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I guess I’m fairly happy with the Fenix 3. For me it does most of what I need. Perhaps the GPS could be improved slightly – it’s largely OK when I use it.
We’ve speculated on some likely features for the Fenix 5 based on what has already been added to the CHRONOS and on some revelations and leaks by others. NB The leaked images are not guaranteed to be real, there may be no F5 🙁
The killer feature I would like on a top-end Fenix 5 would be improved battery life. Just a little bit more and, like with the Spartan ULTRA, I wouldn’t necessarily mind that increased battery life coming from a physically bigger unit.
What I would love to see, AND that I think a lot of people would benefit from, would be something along the following lines:
Simple, Partially-Existing Scenario on F3
- Ability to set a ‘home’ GPS location with a known altitude. Whenever the watch is at home (+/- 5m), elevation is automatically set/calibrated to the exact level. Ideal for starting a run/ride from home.
- This could even be automatically executed ‘silently’ on a periodic basis, whilst at home, to help on runs/rides that do not start at home but that start at a similar time to the last silent home-calibration.
Better Scenario
- Ability to define multiple, personal POIs eg on Garmin Connect. Garmin connect would then use SRTM (or similar) to deliver a GPS point against the POI. As in the simple scenario altitude will be reset when a POI is encountered. Maybe you would manually define 20, or so, points that you regularly cross – or, on an ad-hoc, basis you would define some for a coming route you know you are going to take.
Even Better Scenario
- Perhaps something similar could be built as POIs through the start- and end-points of STRAVA segments?
- Even if altitude information is in a segment or route or course, it would still require a trigger on the watch that physically sets the altitude on the watch so that it affects both displayed altitude and stored altitude in the FIT file
- Compass declination could also be set automatically based on the POI/home location too.
- Maybe a CIQ app (eg the DWMAP app) could add something similar to this?
- Perhaps a whole street map full of roads, trails augmented with GPS points could be a bit too much to ask over an above what we already have.
Maybe there are sports products out there that can already do this?
I would have thought this approach could improve the accuracy of the interpretation of the reading from BOTH barometric-based and GPS-based altimeters.
Thoughts on this suggestion or any you have too.
