Which GPS watch?

[hopelessCause]

I've narrowed my choice down to TomTom Runner, Garmin 220 and Suunto Ambit 2.

I would really appreciate hearing any good or bad experiences anyone has had with these.

[Hidden]

I've got the Tomtom runner, can't really fault it I use it in conjunction with the Miolink heart rate monitor.. But, I'm seriously tempted to buy the Garmin 225, looks nice with the built in heart rate monitor, which is in actually fact the Miolink heart rate monitor. Personally if it was me and you are going to buy Garmin, get the 225 £240.

[hopelessCause in reply to Hidden]

Way too expensive, I'm afraid! I can buy the TomTom Multisport for £100, the Runner +HRM for £80 and the Garmin 220 for £106.

[Hidden in reply to hopelessCause]

too expensive, less than a pint & half of beer a week for one year. Nah that's cheap I think. Besides, most hobbies cost a damn site more than this to do. A season ticket for football, not that I'd go. A ticket for the British Grand Prix on race day, not that I'd go. Its a question of priorities I think. Buy cheap buy twice. might as well get the right one in the first place, lol rich coming from me.

[hopelessCause in reply to Hidden]

It is indeed a matter of priorities and for me food and rent are my priorities. I get about £130 a week sickness benefit so a running watch is actually not a priority for me at all, it's a huge luxury and it'll be a long time before i can actually buy one! I don't know anyone who would spend two weeks wages on a running watch! I'm already pushing way beyond my spending limit in looking at the 220.

[hopelessCause in reply to Hidden]

Have you seen the Tomtom Cardio watches Hussainboltz? These watches with built in HRM sound really cool.

[Hidden in reply to hopelessCause]

Point taken, I could be tempted to sell my runner and miolink for the Garmin 225 though.

[Tomas Graduate]

I've had a 220 for a year (sold it a few months ago when I upgraded). Can't fault it.

[hopelessCause in reply to Tomas]

Tomas - could you please tell me how it deals with accurately measuring distances run on hills? I spoke to both Garmin and Tomtom about this as I live and run in a hilly area and they assured me the watches would do this okay but do you know how that works in reality? ILOVE how the 220 looks but the display on the Tomtom is bigger and I'm a bit gozzy-eyed.

[Tomas Graduate]

HopelessCause, like most of us when we get a new toy, I checked the distance measuring quite carefully when I first got it, and found that it was generally speaking spot on. Having said that, my experience before that was runkeeper running on an iPhone, so it's no surprise that the dedicated gps watch was miles better (pun not intended).

It's pretty flat where I live, so most of my runs were not on hills. But the few times we went holidaying somewhere with hills and I went out a run, the 220 seemed to do its usual perfect job of measuring distances. Although, I never went into super geek mode to double check.

If I remember right, the 220 does not have a digital barometer, so it can't calculate elevation based on the air pressure. But obviouisly the GPS system is a 3D system where it calculates the elevation based on the time it takes the signals to arrive from the satellites.

[hopelessCause]

Ahhhhhh, I see.....I just wondered if I would have to manually do the relevant calculations after the run. Thank you!

[AdamB Graduate in reply to hopelessCause]

All the Garmins (and I suspect many other gps watches will have similar) will give elevation data based on the map heights. As long as you are somewhere with decent elevation data (and that's most of the civilised world) you'll find that elevation data will be recorded for you. You get this info as soon as you upload your route to a pc (or smartphone) through Garmin Coonect. That's often more accurate than units that use barometric recordings because they have to be set each time you run and can be affected by changes in weather conditions. The map based data won't recognise the 2 meteres you climbed when going over that hump backed bridge, but apart from that, it's pretty good.

[dagshar Graduate]

Just got a garmin 210 not sure what the difference is, but other than that it was easy to set up i can't comment as the maiden voyage will be tomorrow.

[Rignold]

I have run races where there was controversy because a huge number of runner's watches recorded a distance a few km shorter or longer than the official race length. I have also done a few where debate has raged online for days afterward between people whose Garmin or Suunto registered vertical gain of 1136m vs 1141m or 1133m.

Clearly some people care more about accuracy than others. For me, if I have have run 14k rather than 10, or vice versa, that matters, but if I have climbed 3m more or less over 1100-ish, it doesn't, enormously.

They're all pretty good. Whichever you choose will do a good job.

[Tomas Graduate in reply to Rignold]

Spot on. Some of the technical fora seems to be populated with people who forget the purpose of the watch and spend their lives worrying about trivial differences.

[Prune in reply to Tomas]

Is that the plural of forum?! I knew I like your posts for a reason, Tomas and now I know why

[Jon_boy Graduate]

No experience of the others but I am loving my £60 Crane watch from Aldi a couple of weeks back. With a download of some free software called GPS master(can convert the files to GPX format and upload to Strava as well for greater analysis) it is doing me nicely.

Our local store still had stock on Thursday just gone.