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Best Smart Watches for Strava?

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#22 ·
More seriously, if you want a gadget to wear on your wrist then go for a watch, but its advantages are slim/none compared to a bike computer + HR chest strap. If you're looking to do this right then get a Garmin/Wahoo.

Battery life on a Wahoo Bolt is something like 20 hours. Charge it when you clean your drivetrain.
 
#23 ·
I use a Garmin Vivoactive HR, I like it for the features and all the sports it tracks, but I do find when MTB'ing in dense areas it does lose signal and I end up with alot of Straight lines when the signal loss is apparent. But only in dense forest areas, I don't find it too much of an issue though
 
#24 ·
FrankS29 said:
I now use the Apple Watch 6 and it has been great. Accurate distance, elevation and heart rate. Works great with Strava, but the native Apple activity tracker also works great and syncs with Strava really easily.

I ran the Apple Watch in conjunction with my Wahoo Elmnt Bolt and different dedicated heart rate monitors (chest and arm band) to test accuracy. The Apple watch and Wahoo were basically identical to each other for all metrics.

My old Garmin Fenix had a completely useless heart rate monitor, always had low readings (like 30-35bpm too low). Elevation gains and distance were rarely consistent. On top of the fact that it also broke really quickly. Seems to have a bad battery and I guess that means you get to throw out the entire watch when it simply needs a battery since Garmin won't service them or sell new batteries.
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My experience has been the same. I'm a tech nerd and have had a seemingly endless array of various GPS/fitness gadgets. My latest generation Apple watch is actually the best heart rate monitor I've ever had, which surprises me greatly since I was under the impression the chest straps would always be superior. The other sensors seem to be excellent as well. And yes, the Fenix was terrible as a HRM.
 
#25 ·
I have the new apple watch, use a 530 with speed/cadence/HR monitors. The garmin gave me back almost 2 miles on a 17.5 mile ride before the sensor install. The watch shows the same ride at 14 and change miles. But lately I've lost some mileage even with the speed sensor, wondering if the batteries are crapping out on it, replaced them all a month ago. Anyway I'm gonna change the gps settings on the garmin from the basic setup. The HR on my garmin and the apple watch are nearly identical. I know gps is sensitive to terrain but was hoping the speed sensor would be better over time. Gonna pull the batteries and put in new ones to see if I get my distance back.
 
#26 ·
For the past month, I have been comparing a Garmin Venu (wrist heart rate) with a Wahoo Elemnt Bolt (chest strap heart rate) on about 20 rides in the SF bay area. I bought the Venu primarily for its AMOLED display.

Comparing GPS tracks, overall, accuracy is about the same. Position errors occur along the tracks with both units, the magnitude of these errors when they occur is about the same. These errors cause Strava to miss segments on rare occasions.

Comparing heart rates, most of the time both units are within a couple of BPM of one another. Differences occur when my heart rate is changing rapidly, for example, when I stop to recover at the top of a long climb. For me, however, this difference is not significant. Also, on cold mornings when I am wearing long gloves, the Garmin is positioned further up my arm for readability. Wrist HR continues to work well. So IMO a chest strap is not needed with the Garmin. I bought a new strap for the Garmin, but returned it once I found it to be not needed.

Regarding displays, the Garmin is vastly more readable in all conditions than the Wahoo, especially in dimmer light conditions in the forest or during twilight. One issue with Garmin display, IMO the Always-On feature dims the display too much. So I disabled this feature and rely on twisting my wrist to read the Garmin, which works reliably.

One advantage with the Wahoo is that it read the power meter on my road bike, the Garmin does not. This is not an issue on my mtb, no power meter.
 
#27 ·
Do some smart watches allow you to adjust the frequency of GPS pings in the watch settings? Mine has frequency settings for BPM but GPS frequency could account for differences in miles and elevation for rides.
 
Discussion starter · #28 ·
Bacon Fat said:
If you want accurate distance and good HR #s, then you really should get a Garmin and a speed sensor. I wear my watch so I don't have to bring a phone. I really only use the strava app when I don't care about gps accuracy. On real rides, I use a Garmin 520
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What counts as a real ride? Most of mine are probably casual-(10 - 20 miles). I'm not training or anything. I got addicted to using a watch with my ionic because I didn't have to remember to bring my phone to turn on strava. I'm pretty much just looking for cell phone level GPS accuracy and I thought the additional heart rate data that came with using a watch was cool.
 
#30 ·
Fenix 5x Sapphire. Seems to do a decent job. The current model 6x is pretty pricey and I don't know what the differences are, but I can't complain on accuracy. I'm not too wrapped up in it though. I did have a strava segment a few weeks ago and a buddy has a different garmin. I started and finished 5 feet off his back wheel but mine showed me to be 5 seconds faster on a segment that takes about 1 min 45 seconds. Mine was more expensive so it must be the more accurate one....lol.
 
#31 ·
bdamschen said:
What counts as a real ride? Most of mine are probably casual-(10 - 20 miles). I'm not training or anything. I got addicted to using a watch with my ionic because I didn't have to remember to bring my phone to turn on strava. I'm pretty much just looking for cell phone level GPS accuracy and I thought the additional heart rate data that came with using a watch was cool.
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For me it's a ride in the woods on twisty trails without my son. Riding around the neighborhood on gravel paths and sidewalks are when I use my watch. The distances don't match up when I use my watch vs GPS with a speed sensor in the wood
 
Discussion starter · #32 ·
Bacon Fat said:
For me it's a ride in the woods on twisty trails without my son. Riding around the neighborhood on gravel paths and sidewalks are when I use my watch. The distances don't match up when I use my watch vs GPS with a speed sensor in the wood
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Crazy there is a difference. What do you do for multiple bikes? Just get a speed sensor for each one or are they easy enough to swap?
 
#33 ·
I have a speed sensor for each bike and set of wheel. The ones on amazon are cheap enough that its not worth changing them. My trails are very twisty, the speed sensor that makes the difference in distance than actual gps, (watch and GPS alone will be closer) but I have had issues with the watch GPS taking a while to lock on or bouncing around, rarely have those issues my garmin gps
 
#36 ·
bdamschen said:
Hardcore. Are there any watches out there that do that?
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Most US commercial products are going to offer GPS + Glonass and GPS + Galileo capabilities. Both should offer an improvement in NorCal over GPS alone, with the latter being the more accurate, theoretically.

There are multiple reasons for that, mostly boiling down to the design of the various satellite constellations (orbit/coverage, total birds, transmitter power, frequency, etc.).

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 
#37 ·
Le Duke said:
Most US commercial products are going to offer GPS + Glonass and GPS + Galileo capabilities. Both should offer an improvement in NorCal over GPS alone, with the latter being the more accurate, theoretically.

There are multiple reasons for that, mostly boiling down to the design of the various satellite constellations (orbit/coverage, total birds, transmitter power, frequency, etc.).
Click to expand...
GPS supported satellites for the two units in my comparison above:

Wahoo Elemnt Bolt: GPS, GLONASS, BEIDOU, Galileo, and QZSS
Garmin Venu: GPS, GLONASS, GALILEO

As I mentioned above, GPS tracking accuracy of these units in my testing in the SF bay area seem similar.
 
#38 ·
bdamschen said:
Interesting... The reviews I read on them talked up their GPS accuracy.

How inaccurate are watch heart rates? The whole point of a watch that does strava for me was to take less stuff on a ride rather than more, so not a fan of a chest strap.
Click to expand...
Let me rephrase that, the Vivoactive has good gps accuracy in that it creates good gps tracks and holds signal well without any interruptions. But when riding the same exact loop 10x the mileage and elevation will fluctuate as much as 10%, whereas my garmin head unit 520 or 530 are nearly dead on every single ride. I've had 2 Vivoactives and both have done this.

For heart rate on the garmin watches you have to strap them 2 notches too tight to get decent readings in my experience, and even then I don't think it is as consistent as a chest strap.
 
#39 ·
It'll be a cold day in hell (or a great day in tech) when I use a smart watch for ride data logging/tracking.

During normal life, I'm wearing a Galaxy Watch 3 LTE (ps, lte is as useless as tits on a cat's ass for me since my phone is always with me, but I consider it a 'backup' just for giggles.) I've used it, and some past models (Watch 2 Active, S3 Frontier, etc.) for recording Strava data and they're not horrendous, but they kill the battery (sucks if it's an after-work ride when the battery has already been working all day) and pairing sensor data was a pain. I also never trust any watch's HR data and stick to a Wahoo chest strap. (Semi-disclaimer, I lost my last one and they were out of stock so I'm now on Wahoo's wrist/arm optical sensor and surprisingly it's been very accurate.)

When riding, I'm not too interested in crushing an expensive smartwatch either, so that duty now goes to my trusty G-shock.

Garmin Edge 530 ftw. Easy to view at a glance, not affected by sweat or rain or being accidentally touched. Clip it to the bars, press start, ride, press stop, and done. It also instantly links up to the HR monitor, my wheel speed sensor (Wahoo), used to be a Wahoo cadence sensor but I never gave a damn about that metric and it didn't fit well with my latest frame/crank combo), syncs up to my InReach Mini, and lastly to my AXS drivetrain so I also have shift/gear usage data.

I'm pretty sure most of those sensors are both BTLE and ANT+, but if your sensors are BT only, that could also be an issue depending on the watch.

General simplicity aside, it's really nice to be able to glance down and see a running graph, color coded, of my heartrate during a ride, or shift over to the map view and have a quick view of the trail options nearby. Oh, and my default screen also shows current gear which can be handy to remind me to get out of my climbing gear after stopping at the top of a hill, before I get halfway down and try to pedal at speed when I'm in the 52t world.
 
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