Garmin Swim 2, GPS Swimming Smartwatch for Pool and Open Water, Underwater Heart Rate, Records Distance, Pace, Stroke Count and Type, Slate Gray

Garbage. I decided to swap from an Apple Watch as I do long distance swimming in cold weather (as well as warm) and the Apple Watch battery used to often give up after a few hours in the water.The battery life on the Garmin Swim 2 is great, however it’s absolute garbage as a swimming watch. In the pool it gets the length count wrong about 30-40% of the time. Even just doing short burst sets of 10 lengths it can’t count to 10. Regularly counts 11 lengths. Over longer distances it can be as far out as 16-20 lengths.The heart rate monitor is also garbage. On a long swim with a heart strap under the wetsuit I average 115-120bpm which is exactly what I’d get on the Apple Watch. The Garmin registers 110-115 for 20 minutes then shoots up instantaneously to 160-170bpm. This is complete nonsense since as a 51 year old doing 3 hours at 160-170bpm, I’d be dead. I’ve googled this and it seems to be a common fault with many people experiencing the same thing. See photo. It does this on nearly every swim. My stroke rate and effort is super consistent and I know it’s garbage data.It’s no where near as easy to use as an Apple Watch. Not nearly as intuitive and hardly any of the useful metrics that you get from Apple Watch are available on the Garmin. Even some simple swimming metrics are missing from the Garmin that come as standard on the bottom of the range Apple.So very disappointed in this. It’s going onto eBay and I’ll be going back to Apple soon.

The watch works well and the Garmin tracker in the running mode works well, but I purchased the watch to use whilst swimming. It gives out the time swimming but as for showing the route you have taken, forget it.I am more than disappointed with it and that after paying £350.00 for it as that was the price at the time. If you are an open water swimmer and want to share your route with other swimmers do not bother with buying this watch. On contacting Garmin they said that the watch will not give a true reading if it is submerged, they recommended strapping it to hair or a swim cap. For heavens sake its a swim watch, of course it will end up submerged for a lot of the time.

This is the second time I bought this watch. The second time, I made sure to look after it more carefully, but it stopped charging after two years, just like the first one I bought (same fault). I swim open water in very salty water; it's probably fine if you swim predominantly in fresh water or pools, but I cannot recommend it for sustained sea swimming.For a swimming watch it should really also give results separately for open water swims vs pool swims. It records which of these you are doing, so it's frustrating not to be able to compare the stats between the two.I am looking for a swim watch again now, but it won't be this one.