Monday, June 6, 2011

Two More Runs with the Garmin 610

Busy weekend, no time really to do my full review of the new 610. I will try to get that out sometime this weekend.

Yesterday's run was cutback from 2 hours to 90 minutes. Just didn't feel like running that long, the summer running doldrums of in-between marathon training. For this run I cleared the Timer Started window only.

This morning's run was 1 hour. For this run I cleared both the Timer Started and Lap windows.

Quick and dirty details:
  • Sunday's run: 305: 11.19 miles 610: 11.16 miles. I still think there is some delay at the start with the 610, since the Timer Started window still pops up and you have to clear it. Would be nice if they just got rid of the window popping up at all. Nevertheless, pretty good agreement between the two watches. I didn't see the GPS accuracy field blow up on the 610.
  • I had some weird ANT+ uploading issues I think that were caused by coming into and out of range of the ANT+ stick which caused not everything to upload. I had to turn on/off the watch once to actually get it to upload. The ANT+ agent on my laptop seems to get stuck at 44% uploaded and others have noticed this as well.
  • Monday's run: 305: 7.28 miles, 610: 7.28 miles. What I noticed from this run is that there is some sort of lag at the start for the 610. The 610 was consistently 0.015-0.025 miles behind the 305 until the end. Then the distances were equal. My pace over the last 0.28 was about 10 sec/mile faster on the 610, so that is probably where the catch up was.
So....

I don't think I'll be wearing the 305 anymore (with the 610) as its no fun wearing two watches. I will probably update my review on Amazon to 3 stars. (I would do 3.5 stars but they don't have it). For the 610 to get to 5 stars here are the main items they need to improve on:
  • Fix the Timer Started/Lap screen pop-up with a firmware update. The users shouldn't have to always do something to get a product to work.
  • On Auto Scroll, the option to not have the time-of-day/Clock screen included.
  • Hammer out the problems with auto-uploading through ANT+
However, it is good to see that there is some resolution to the problems I first reported. 

2 comments:

  1. Hi, have you read the "2011 Sport Device GPS Accuracy In Depth: Part I" article on www.dcrainmaker.com? Interesting to notice the "bad" results of the 610 compared for instance to the 210.

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  2. No I did not, but I just looked. Interesting to see how the 610 comes up short on the normal, rambling route that everyone runs on.

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