If you don’t know exactly what it is already then it almost certainly will be of no use to you whatsoever. This is the one thing you will miss out on by buying the 5 Plus or 5S Plus. It’s a highly specialist blood oxygen sensor (SpO2) for intermittent use when acclimatising during climbing. There are also potential medical uses. Added support for Explore Navigation Sync, where one can select lines, waypoints or generic points on the map within the Explore app and start navigating on device. Time and distance alerts are supported as are more complex alerts. These are activated if, for example, you exceed various cadence or power thresholds.

Display // Navigation – The screen size on the Fenix is clearly smaller than on many of the best cycling computers. If you take cycling seriously you have a couple of options: buy another computer and leave the Fenix at home; buy a bike computer for display purposes but still use the Fenix as your main workout recording device; buy a specialist dummy bike computer like the Edge 130 – dummy in the sense that data FROM the Fenix can be cast onto the Edge 130’s display. The Fenix is supplied with Garmin’s routable, cycling-specific street map – that’s pretty cool but the screen size will limit its usefulness when cycling at any normal speed on intricate routes, especially on trails where turns are less obvious. Garmin’s ELEVATE sensor *IS* one of the better ones. Valencell/Suunto and Polar are also as good and debatably even slightly better in some circumstances. (Edit: Polar Vantage new oHR sensor looks AWESOME and may well be the best….we shall see)

What’s Different?

Fixed an issue where the device could intermittently stop recording distance during a swim activity. Fixed an issue where the device would try to auto resume an activity during 'Resume later,' if connected to an inReach Mini. Once it’s done copying, you should now see that file sitting in the Garmin folder. The names will be similar, but it’s the one ending in ‘Supp’ (like ‘supplementary’): initially, only the Fenix PLUS series of watches had the GALILEO GNSS (read ‘GPS’) capability. However, within a few weeks, Galileo was also rolled out to the earlier Fenix 5 watches and the Forerunner 935. It will not be rolled out to the Fenix 3. I see the picture, my point was far more subtle perhaps: Don’t complain about things without offering solutions.

Your workout data can be recorded every second or ‘smartly’. SMART (default) seems to mean that something is only recorded when some data changes eg speed, cadence, direction. I’d change this to record every second. Improved ClimbPro for cycling by adding category coloring to the ascent graph, which better depicts the difficult portions of the climb. This will also be available when reviewing the elevation plot for a course. Note: I got 5:30 hrs when navigating with GPS only, some sensors and per second recording. IE it more than halves the battery life compared to GPS only. That period had about 30 minutes when I was off-course (which might cause further battery drain as it re-computes the route)

Fixed an issue where lap time and total time could differ by a few milliseconds on the first lap of an activity. In the Fenix 5 collection, the Sapphire models also have WiFi (the normal ones do not), which makes the transfer of data from watch to smartphone a bit easier. But otherwise they are identical to the normal editions.

As a consequence of that firmware downgrade I have not yet done my GPS test route and so don’t have a GPS-only %age figure for those of you (us) that like that sort of thing. I am waiting to get some pesky races out of the way and also hoping that Garmin tweaks the firmware in the meantime. Putting OWS to one side, the Fenix 5S Plus seems in line with the better, recent Garmins in terms of GPS performance. That means it is NOT MARKET-LEADING and needs to do better for the price-point.Some sources say June 2018 announcement and availability almost immediately afterwards. That would be my bet but it could be in the fall/autumn for retail availability. Garmin Fenix 6 If you want to live-stream music over the internet then you will need to “dream on”, rather than Shakespeare’s “play on”. No Garmin has got any kind of inbuilt cellular connectivity. You’d only technically be able to live stream via a smartphone when running…yet another thing for you to carry and charge. And that’s pretty pointless as we already know that MANY watches can act as a remote control for the music played via your phone. So you would be better of using your smartphone if you want to live-stream music as you run.