Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

[Updated after using the watch for 3 years.] I swim 3 times a week on a masters swim team, and am a USMS coach. I pre-ordered the Garmin Swim ("GS") and received it around August 1. I have logged 6 workouts [now many more!] with the GS, and overall, I am impressed at what this watch does and I still consider it the hands-down best choice for the money. The watch is easy to set up (for the length of your pool, plus your weight and so on), and easy to sync to your computer. There's also a handy "3-second countdown timer" function that lets you avoid the hassle of pushing a button as you're pushing off the wall. The reports generated are pretty exhaustive and provide tons of information about what you did and how efficiently you did it. (By the way, the GS is not a heart-rate monitor, although it does tell you how many calories you've burned.) Here are a couple of things about the product that I didn't understand before I started using it. 1. The GS tracks your distance by noting turns/flips and a strong glide after the turn (I think). If you start your stroke too early after a turn, it will sometimes [very rarely] miss the fact that you completed a length, and your total length swum for that interval will be off. Thus, it is a good idea to keep track of the length of each set as you go--in effect, trusting the watch but not turning your brain off completely. 2. If you do your strokes correctly, the GS is quite good at recognizing whether you are doing fly, back, breast, or free. If you are sloppy, the GS can get confused. Unlike some other reviewers, I have not had any significant problems with the GS accurately tracking my progress as long as I swim carefully around turns. Once, on a swim of 5525 yards, it missed 50 yards (2 lengths of the pool)--which I figured was better than I would've done if counting in my head. :-) 3. You can set the GS for drills, but I don't think there's a way to set it for kicking. While understandable considering the way the GS tracks your distance, this is also frustrating, since normally when I kick I don't do flip turns--so the GS doesn't log this mileage. I have to manually add the distance of any kicking sets (exactly as I do for drill sets) to get an accurate total distance for the swim. Which brings me to my next point-- 4. I wish there were a way to override the total distance logged by the device, via the GS website.. I really *love* the fact that the GS tells you how far you've swum in each week (right on the watch face--very motivating!), but it would be so, so, SO much better if that number were accurate--at this point (the only way I can figure out to do this is to create a "fake" workout by putting the watch into Drill mode and plugging in whatever distance I missed before saving my real workout. (This is easy--I just had to figure it out.). I would strongly recommend the GS for any swimmers who want info about their workouts and the motivation of "workout reports" for each swim. The GS is easy to use, times your swimming and rest intervals, and does lots more. Now, if ONLY Garmin would offer this watch in some colors more exciting than BLACK.