Garmin Swim 2 GPS Swimming Smartwatch – Whitestone, White
Garmin Swim 2 GPS Swimming Smartwatch – Whitestone, White, One Size
Designed for Water
Garmin Swim 2 was designed to never slow you down in the water — it’s slim and lightweight. The always-on, full-colour Garmin Chroma Display technology that makes it easy to read, even in direct sunlight. With its reliable five-button interface, you can easily start workouts, view different data, log drills or change your settings without worry of water interfering.
Stay Connected
Get your swim in without leaving important smart features behind. Once paired with your compatible smartphone, you can stay connected with smart notifications and automatic uploads to the Garmin Connect online community. The app allows you to see detailed metrics and track your progress over time. You can also share your workout data with your coaches, workout buddies or friends and family.
24/7 Wear
Beyond its swimming capabilities, the Garmin Swim 2 smartwatch offers wellness monitoring features and fitness tracking, which make it great for all-day wear. Features such as all-day stress tracking and advanced sleep monitoring help swimmers manage their overall health by providing crucial insights that can be used to maximise their training. Set move goals, track steps, monitor body battery, perform guided breathing, and use it to track workouts — including cycling and running — out of the water.
Overall a good swimming smartwatch
I had the watch for over one year. It has a few functions, I mainly use pool swimming, open water and cardio for paddling sessions.
It is able to measure and monitor pool swimming distances accurately in more than 90% of cases. Every once in a while it skips or adds a length.
It recognises the front crawl and fly but is not that good with backstroke or breast stroke.
It gives you number of laps/total distance, average speed, strokes/lap, HRate.
During pool swimming can be set to show you distances (total/intermediate) or times.
Open water swimming uses the satnav.
The satnav is ok. I expected more from Garmin. It shows you swimming on the land but in spite of this I found the distance and the average speed to be what I expect.
Battery lasts for about 7 days.
Didn’t manage to use the alerts or auto laps correctly. I found the drills a bit awkward to use. It only records the time, you need to add the distance. I just skip them.
If you just walk, don’t use the cardio. I don’t know why but it shows you a higher HR at the beginning.
Overall it is a watch I would recommend, if you are focused on swimming and need something to count the laps or record distances for you.
Very good value
Watch is great does all that it should do, purchased for my son he is very happy with it, wanted it for swimming mainly, was a bit hard to program but all ok in the end, good price
Very satisfied
I like the watch very much. Getting used to the menues etc can be tricky at times but once mastered the watch does everything I want. I use it most of all for swimming and walking. The different dials are great and I have chosen the “data” one which is clear and full of fun facts. Would highly recommend this watch for all swimmers
I brought it because my GP is nagging me to provide ‘fitness data’, and selected this on specifically because I do a lot of pool swimming.
I have had this watch for a few days now and here are my fist impressions.
Aesthetics and screen
As a watch (I have analogue hands selected) I can easily read the time with our without the backlight turned on. The display is crisp and clear (although at my age I cant read any text without removing my glasses).
This physical depth of the watch body is deeper than I would like, but this is one of the thinner watches on the market; I recognise what has to go inside and this is probably an area that gives engineers trouble for any watch let alone one with GPS receiver and optical sensors for heart rate etc… overall Garmin are probably pushing the boundaries for the state of the art in this area.
Comfort
For me the watch strap is too short – I have the larger strap on order, but then I suspected that would be the case before placing my initial order so certainly won’t hold that against them.
What I am disappointed with though is that in order to have the strap tight enough that the watch doesn’t move around on my wrist, then the clip digs in enough that it grazes my skin enough that it is painful. It is perhaps because the silicone strap is so compliment, and the buckle being solid is the bit that will dig in. (when I remove the watch there is a feint outline of the watch body, nothing for the strap and a big indentation, and red marks where the buckle joins the strap.)
The smarts
As previously stated I didn’t especially want a smart watch. I really hate the whole IOT / Cloud / big data trend and actively try to avoid it, but given that my GP wants the data, and that I don’t have the time or patience to write my own data collection app to bypass the Garmin system (let alone reverse engineer the watch to phone comms) then this will have to do.
I didn’t realise that I needed a smart watch – I probably don’t. But I do find the analytics applied to the data it collects really interesting. The sleep and stress monitoring is especially interesting.
Now I am sceptical about accuracy, & inferences that are made from the measurements taken, after all this is all derived from a clock, multi-axis accelerometer and a the critical LEDs and Photo Diodes to measure sub-dermal optical scatter and reflection changes as blood pressure changes with each heart beat. I certainly wouldn’t want to add Si units of measurement to any of this data, but it is probably enough to get trend analysis. Over time I will take comparative measurements and see just how good the watch is, but for now lets just say that what it is reporting to me has a very strong correlation to expectations and totally non-scientific observations 🙂
I was using my iWatch for my cold open water swims, but struggling when the water was very cold to get it to turn off / end, additionally sometimes the GPS didnt seem particularly accurate.
No such problems with the Swim 2 – easy to use, the buttons mean it can be paused / splits taken / session ended with ease, additionally the GPS seems much more accurate.
An added bonus is the battery life – so much better than my iWatch – it requires charging much less often.
In Summary, great, easy to use product, perfect for pool or OW swimming – also able to track walks / runs /bike rides too.
Recommended
Initially gave it a one star, had trouble setting the custom pool length, seemed only to go to 15m, put in the box ready to send back, then read the instructions , actually goes from 0 – 150m, also had trouble initially with the miles when used in the bike mode, again set to uk miles and now me and the swim 2 are the best of buddies, inseparable, has also got a clock on it and an alarm clock etc. Modes; swim, cycle etc are really easy to use, swim and miles accurate and reliable, love it, good job I didn’t take notice of any of the bad reviews, I always bear in the back on my mind they are written by people like me.