Garmin Fenix3 - day 1

Just unboxed my Garmin Fenix3 and when I posted the photo to facebook a number of people asked for a review - so I figured I would use my blog here to keep people up to date with the good and the bad.

Watch is nicely packaged in a box that resembles a quality watch. No issues when I opened the watch from the box, everything that was supposed to be there was there and the battery had about 50% charge so turned on straight away. It is a very attractive piece of kit - I had it sitting next to my xt910 which is now showing its age by comparison. The buttons have a really nice feel to them though going from the 910 to the fenix3 is not intuitive and you will need to relearn each of the buttons. Having the start/stop/select button as the largest is a good idea though.

First thing I did was set the time (which I did manually, later setting this to auto so it gets set from the satellites which is far more convenient). I couldn't set the date but by the next morning the date had set itself (how I still am not sure as I hadn't connected it to satellites overnight). There is no way to set the date so my assumption is it just gets set by connection to the phone or some other means. There is nothing in the manual at all about "date" so I can only assume on this point.

I then paired with my phone which was super easy and took no time at all using the Garmin connect app (I already had this on my phone but if you don't have it I suggest you download it). As soon as it was paired I started receiving notifications. On my phone I have notifications for email and twitter and this started to get a bit too much by the end of the night. So I will probably turn the Twitter notifications off. The SMS and Call notifications were great though as I often miss sms and calls when I'm out with my phone in my pocket - particularly as I usually have the ring turned off and just have my phone on vibrate. So with this watch on you should never miss a call!

I tuned the watch off for the night given I didn't get home till late so didn't get a lot of time to "play" with it. Looking forward to getting a bit more time with it tomorrow.