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

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.

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.

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.

No good for outdoor swimming. Had two, sent both back. GPS signal Sync is quick 20 seconds usually for me. For running, cycling and walking GPS tracking is fine. I bought this to track my swimming in the sea. Both produced garbage for my routes. Round known land marks giving half or less the distance measure on Google Earth. Some parts of my route totally missing, similar spots with both watches. I even tried putting the watch inside my swing cap at the back of my head, to limit the time it was submerged. Made no difference still huge chunks of my rout missing, so all other data was irrelevant. Can’t comment on pool capabilities as I don’t swim indoors. If you are an out door swimmer only, money would be better spent on a sports watch with GPS tracking for swimming capabilities and have more land based features. I now use my cycle computer in a swim float. All other functions seemed to be OK.

Update 16June2022: I just want to give a shout out for Garmin phone support. I was having trouble getting GPS to find satellites this summer, and it was losing track mid swim. Mary Beth at Gamin support walked me through several paths to finally get the find time down to under a minute. She was patient and seemed genuinely interested in solving my problem -- a rare event from support lines these days. I'm still loving my Swim 2 after nearly a year. ------- original review -------------- My earlier Garmin Forerunner 310XT wrist GPS takes forever to achieve satellite lock, and it showed me zipping back and forth while I was open-water swimming, so I needed something new. It's all in the software, because a watch on your wrist will lose a satellite or two while it's under water, and the software needs to adjust for this and not think you have zoomed at high speed to the point where it regains satellite lock. Garmin has been working on this issue for some years, (as have others) and I'm very pleased with the results. I also borrowed an Apple watch for a few open-water swims. Tracking was excellent, but it has a feature that locks out any screen actions while swimming, making it somewhat difficult to control. Also, the Garmin is really built for swimming, so it has many more swimming metrics besides speed that make tracking your progress easier. The other advantage is that the Swim 2 software interface is very smooth on a PC, whereas you have to interact with an Apple watch with an iPad, Mac, etc. (There may be options for the interface that I'm not aware of.) The real killer for my use of the Apple watch was that it was less reliable reading my pulse while swimming. Both Apple and Garmin use optical pulse measurement, which is a bit dicey in the water (both say to adjust the band tight but comfortable), but often I would finish a swim to find that the Apple watch had not recorded my pulse at all. The Garmin may make some mistakes occasionally, but it keeps doing the best it can. Controlling the Garmin is not as intuitive as the Apple watch, but once I got used to it I didn't start activities unintentionally or make similar mistakes too often. On balance, the Garmin Swim 2 is a keeper and has replaced my Timex Triathlon as my main watch. The alarm, timer, and stopwatch features are more flexible than the old Timex and get a lot of use.

Love this watch. Simple and does the job.

I used the previous Garmin watch for about 10 years and was very nervous about switching to this one as the next step. But I’m finding that this watch is perfect for me. Its easy to use and very accurate. Good for lap swimming. I’m really glad that it works with Garmin Connect so I can continue viewing my swim history online. It syncs easily so I can see my number of strokes number of laps and all the other data. I know that you can see it on the app on the phone but it’s very difficult to see history with watches., but Garmin Connect keeps me coming back to Garmin. And why not? They have great swim watches!

Product works the way it suppose to. Fast delivery!

Excelente dispositivo, atractivo y funcional para sumergir en el agua