I had been looking forward to the Fenix 5 for a few weeks. After having had previous watches from Garmin, Polar and TomTom, I liked the last Garmin 920XT so much that I definitely wanted to go for a Garmin watch again. The only downside to the 920XT was the design. This watch is not suitable under a suit or for neat, but the Fenix 5 definitely is.
Delivery:
The delivery was perfect as always with Coolblue. Of the 71 times I ordered a product from Coolblue, 70 were delivered the next day.
However, I did not receive the watch I ordered. I had ordered a black Fenix 5, but received a Slate Gray with a black strap, a type that is not even listed on the Coolblue website. Now this was not a problem for me, because I liked this watch even more.
Design:
I have a normal to small wrist and this 47mm watch fits my wrist perfectly. I think the Fenix 5x would have been too big.
The watch looks very nice (opinion) and feels good quality. It doesn't feel like you're wearing a cheap plastic watch. It (85 grams) is also a bit heavier than the 920XT, but certainly not too heavy in my opinion. The only drawback I think is that you have to pay 100 euros more for a model with sapphire glass. My experience with the 920xt was that the glass damaged quickly. Fortunately, I have not yet suffered any damage with this watch, so I cannot estimate how strong this glass is.
Reliability:
I think it's important that if I've walked a part and then run the same part again the next day, that the distance is exactly the same. Of course there can be a small deviation, but I'm not talking about 100 meters difference on a stretch of 5 or 10 km, because I think that's quite a lot. As a result, the previous purchase of a Samsung S3 Frontier was dropped. This one was very unreliable, but not really a running watch. However, the Fenix 5 is accurate to the meter. Have now walked 4 times the same stretch of 7 km and always the distance was the same except for a few meters.
The reliability and accuracy of the built-in wrist-based heart rate monitor was less important to me, but it is also very accurate and reliable. I already assumed that I just had to wear my chest strap for a reliable result, but nothing could be further from the truth. He showed no strange fluctuations during walking and the values also corresponded well with the values obtained via the chest strap. 1 or 2 strokes difference, but often exactly the same.
The advantage of this Fenix 5 is that you can now connect chest straps from other brands such as Polar. In the past, Garmin only picked up bands with Ant+.
Setting options:
With this watch you can decorate almost everything to your own style. There are already quite a few watch faces in the Garmin IQ store and there are also quite a few apps and widgets to download. This downloading is quite easy and fast via the supplied charging cable.
Furthermore, you can set different sports as favourites, you can adjust the fields that are visible during walking, swimming, cycling, etc. to your own preference. You can set almost all the information you need, such as distance, speed, heart rate, cadence, etc.
You can also adjust the brightness of the lighting. Everything works very user-friendly and the settings can all be found fairly quickly.
I think the advantage of this watch over the 920XT is that you have to buy a separate Garmin chest strap for the running dynamics with the 920XT. This is not necessary with this watch, this information is simply collected by the watch itself: running cadence, stride length, training effect, etc. In addition, after every exercise you get to see how much rest you should in principle keep until the next time you have to sports.
GPS fix:
An annoyance with older sports watches for me has always been the dramatically slow GPS fix. For example, with a Polar and TomTom watches (older models), I regularly waited 5 minutes in the cold until the GPS was finally ready. With the Fenix 5 (where I tested it about 10 times) the fix was always found within 5 seconds and in many cases also within 1 second. That's really great.
smart watch:
Conveniently, you can also use the watch as a smartwatch. You can receive messages on it, as well as the weather, football results, calendar etc. You can set whether you want to receive a tone or a vibration or both and you can also set separately whether you want it while exercising or not. In addition, you can indicate whether you want to immediately see the message on your screen or only receive the notification without others being able to read your message immediately.
However, as a smartwatch, the watch is a lot less extensive than, for example, a Samsung S3 or Apple Watch.
Battery life:
I can say very little about this as I have only had the watch for 2 days, but after running 4x (4x30 min) and being connected to my phone every day, I still have 72% left after 2 days.
Link PC and Phone:
The connection to both the phone and the PC is done quickly and you have a lot of screens that you can read. Certainly on the PC you get a huge amount of information about your sports performance. This is also very clear and user-friendly.
On your phone you will see all information very clearly and clearly displayed and you can also find information such as the route (with map), records, etc.
Wristbands:
I was a bit apprehensive about Garmin's new wristband system. They pretend that these would be easy to change, but I was concerned that the construction would be too loose/slack. That is certainly not the case. The straps can really be detached from the watch with 1 click and feel very robust. So there is no play in the construction and the straps are firmly attached.
The wristbands are very flexible and sit comfortably on the wrist.
I definitely think this watch is a must. It is a watch of which I have not yet been able to discover the negatives.
