Internal Mono(b)log

With some patience and perseverance I managed to score myself a Garmin 910xt with a heart rate strap.  I was on the fence about these units until I started to research the battery life with the GPS on: 16 hours in pretty amazing in my mind.

DC Rainmaker has done his normal, stellar job of a detailed review of the Garmin 910xt and I won’t replicate it or even try to here.  See his blog for all that in depth content.  It really is extremely well done and well worth the read.   In general, if you’re looking at gear, check his site, he does an amazing job reviewing gear at a depth level that I sometimes have a hard time consuming, never mind producing! 🙂

What I’ll give you here are my initial impressions of the 910… kind of a reader’s digest view of the Rainmaker review if you will 🙂

Likes

• Pool swim mode: it’s nice to be able to collapse 2 devices (swimsense and 310xt) into 1.  The pool mode works well and the screen is much easier to read than that of the swimsense
• Battery life is stellar. Though I haven’t tested it yet, the quoted specs are great!
• GPS sensitivity feels much better than the 310’s: it seems to find satellites faster and keep lock in poor weather better
• Has “Training Effect”, which I haven’t currently used, but will explore (TSS is, in theory, coming soon and I’ll look forward to that for sure)
• Because the 910xt is ANT+, all of my existing ANT+ devices “just work”

Dislikes

• The smallest pool length it allows for is 20m.  My neighbourhood’s YMCA’s pool is 18m.  Hopefully a future firmware update relaxes the 20m limit.  I can’t see any good reason for it to persist.
• It appears that in order to upload swim workouts to TrainingPeaks I have to export them from Garmin Connect and then manually import them to TrainingPeaks.  This is pretty clunky and hopefully new releases of TrainingPeaks device agent or the Garmin ANT Agent resolve this
• No Heart Rate data on the swim.  Currently Polar is the only manufacturer of a strap-based HRM that transmits on frequencies that can be received in the water.  Why Garmin doesn’t do similar is beyond me.

Curiosities

• I have the quick release for the 310xt and anticipate getting it for the 910xt, though given the size of the 910 adding the quick release may just make it too unwieldy
• I’m really curious about the battery extender, though given the published battery life expectancies, you’d only need this additional battery life if you were doing ultraman or some other super-long event.

In Summary

If you’re a data addicted triathlete, like me, this is probably the closest to the ultimate training watch on the market today.  I can’t imagine you regretting the purchase.  Shame about the backlog but I know that Garmin is working hard to get caught up.