I purchased this Garmin FR610 watch to replace my old FR305 that I somehow lost, even though a new 305 could be had for only a third of the price of a new FR610 at the time.

There’s a lot of things to like about this watch. When turned on, it takes anywhere from a few seconds to a couple minutes to find its location but it reliably does (if you are outdoors). The touchscreen works well and its interface is well thought out. Though the screen may become somewhat unresponsive when it gets wet from rain (as it also happens to smartphones), that hardly matters because important functions that you use while running, such as Start, Stop, and Lap, are handled with the buttons on the right side of the watch. Improvements over the FR305 include a battery charge indicator, so you know how much you have left at the beginning of a practice or race and won’t be left stranded while you are at it. When you press the Start/Stop or Lap buttons or use the auto-lap feature, it vibrates in addition to making the conventional beeping sound, which I found useful and reassuring to quickly know that my press of the button did register and therefore did not missed a lap. That feature may be turned off if it’s a matter of personal taste. The watch also tells you when you begin a run that the chrono has not been reset to zero when that’s the case. With the old 305, I had spoiled the data of many workouts by not noticing that, thus starting a run where I had left off during the previous day’s practice. That’s a real annoyance that just won’t happen with the FR610. A very welcome new feature is that it will shut down its battery-eating GPS tracker after 5 minutes when idle. Then the screen will just show you the time of the day like a regular watch, and the battery will last a very long time (don’t know how long but LONG).

As others have reported, this watch tends to overestimate a bit the distance traveled. About 0.5{60f78fc10f9d225dae0ba0255c415eaf093f5a3220b43cdf3df82aaf7b5f9e5d} to 1{60f78fc10f9d225dae0ba0255c415eaf093f5a3220b43cdf3df82aaf7b5f9e5d} by my own estimate. This appears to be systematic rather than random, but I am comfortable with it and do not believe it is excessive. Importantly, the margin if error is noticeably smaller than the FR305 unit I used to have. Anyway, I ran the Philadelphia Marathon last week (without my watch), and could not help but chuckle when I invariably heard a cacophony of its familiar lap-completed sound made by other runners’ watches, always one or two or three hundred meters before reaching every mile marker.

In sum, I was very satisfied for spending 5 for the FR610 unit instead of 0 for a FR305 that does basically the same things but is bigger, clunkier, and has an older chip.

Then The Flaw revealed itself. The watch employs an innovative system of magnetic contacts that you connect to the charger by clicking the contacts into place. After a couple of months of use, the charge indicator appeared to convey that it was being discharged, i.e. the charge {60f78fc10f9d225dae0ba0255c415eaf093f5a3220b43cdf3df82aaf7b5f9e5d} decreased while connected to the charger. If allowed to reach 0, the unit wouldn’t power up. I thought that maybe the watch was not making good contact with the charger, and inspected the contact points. I had not really bothered to clean and dry the watch during normal use, and it was then that I noticed that the magnetic contacts had collected some dirt and/or rust, I could not tell which. Cleaning with isopropyl alcohol and a microfiber cloth did not help much, perhaps because it is very hard to reach into the small holes where the pins and contacts are located in both the charger and the watch. (Maybe I should have paid more attention to cleaning the watch after use, but then again, I had not subjected it to abuse, other than running with it on my wrist as it was designed for, and also, the cause of the watch’s erratic performance could be software-related). Back to the topic, if you are persistent and babysit it while charging, you can manage to get some charge back into it, and it behaves normally for all purposes except when you are trying to charge it. However the problem occurs with increasing recurrence at the time of this writing. I read these reviews and Garmin forums and, to my surprise, this appears to be a common problem.

I like how this watch works and would like to recommend it. But the problem I described is something major, so I strongly advice that you save yourself some aggravation and a few hundred dollars by first researching and finding to your satisfaction that this issue has been addressed by Garmin. Or if you are upgrading from another device, don’t sell the old one yet.

I made this purchase as soon as I heard about the product. I was lucky that the Nike+GPS was out of stock at the time or I would have ended up with one of those… funny how that works. I made the switch from the 405 (first generation) to the 610. I did enjoy the 405 and logged a couple thousand miles with it. My biggest beef was the useless bezel (you probably already know this). The 610 has blown the competition out of the water with the 610. Granted I have only done a few runs and about 25 miles with it, but my initial reaction is WOW. The touch screen works PERFECTLY on runs. Very easy to read and tap through screens. I love the vibrating alert feature (great for us audiophiles), which also can be set to back light. I run often in the darkness of the early morning so the that alert (set at 1 mile auto lap) reminds me to look down and check my split. I did have a few issues upload data to garmin connect, HOWEVER that was probably user error on my part. I decided to download the desktop software and try that out instead of the website. I attempted to send a workout to the watch, which cause the ant agent to “hold” the data and I never did get the watch to take it. I had to uninstall the gconnect and the ant agent. I am back to the garmin connect, which is just fine with me.
The training screens are very customizable, I use two screens of two data fields… pace and distance on field one and ave pace and timer on page two. You can use four fields on a page and you can have a total of three pages… that is A LOT of data. I do not use a heart rate monitor so I cannot comment on that. The watch has WAY more data than I am concerned with, but maybe in the future I could use it. I do have a foot pod, but don’t have in connected yet. Honestly, just too lazy to take it off my other shoes and also I don’t feel it is necessary. The history setting on the watch is also FANTASTIC. It allows you to review your workouts on the watch, including splits. This great for times I am traveling and work out several times before getting back to my home computer.
I saw a few reviews and a post or two on the garmin site pointing out some gps errors. I am not concerned with those. I don’t really KNOW what the most accurate GPS data even is. I have measured routes with google maps, google pedometer, my car, bing maps, garmin, nike+, etc and they are NOT identical so I expect some error. Some days with my 405 I ended up with slightly different distances running the exact same route. I compared data from my 405 to the 610 on the same route and the 610 measure a .02 difference. That could be a starting at a difference place in my driveway, crossing for a car, etc. I am not concerned at all with the GPS accuracy.

Bottom line, I love the watch and would recommend it to others.

Update 12/18/2012
I still love the watch. I am now having major issues charging the watch. It has gone from a minor annoyance to frustration. I used to be able to slap a guitar capo on it while it was charging and it would be fine. Now I have to get the contacts just right, apply the right pressure, in the right direction, and then squeeze it to clamp on a heavy spring loaded carpenter clamp. If I am lucky I can get it to start charging. The watch holds a charge great. It works perfectly on runs, flawless data upload… the CHARGING PROCESS! AGGHHHH. I understand over time all of our beloved electronics bite the dust… but this only has 18 months on it and around 2000 miles. Does anyone know if buying a new charger make the issues go away for awhile?

Update 5/8/2013
I was finally at a point where I could longer get the watch to charge. I emailed Garmin Support and they immediately replaced my charger and bam instant success! The watch is working flawlessly. There has been a time or two when I was having trouble get my data to upload to garmin-connect. I needed to simply have the ant agent forget the device and then repair. This watch is tough to beat. This time around I will take more care to dry my watch before charging. I think corrosion played a major roll in the charger failing.