Garmin fēnix 7S Solar Multisport GPS Watch, Slate Grey with Black Band

Product Information

Meet any athletic or outdoor challenge with the rugged fēnix 7S Sapphire Solar multisport GPS watch. It’s styled for smaller-sized wrists, and its scratch-resistant Power Sapphire™ solar charging lens uses the sun’s energy to extend battery life — powering advanced training features, sports apps, health and wellness monitoring sensors and more. This is where you’ll see two sections. The first is the TopoActive Maps, which are the main maps that you want for sports/adventure navigation. However, there’s also entries below it for SkiView and CourseView (golf), plus a vert basic worldwide base map (it’s useless). The SkiView and CourseView maps are preloaded on all units, because they’re relatively small (23MB for SkiView, and roughly 200-500MB for each continent’s golf courses). We are also able to offer an exchange to a different product if required, please specify this when returning your product.

The new multiband GPS registered a small improvement over runs using regular GPS. But despite an upgraded next-generation optical heart-rate sensor, we got the usual lag, lurch and rogue max BPM reads that all wrist sensors suffer from. As with its predecessor, the Fenix 7 is available in a mind-boggling array of different sizes, colourways and feature combinations, and a commensurately wide range of prices. The Garmin Fenix 7 range of watches landed at the start of the year, after what has felt like an age of waiting – although it’s actually been less than three years since its predecessor, the game-changing Fenix 6, came to market.Note that the usual smart-recording or 1-second recording option is still in the settings (and still annoying defaulted to ‘Smart Recording’), but that has no bearing on the GPS reception timing/display, it’s purely what it writes to the recorded file. In the case of the microphone/speaker, Garmin says that the higher waterproofing standard of the Fenix series (100 meters) versus the Venu 2 series (50 meters), makes this challenging at this time. On the LTE front, I asked Garmin why there was no LTE option given it’s been a while since they launched the theoretically inferior FR945. It was the singular item they provided a ‘no comment’ on, out of the arguably 50-70 questions/details I’ve asked over the past two months. As expected, the Fenix 7’s optical heart-rate monitor lags behind the chest belt for short bursts of intense activity, and its performance for maximum heart rate isn’t quite as good, either, with a difference of 4.3% over those same runs. It’s certainly good enough for most workouts, however. Finally, those of you with Fenix 6 series watches are getting many, but not all, of the new software features in “an upcoming update”. Many of these were actually released over the weekend, but some are still outstanding. The specific list of features coming to the Fenix 6 series devices is: You can, of course, opt for an older Fenix 6S to save money. Fenix 7S and Fenix 7 – the key differences* *Standard versions

Remember also that you can change the map sets shown. Within the TopoActive map, there are different map layers, including high contrast ones, night ones, even popularity routing (heatmap) ones. I find I tend to prefer the popularity one the most, but the one titled ‘System’ is the default. The sports available on the Fenix 7 series are (some are technically not sports, but fall under the apps list, like Map Manager):READ NEXT: Our guide to the best running watches you can buy Garmin Fenix 7 review: What you need to know GPS-based distance, time and pace. Cadence, real-time performance compared to average (after 6-20 mins). PacePro pacing strategies. Run workouts, race predictor. With that out of the way, the Fenix 7 series retains the same case sizes as the Fenix 6 does, which are: If you tap the up button you can add a course (or other routing, more on that later), structured training, or change the power profiles. I mean, frankly, you can change anything from this point. For example, you can see how many hours of GPS life you’ll get with your current settings, and then there’s some pre-canned options which show higher GPS levels if you realize you’ll need them. Or, you can go rogue and create your own battery profile: The total spread in ascent between all those units is 27m (out of 1,341m), which is a max spread of 2%. The COROS Vertix 2 seems to start off however about 20-25m higher than the other units, but over the course of five hours, drifts closer to the other units. Given there was no absolute known good reference point along the trail to compare against, it’s hard to say exactly who was perfect. But I think it’s fair to say that any unit would have been more than sufficient in this scenario.