New Models Garmin 230, 235, 630

Cona

My Garmin is on its last legs and I am in the market for a new watch. I had considered the Fenix 3 but now I am leaning back towards the new Garmin models.

Discussions and thoughts on these new models?

http://www.dcrainmaker.com/2015/10/garmin-fr230-fr235-fr630.html

ThisRegard

I just posted in the other thread, the Fenix 3 is on bike-discount.de for €356.95+€8 DHL, the lower price might sway you back to the Fenix.

Baggirshorts

Cona wrote: »

My Garmin is on its last legs and I am in the market for a new watch. I had considered the Fenix 3 but now I am leaning back towards the new Garmin models.

Discussions and thoughts on these new models?

Well I have just recently bought the FR225...only to read your link and find out it's a replaced model already...:-(
LOL...

McNamarathon

I'm in the same boat as my Garmin 405 is about to die. I'm leaning towards the 235 with the built in heart rate monitor. Both the 230 & 235 look better value than the 630 as they all seem to do the same thing only the 630 has touch screen and running dynamics which I can definitely live without.

I see the 230 & 235 are available on the Garmin website now. Hopefully Santa might be good to me this year.

Bez Bing

I like the look of the 230/235, not sure what use those fancy running dynamics are really.

opus

The review showed up on the dcrainmaker site, reasonably positive with a few caveats, the battery one sounds ugly if they're advertising 9 days +...

– FR235 Battery Life: It’s bad. Really bad. It’s about 2-2.5 days for me, using the optical HR sensor on its usual continuous mode (24×7). It’s supposed to be 9-11 days. Garmin says they’re aware of the issues and are working on it, with hopes to issue a firmware update in a few weeks. I’m sorta realistic though that something will have to give here – such as reduced sampling rates. Perhaps I’ll be proven wrong, but it’s a pretty big jump to increase battery life 4x over what’s there today without any negative impacts.

– FR235 optical HR is a bit…jaggy: For lack of better term, perhaps spikey, the optical HR signal seems to be a bit non-smoothed. It’s rare that I ask for something to have more smoothing, but it seems like that might be called for here. I’m sure there are other ways they can address it, but it’s just a touch bit too variable. This isn’t a deal breaker right now, but is something they should address.

– FR235 optical HR quirks with fast pace shifts and some hill sections: As noted in the accuracy section.

sconhome

That is interesting Opus.

Considering AFAIK the 225 features the mio optical sensor which was a gap fill while Garmin pursued it's proprietary sensor to go in the 235 I'm curious about those reports of accuracy.

225 was pretty much flawless so you'd wonder why change (other than for money reasons). Hopefully they don't return to the manufacturing issues of the earlier models and clean up under warranty claims.

Woden

I resisted on the 225 and now see that the 235 is out. Concerned about the caveats in the 235 still considering picking one up. I'm coming from a 410 so happy that the bike mode is back.

Sometimes you just want a new piece of kit!