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(More customer reviews)I purchased the Garmin 610 at the Boston Marathon expo. I had the Garmin Forerunner 305 for 3 years previously and the watch worked great and I had little problems. The battery life was starting to die and I had it turn off during a wet 25k race, so since I truly forgot my Garmin 305 home for the race, I bought the 610 at the expo.
I wore it for the marathon without really testing it out and it worked fine (or so I thought).
However, when I started to run at home, I started to notice the following bug and annoyances:
1. When ever you press start at your runs, the GPS accuracy would go from < 15ft to > 150ft. In some runs I would be running for 30+ seconds before it every registered pace or distance. So my first mile would be off by 15-20 seconds.
2. It consistently measured < 1%+ on all the same routes I ran on for three years with the 305. Yes, people will say that that is within the GPS tolerance of error and maybe the 610 is more accurate, but this lead to really closely analyze the GPX data (the actual path data the unit records) and...
3. The path is all over the place at the start. This is the main cause of the incorrect pace at the start.
4. In a recent 12.5 mile run I ran with both my 305 and 610 on the same wrist. The 305 measured 12.52 while the 610 measured 12.40. The 305 agreed with what it had always said over 3 years and what a hand-measured distance on mapmyrun.com showed.
5. About 10+ times in the GPX path data you can see the 610 either loops back on itself or totally loses track, while the 305 path is still smooth.
6. When measuring the actually distance of the GPX track (point to point and not what the watch shows) the 305 was at 12.57 and the 610 was at 12.69. So clearly shows the extra 0.29 in these GPS point glitches
7. On numerous occasions, especially after auto-lap it shows that I am running 1-2 min/mile pace. I can assure you I am no Usain Bolt.
8. The heart rate strap is rather comfortable, but it seems to eat into my skin on long runs. The 305 strap never did this.
9. On Auto Scroll the clock is one of the screen which is rather useless when running.
The watch to me seems like its all whizz-bang and has no meat. The watch itself is great. I wear it everyday. I have had zero problems with the touch screen, but I didn't spend $399 on a watch that had cool features. I mainly bought it because I "thought" it would have at least the same accuracy level as the 305 which you can buy on Amazon for $120. But it doesn't and it doesn't come close. Others have seen the problems I had detailed above. They are over on forums.garmin.com. Maybe I got a lemon because it was the first batch of watches.
Also Garmin Support was horrible on this issue. Here is the reply I got from them. I don't think they even looked at the data. I think they assumed I didn't really know anything about this stuff.
Dear XXXX XXXXX,
Thank you for contacting Garmin International.
I was concerned about possible GPS Drift. The time stamp appears to show the 305 started at .01 seconds ahead of the 610.
After collaboration with the engineers and sending your data to them the difference of .12 is within the acceptable ranges for GPS watches which is 1%. Also you may have had consistent readings with your 305 but they may have been consistently wrong and now you have a watch with correct readings the natural assumption would be that the 610 is wrong when in fact the issue may be with the 305.
Click Here to see more reviews about: Garmin Forerunner 610 Heart Rate Monitor Watch - Garmin 0100094710
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