I've been a Garmin customer for the last four years starting with the Forerunner 235 up to the fantastic Forerunner 935, which I used for the last two years. The Forerunner 945; is not a worthy successor.
In fact the 945 is currently on its way back to the vendor as I type this due to a laundry list of both physical issues and software problems so egregious I have to question just what the company was thinking in releasing this in an obviously rushed state.
-Lets talk about the elephant in the room: the buttons. The 945 is supposed to have buttons that have a 'click' to inform the user that button has been compressed. It's a satisfying little thing, but it doesn't work. Now, the 935 also did this but after sometime, that stopped. The button still functioned but the click was gone. In less than two weeks the 945 'Down' button (bottom left button on face) would click sometimes, and then not click and then finally; got stuck in the housing and had to be physically pried out of the unit (using my nails like tweezers to yank it out). The function of the button was also splotchy. Sometimes it worked, others it did not.
-The battery life is the absolute worst I have ever seen in a Garmin watch since I began using theese watches. My over 2 years old 935 (which I returned to) is vastly superior. I had a never-ending 1.5-2.2%/per hour battery drain on the watch regardless to what I had running or not running. I ran the straight default settings and had the issue, I turned off sensors (PulseOX,see below), same drain, completely drained the battery hoping this would correct it, did not. I factory reset the watch numerous times and nothing fixed it. Either the software was killing the battery (via bug) hardware (too much of a energy hog, and a massive design flaw) or the physical battery itself was bad. Either way it rendered the watch useless.
-PulseOx does not work as intended as of this writing. It seemed to work during sleep, the all day option does not with hours upon hours of missed reports happening. This most likely led to some of the battery drain. I had to force a reading via the widget all the time and even then it took a number of tries for it to work. This was not ready for market.
-The optical heart rate monitor and PulseOx stays on while doing a tracked activity if you are using an external sensor for heart rate measurements. Garmin states this is needed for users to use Garmin Pay. Well I didn't even have Garmin Pay set-up and it still ran. This is an unesscessary battery drain. Could they not just set the parameters to turn these on ONLY when the user is using Garmin pay? There's also the psychological issue for the user. Is the watch actually getting a measurement from the external strap? Is it coming from the wrist? The watch infrequently would state "external HR connected" while in a tracked activity, but not all the time. A simple icon showing a heart with strap around it would have cleared up the confusion instead of sharing the exact same icon between the external and wrist.
This watch was rushed to market and did not build upon it's predecessor in any way. Garmin put out their luxury line with all the new bells and whistles and clumsily shoveled them onto the 935 successor with obvious poor manufacturing and the same run-of-the-mill shoddy software updates for a new device for the next six months. If you own a 935 and is thinking about upgrading, I'd hold off. If you're thinking of moving up to the top tier, buy the 935, the 945 is a mess.
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