roll (while starting the interval going downhill), which caused the cadence lock you see. That’s a good example of an edge-case scenario that the Gen5 optical HR sensor can typically handle.

Still, there are other times where the FR70/170 varies a bit on the recovery, especially, which is semi-common for optical HR sensors that tend to delay catching up after dropping down).

Meanwhile, here’s a run my wife did yesterday, and you can see it’s virtually identical to the Garmin HRM-FIT chest strap she was wearing:

As for GPS, the Forerunner 70/170 doesn’t have a multi-band GPS/GNSS, but as I’ve said countless times, it’s not the size of your GPS, but how you use it. Garmin specifically has had industry-leading non-multi-band GPS antenna designs (and chipsets/firmware) for the last few years, and beats almost every other multi-band/dual-frequency unit on the market. Virtually every reviewer out there finds the same.

So, with that in mind, here’s some trail running, without any issues at all:

Likewise, here’s a downtown area with plenty of tall buildings, and even going under a swimming pool. No, really, I went under it (yes, that’s a man in the water looking down at me):

As you can see, it’s virtually identical to the Fenix 8 Pro with full multi-band enabled in that scenario:

And likewise for this gravel bike ride, no issues here, including next to cliffs, and fast single-track trails that are frankly mountain-bike trails. Here’s a zoomed-in snippet of one section:

If I look at the heart rate data from that ride, you can see that most of the time it’s good, but equally, it missed one entire section/climb for no obvious reason. The fact that the FR170 managed that section (2nd interval, towards the end) is more likely just dumb luck than anything (identical sensors) – it could have easily been the other way around. That said, outdoor cycling, let alone gravel/MTB terrain as was the case here, is one of the most difficult things for most optical HR sensors, and that proved true here as well.

Across more and more trail runs, downtown building runs, and just general rides/runs, I continue to see virtually identical results between my Fenix 8 Pro and the Forerunner 70 when it comes to GPS.

For heart rate accuracy, as seen above, it’s generally very good, though there are minor moments in certain scenarios where the Gen5 optical heart rate sensor of a higher-end Garmin will outperform the Gen4 optical heart rate sensor seen on the Forerunner 70, but those are pretty few and far between.

(Note: All of the charts in these accuracy portions were created using the DCR Analyzer tool. It allows you to compare power meters/trainers, heart rate, cadence, speed/pace, running power, GPS tracks, and plenty more. You can use it as well for your own gadget comparisons, more details here.)

Comparison to Forerunner 170:

I’ve got an entire video & post covering all the differences to the Forerunner 170, as there’s more than meets the eye. Roughly 27 differences, some of them major, some of them minor. At a high level, the key differences are:

– The Forerunner 170 has a barometer altimeter, compass, and temperature sensor
– The Forerunner 170 has Garmin Pay
– The Forerunner 170 has a Music option (with offline music)
– The Forerunner 170 can pair cycling power meters and smart trainers
– The Forerunner 170 has an openwater swim mode

Again, there are a lot of nuanced features that spill out from the above, such as the altimeter gives you elevation and ascent data during activities as well as stairs climbed in daily life, and the cycling power meter gives you more cycling-focused metrics (like Cycling Performance & VO2Max predictions), and so on.

Check out my full Forerunner 70 vs Forerunner 170 post on that here.

Wrap-up:

I’m legit surprised that Garmin packed as much as they did into the Forerunner 70, all for $249. This is an incredibly competitive budget watch, even if the price of ‘budget’ has slowly shifted (by most brands) from $199 to $249. This watch is price-wise unlike anything else Garmin has released in the last few years, in any of their categories. It’s the first time in a long time that Garmin seems determined to not just win on pure features (or depth), but also compete against the COROS/Suunto/Polar’s of the world with price.

As I said in my video, I see this watch as the ‘easy-button’ pick for almost all road runners, or general fitness-focused people who want a Garmin watch without the Garmin price tag. It’s got all the health/lifestyle features of a higher-end Garmin watch, without compromising on the core running (or sports) features. Sure, it doesn’t have offline maps like an Amazfit unit would at this price, nor does it have music or contactless payments. But your phone does both of the last two, and for most road runners, maps aren’t a critical thing. Whereas if you shift over to trail running, then having offline maps (and features like ClimbPro) are much more valuable.

I have very few complaints about this watch, perhaps because almost all the features are already there in other watches and reasonably well-tuned. About the only ‘complaint’ I’d say is that the decision to exclude timing gates & race finish trimming is a bit quirky (given their inclusions of some ultra trail features), but honestly, that’s a pretty minor nit that most people won’t even notice (especially if you never load a route during a race).

It’ll be interesting to see in a few years if this unit turns out to be as popular as the existing Forerunner 55 was. With that – thanks for reading!

Found This Post Useful? Support The Site!

Hopefully you found this review/post useful. At the end of the day, I’m an athlete just like you looking for the most detail possible on a new purchase – so my review is written from the standpoint of how I used the device. The reviews generally take a lot of hours to put together, so it’s a fair bit of work (and labor of love). As you probably noticed by looking below, I also take time to answer all the questions posted in the comments – and there’s quite a bit of detail in there as well.

If you're shopping for the Garmin Forerunner 70 or any other accessory items, please consider using the affiliate links below! As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. It doesn’t cost you anything extra, but your purchases help support this website a lot.

Garmin Forerunner 70

Amazon REI

Here's a few other variants or sibling products that are worth considering:

Garmin Forerunner 170

Amazon REI

Garmin Forerunner 570

Amazon REI

Garmin Forerunner 970

Amazon REI

And finally, here’s a handy list of accessories that work well with this unit (and some that I showed in the review). Given the unit pairs with ANT+ & Bluetooth Smart sensors, you can use just about anything though.

Garmin Index S2 WiFi Scale

Amazon

This wifi-connected scale will track your weight and related metrics both on the scale display and in Garmin Connect (plus 3rd party apps like TrainingPeaks). It'll also then sync your weight to your watch/bike computer, to ensure accurate calorie data.

Garmin Cadence Sensor V2

Amazon

This is a dual ANT+/Bluetooth Smart cycling cadence sensor that you strap to your crank arm, but also does dual Bluetooth Smart, so you can pair it both to Zwift and another Bluetooth Smart app at once if you want.

Garmin inReach Mini 3 Plus Satellite Communicator

On Sale!

Amazon $449

I never leave cell range without this. Every adventure I do that could leave cellular coverage, I have this with me, and it has native integration with virtually all Garmin watches for seamless alerts. This is the newer version which can send voice mesages & photos.

Garmin Puck Charger (USB-C)

Amazon

Seriously, this will change your life. $9 for a two-pack of these puck Garmin chargers that stay put and stay connected. One for the office, one for your bedside, another for your bag, and one for your dog's house. Just in case.

Garmin HRM-200

Amazon

The HRM-200 is Garmin's newest strap that transmits concurrently on both ANT+ & Bluetooth Smart, as well as containing new authentication and encryption capabilities.

Garmin HRM-600

Amazon

The HRM-600 is Garmin's newest top-end strap that transmits concurrently on both ANT+ & Bluetooth Smart, as well as containing new authentication and encryption capabilities. Plus, it has all of Garmin's on-board storage features, for using it without a watch.

And of course – you can always sign-up to be a DCR Supporter! That gets you an ad-free DCR, access to the DCR Shed Talkin' video series packed with behind the scenes tidbits...and it also makes you awesome. And being awesome is what it’s all about!

Thanks for reading! And as always, feel free to post comments or questions in the comments section below, I’ll be happy to try and answer them as quickly as possible. And lastly, if you felt this review was useful – I always appreciate feedback in the comments below. Thanks!