Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

As someone else mentioned, make sure you are buying this watch for the right reasons! I have been a dedicated Fitbit user for the past 3 years. I have had the Charge HR, the Surge and the Blaze. I was a runner through the Charge and Surge (GPS) but then had a knee injury and became a gym rat through the Blaze time period. My knee has been doing better and so I am pleased to say that I am back to running! I used the Garmin and Fitbit Blaze together through various days and workouts to compare them. I hope this review helps someone switching from a Blaze/Surge to a Garmin 235. I love having an activity tracker but I also love having a GPS running watch. I had the Surge but it was SO ugly, I got rid of it. So why did I need to move on from the Blaze? It is advertised as being able to connect to your phone for GPS. This was an epic fail for me and although Fitbit customer service was awesome and replaced it under warranty, the new unit still did not work on GPS. It had a lot of bluetooth problems including not connecting often so that I could access music controls. It also was not catching my heart rate correctly during high cardio and peak heart rate. Here are my thoughts on the Garmin: -The GPS is awesome! Not once have I had a single issue with the GPS. I ran with the Blaze and Garmin yesterday. The blaze (connected to GPS for a brief moment before it lost connection) gave me 2.35 miles while the Garmin gave me 2.2. I do like that the Blaze tells you how many steps you take on your run while the Garmin does not. -The music controls work well and always connect. This was VERY important to me and if the Garmin did not have this option, I would not have bought it. I do wish it showed the track name like the Blaze did though. -I like that you can customize your Garmin, but it can take some practice before you can figure out how to do that. It's also MUCH easier to download apps, widgets and watch faces connected to your computer than to your smart phone. I got TONS of error messages when trying to do it on my phone. Also like the Fitness Pal connection. -Heart rate seems pretty spot on. I have read lots of reviews here that say this product has a bad hrm, but I have found that to be untrue. Since I have had many fitbits with this feature and experience with Polar heart rate straps (they cut my skin so I had to stop using them), I believe that the heart rate monitor is pretty reliable. It does not show the heart beat moving like the Blaze does, but that's minor and it does take a minute to update. It did catch my peak heart rate where the Blaze had trouble. It showed my peak at 175 which is maybe 3-4 beats too high but much closer than my Blaze which said 164. -As for steps... this is where I am not sure of the reliability. I wore it with the Blaze yesterday and the Blaze gave me 12,499 while the Garmin gave me 10,823. On Friday, my work schedule is such that I don't usually get very many steps and the Garmin gave me 10,948 steps, so I became suspicious leading to me wearing both monitors together on Saturday. I am going to guess that the correct number is somewhere in between the two watches. Also, the Garmin does not let you know when you have reached your goal and that feature on the blaze was kind of cute. VO2 Max is cool but probably not very accurate. So is the recovery hours suggestion. -Love the weather and sunrise/sunset view. This helps me not need to look the info up on my phone. -This is a very attractive looking watch. I hate that Fitbit is stuck on the square watch face look and I will not go back to Fitbit until they try a round watch face that can pass for a regular watch like this one can! I have a very small wrist (around 5.5") and this strap is comically long on me. I wish they made small watch band sizes for women like me. But nothing is as comical looking as the hideous Surge was! Here is where I agree with the reviewer about making sure that you are buying this watch for the right reasons! The bad parts. I am a gear head and very good with gadgets. So I can only imagine being someone who is not. -On the first night I had my Garmin, I was 100% sure I was going to return it because the set up process was such a pain in the butt. The app absolutely sucks. If Garmin could hire a Fitbit software engineer to sort out their IOS app, I would be a happy camper. I got so many error messages and I still cannot figure out how to use the app very easily. That's where Fitbit has one up on Garmin. Information you want at your fingertips are easy to find, but on the Garmin, it often takes me a few minutes to find the info I want. I wish I could have all the data from the Garmin with the Fitbit app. -The menus on the watch are very difficult to figure out. If you asked me right now how to get to my stopwatch feature, I could not tell you how and I would have to google it. I also had to google various other steps to access other things on the watch. -I cannot tell when my Garmin is actually charging. I don't see any icon or any indicator that it is charging and I have to just come back in a few minutes to see if the percentage has changed. -Battery life. Well, needless to say it doesn't last very long. I charged it fully on Wednesday and then used it only during the day (turning it off at night) and it is Sunday now. It has 31% battery left. So that's around 48 hours so far with probably another 8 before I need to charge it again. I read some users saying that the battery life gets better as time goes on so we will see. -Sometimes I wonder if the HRM is working at all. My blaze was running/flashing at all times. Just now, I took my garmin off and it is not flashing at all. It takes about a minute or so before it turns back on. But when it is working, it's reliable. So all in all, be sure you are buying this for the right reasons. Don't expect it to be a gimmicky/cute activity tracker like a Fitbit. If you are looking for a good GPS running watch with some maybe reliable activity tracking, this is the watch for you. I was very sad to leave Fitbit and I will probably go back if they ever come out with a Surge 2 that is not square (hate that look) so I can use their awesome app and do challenges with my friends and coworkers.