Garmin Forerunner FR-15 GPS and Fitness Watch Review

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Just two days before my first marathon in 2012, Garmin sent me their new ForeRunner FR-10. It’s an entry-level watch with the right amount of tracking features for most casual runners and racers. I jumped at the opportunity to check out the new entry-level Garmin Garmin Forerunner FR-15 GPS and Fitness Watch!

This new Garmin watch is easy to recommend, delivering new and improved functionality in all ways except for one. Read on for more details …

Garmin Forerunner FR-15 GPS and Fitness Watch Review

Manufacturer’s Description:

Run with all your heart. This easy-to-use GPS running watch tracks distance, pace, heart rate, calories and Personal Records. Pair it with a foot pod to capture distance data on treadmill runs. Forerunner 15 helps you stay on top of your fitness goals between workouts with Activity Tracking features that remind you when it’s time to move and count steps and calories burned all day. The rechargeable battery lasts up to eight hours with GPS on or five weeks in watch/Activity Tracking mode. Upload to their free online community, Garmin Connect, to join fitness challenges and save, plan and share your progress.

Garmin Forerunner FR-15 GPS and Fitness Watch Review

The Watch:

If you look at the Garmin Forerunner FR-15 GPS, you will note that it looks a lot like the FR-10 … because it does. In fact, aside from now having a stylish blue it is virtually identical! That isn’t a bad thing – the FR-10 came in two sizes that worked well for smaller and larger people. The FR-15 is similarly comfortable and easy to fit on a variety of wrists. I had a bunch of people try it on at work and home (I’m pushy that way!), and everyone agreed it was light and comfortable.

Similarly the display is nearly identical to the FR-10, though I feel that the new display is even crisper. You get at most two items displayed at once – Elapsed Time and Distance, Distance and Pace, Heart Rate and Calories, and so on. The text size is large enough to be easily visible at a glance. It is a great compromise – larger watches display more but are often harder to see on the run, and many similar sized watches try to display too much (like the Polar RC3) and end up with a confusing interface.

That is where the FR-15 shines – all of the functionality is easily accessible, and the button controls are well labeled and intuitive. You don’t really NEED to read the manual, but it only takes a minute and then you won’t forget.

Garmin Forerunner FR-15 GPS and Fitness Watch Review

More Garmin Forerunner FR-15 Features:

Some of the features you can access are Auto-Pause, which is great if you regularly run in traffic and need to stop at intersections; Auto-Lap, which I (and seemingly everyone else) has defaulted to 1 mile; an ‘auto-pace’ that helps keep you on track; the data fields displayed on the various pages of the display when active; your weight for calculating calories; and a bunch of other settings. For fitness you can turn the system on or off, and set your goals and ‘Move’ alert.

There are not the seemingly infinite settings found in other devices, but there is a considerable amount of flexibility and control, and for me I have yet to come across anything additional I would want. Here are a few screens:

Garmin Forerunner FR-15 GPS and Fitness Watch Review

Fitness Tracker:

One of the biggest additions to the FR-15 is the fitness tracking capability, similar to Garmin’s recent VivoFit dedicated fitness tracker. This product space is interesting now – with Fitbit having to recall their entire ‘Force’ product, Nike exiting the space, leaving the Garmin ViviFit competing against the Polar Loop, Jawbone Up, and older Fitbit products.

The allure of fitness tracking is obvious to most people – modern jobs and internet-centric society means more sedentary lifestyles than ever before, and more and more research shows that ‘sitting is the new smoking’, and that even people who exercise regularly need to maintain active lifestyles throughout the day. So a fitness tracker is a great way to ensure that you are moving throughout the day.

Using the Garmin FR-15 for tracking fitness is simple – enable tracking, and wear the watch all the time. That’s it – then just look at your watch and it will show your steps and progress against your goal, and tapping the lower-left button will toggle through steps, goal, calories and the current date. The data resets to zero at midnight, but your last 7 days are saved for later sync-up.

Then the next time you hook up to a computer to sync the FR-15 your steps and sleep patterns. You get tracking across days, performance to target and so on, viewable on the web or your Garmin Connect app. The only thing lacking is that you have to manually specify your sleep hours – on the VivoFit you can hold the button and the system goes into sleep tracking mode, and you wake it up by holding the button in the morning. That makes the FR-15 method more approximate, but I still like the way it tracks and charts motion during the night.

Garmin Forerunner FR-15 GPS and Fitness Watch Review

Wireless Sensors:

One of the two criticisms I had for the FR-10 was “no support for ANT+ wireless devices (such as heart rate monitor) or foot pods.”

Well … they listened.

The FR-15 now features ANT+ sensor support, meaning that if you already have an ANT+ HRM (heart rate monitor) or foot pod sensor it will work with the FR-15. Garmin sent along the FR-15 model that comes with the heart rate monitor. I didn’t have a foot sensor to test.

Pairing up the sensor was quick and easy, and I also tried with a couple of other ANT+ HRM sensors and it worked easily every time. The HRM is a standard chest-strap model, so you need to wet your skin and the sensor before it will find your heart rate for precise tracking.

Once paired, the HRM has linked up for me every day without fail. And with the heart rate displayed prominently on the screen I found it easy to use the system to maintain constant effort based on heart rate. Well, it was easy to see the display … the rest I’m still working on!

Garmin Forerunner FR-15 GPS and Fitness Watch Review

Battery Life:

My other criticism of the FR-10? “Battery life is short.”

Again, Garmin listened.

The FR-10 specified a 5 hour GPS life, and based on my usage the last couple of years that seems about right. That means it is good enough for most people to run a marathon without charging the day before or after … and not much else.

The FR-15 specifies 8 hours of GPS and normal use (since tracking is generally on), so I decided to test it out for a week. I didn’t plug it in all week long, which meant tracking for 24 hours per day, using the HRM and GPS for at least an hour per day. At the end of the week I had done over 8 hours of use, was getting low battery warnings but everything still worked. I synced up the watch and everything was stores – activities, heart rate graphs and daily activity tracking. Very impressive for such a small and light watch.

Garmin Forerunner FR-15 GPS and Fitness Watch Review

GPS Location and Strength:

The joke would be that GPS is all about location – in more than one way. Not only is its basic function tracking location, but how well it syncs to GPS to get started can be the difference between fun and frustration. For me the Garmin FR-10 generally would link up within a minute at home, though when in different locations it could take longer. Last year when I was traveling for work it took a few minutes the first couple of times but gradually the lock came faster.

For the FR-15 nothing much seems to have changed. At home the GPS is generally ready to go before I am, and on my trail run this weekend it still took less than a minute. Of course, if you had issues with the FR-10, chances are the FR-15 won’t be much better.

Only one time has the FR-10 GPS failed me – running the trails of the PA Grand Canyon Marathon. So I was interested to see how the FR-15 handled the Catharine Valley Trail on my run … which ended up boring because it never had an issue!

Garmin Forerunner FR-15 GPS and Fitness Watch Review

Sync-Up and Apps:

Syncing up the FR-15 is pretty much identical to the FR-10: you get a cradle that the watch snaps into with four contacts on the back. You plug into a USB port on Mac or PC, launch Garmin Express (which should auto-launch), and the data anto-syncs to the Garmin Express site where you can view it.

You can also view activities on the Garmin Connect app for iOS or Android, though honestly it is of less value for the FR-15 than for my wife’s VivoFit. That is because the VivoFit direct syncs to the app, and has features that work together with the app that the FR-15 doesn’t support.

If there is one weakness, THIS is it – so many devices have moved to wireless sync that it is a shame that the FR-15 requires corded sync. Especially because of the fitness tracking – having to plug into a cable on a computer just to see results on your phone reduces the value of fitness tracking.

Accuracy & Precision – Fitness Tracking:

There are two areas that I looked at – walking and running.

Running is … weird. And it makes sense – your stride length varies if you are doing hills or a long flat run, an easy pace or a more strenuous speed workout. As a result the tracking of steps to distance was fairly useless for me. I found that I could run the same basic route two days – on easy and the other pushing the pace – and get results that skewed by up to 1000 steps, which would be about 0.5 miles at a walking stride. As a result I did what most people seem to do – not use the Garmin FR-15 fitness tracking when running.

Garmin Forerunner FR-15 GPS and Fitness Watch Review

But walking is another thing – Lisa and I love to go for walks, so I was able to test the FR-15 against her Runkeeper app on the iPhone, the Garmin VivoFit and Polar Loop fitness tracker. All of these matched very well between miles and steps (using ~2500 steps/mile equivalent), and the agreement between all of them was within less than a hundred steps across about a dozen miles walked over several days.

Accuracy & Precision – GPS and Heart Rate:

Comparing heart rate monitors is hard because you can really only have one monitor at once. So instead of making direct comparisons I used different sensors on different days on similar runs. And using three different sensors I got more or less the same message – my rate starts low, ramps as I ramp my intensity, then settles into a groove for most of my run. The Garmin HRM was the most comfortable and easiest to adjust and wet of the ones I tried, and I have happily made it my go-to HRM.

In terms of run tracking, I got a bit more involved … I used my old FR-10 on one wrist, the FR-15 on the other, and the Wahoo Fitness app on my iPhone in my running belt. I wore all three across a few weeks, and all three tracked extremely well. I will let the graphs speak for themselves – but the agreement was within +/-0.1 mile across the 7 – 15 mile runs.

gps-tracking

Conclusions:

The Garmin FR-10 provided a great entry-level GPS watch which I heartily recommended. The FR-15 improves on the FR-10 in every appreciable way, with better battery life, fitness tracking and support for ANT+ wireless sensors. The Garmin Express app and site continue to become more useful and helpful with tracking and integration features, and the ability to do sleep monitoring graphs adds another new direction.

With the FR-15 Garmin retains my vote for the best entry-level GPS watch. For $169.99 you get all the features of the $130 FR-10 and most of the features of the $130 VivoFit combined. Add on the heart rate monitor, and you have a $200 all-in-one fitness data collection system!

Review: Garmin ForeRunner FR-15

Where to Buy: Garmin.com or Amazon.com

Price: $199.95 ($169.99 without heart-rate monitor)

What I Like: Great design; fantastic accuracy; useful fitness tracking; support for ANT+ sensors; super light-weight; perfect fit; great price; easy readability and controls; great choices in features.

What Needs Improvement: lack of wireless sync.

Source: Manufacturer provided review sample

Here is my hands-on video of the Garmin ForeRunner FR-15:

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About the Author

Michael Anderson
I have loved technology for as long as I can remember - and have been a computer gamer since the PDP-10! Mobile Technology has played a major role in my life - I have used an electronic companion since the HP95LX more than 20 years ago, and have been a 'Laptop First' person since my Compaq LTE Lite 3/20 and Powerbook 170 back in 1991! As an avid gamer and gadget-junkie I was constantly asked for my opinions on new technology, which led to writing small blurbs ... and eventually becoming a reviewer many years ago. My family is my biggest priority in life, and they alternate between loving and tolerating my gaming and gadget hobbies ... but ultimately benefits from the addition of technology to our lives!