Swim watch - Garmin versus Swimovate Poolmate Live

I'd be interested in any Swimmo reviews as well. Holding out on a purchase until I can read more about it; it seems to have all of the features I'm interested in, but I'm not sure how accurate or durable it is. Hi, I went ahead and bit the bullet and ordered the Swimmo. I did so because I do a lot of long distance swimming and found my mind wandering and losing track of my laps. When it worked, it was generally pretty good - it tracked laps fairly accurately. It displayed the distance and time pretty closely (I still rely on the pool clock as the Swimmo doesn't have a very good stop feature (you have to double tap it hard with your fingernail and there is a delay, so you can't be sure it stops. I usually had a 10 to 15 second lag, which is workable.) The problem is that it was very difficult to charge. It came with a loose USB cord and when I used a better quality cord, I was sometimes getting a charge. However, there is no way to be assured the device is charging - there is a battery icon that flickers on initially, but I soon found that didn't mean the watch was charging. I would plug it in and see the icon and put it on the next morning only to find that it hadn't charged. A few times, when I plugged it in, the battery actually drained overnight. For the past week, I have not been able to get it to charge at all. I am going to return the watch. Some other notes - it doesn't yet track open water swims or the treadmill pools; although the company indicated they hoped to upgrade the software to do this in the fall of 2018. It does track beats-per-minutes while you swim. I'm not sure how accurate it is. My resting bpm is pretty low (in the 40 range) and the device generally showed my resting heart rate at 10-20 bpm higher. Yet, my workout rate seemed kind of low for me. That is the highest I could get it to register was about 100bpm, but I'm sure my heart rate was higher. As I said, I like to do long swims without stopping. Since I'm in a 25 yard pool, that means 200 laps for a 5000 yard swim (yesterday). The watch has a nice feature that buzzes you at the 25%, 50%, and 75% point (and also at the 100% point, if you select that). However, for a long swim that's almost too far. So, I found I will do several 1000 yard or 2000 yd. swims for a more frequent "buzz." Unfortunately, you cannot adjust the watch directly, but have to go through an interface on your cell phone. So, you program your available workouts before you get to the pool and then select the appropriate distance when you turn the watch on and start swimming. And you have to start right away - the clock starts immediately. Similarly, you can only make alterations to the cell phone interface if your Swimmo watch is near by and actually has power. You cannot program the cell interface without a working watch. As I understand it, there are plans for a future workout interface. I'm not sure how this would work. There are other features which I haven't gotten to try out - pulse, pace, etc. These might be nice, but the learning curve was steep for me with the power problems, so I just stuck to distance training. So, overall, I was disappointed in the watch. Perhaps I just got a bad watch, but (judging from the poor customer service), I think there may be a lot of other users who might have the same problem. I'll probably go back to using the clock to keep track of my distance. I'm interested to hear if anyone else has had a better experience.

I'd be interested in any Swimmo reviews as well. Holding out on a purchase until I can read more about it; it seems to have all of the features I'm interested in, but I'm not sure how accurate or durable it is. Hi, I went ahead and bit the bullet and ordered the Swimmo. I did so because I do a lot of long distance swimming and found my mind wandering and losing track of my laps. When it worked, it was generally pretty good - it tracked laps fairly accurately. It displayed the distance and time pretty closely (I still rely on the pool clock as the Swimmo doesn't have a very good stop feature (you have to double tap it hard with your fingernail and there is a delay, so you can't be sure it stops. I usually had a 10 to 15 second lag, which is workable.) The problem is that it was very difficult to charge. It came with a loose USB cord and when I used a better quality cord, I was sometimes getting a charge. However, there is no way to be assured the device is charging - there is a battery icon that flickers on initially, but I soon found that didn't mean the watch was charging. I would plug it in and see the icon and put it on the next morning only to find that it hadn't charged. A few times, when I plugged it in, the battery actually drained overnight. For the past week, I have not been able to get it to charge at all. I am going to return the watch. Some other notes - it doesn't yet track open water swims or the treadmill pools; although the company indicated they hoped to upgrade the software to do this in the fall of 2018. It does track beats-per-minutes while you swim. I'm not sure how accurate it is. My resting bpm is pretty low (in the 40 range) and the device generally showed my resting heart rate at 10-20 bpm higher. Yet, my workout rate seemed kind of low for me. That is the highest I could get it to register was about 100bpm, but I'm sure my heart rate was higher. As I said, I like to do long swims without stopping. Since I'm in a 25 yard pool, that means 200 laps for a 5000 yard swim (yesterday). The watch has a nice feature that buzzes you at the 25%, 50%, and 75% point (and also at the 100% point, if you select that). However, for a long swim that's almost too far. So, I found I will do several 1000 yard or 2000 yd. swims for a more frequent "buzz." Unfortunately, you cannot adjust the watch directly, but have to go through an interface on your cell phone. So, you program your available workouts before you get to the pool and then select the appropriate distance when you turn the watch on and start swimming. And you have to start right away - the clock starts immediately. Similarly, you can only make alterations to the cell phone interface if your Swimmo watch is near by and actually has power. You cannot program the cell interface without a working watch. As I understand it, there are plans for a future workout interface. I'm not sure how this would work. There are other features which I haven't gotten to try out - pulse, pace, etc. These might be nice, but the learning curve was steep for me with the power problems, so I just stuck to distance training. So, overall, I was disappointed in the watch. Perhaps I just got a bad watch, but (judging from the poor customer service), I think there may be a lot of other users who might have the same problem. I'll probably go back to using the clock to keep track of my distance. I'm interested to hear if anyone else has had a better experience.