Garmin Forerunner 245, GPS Running Smartwatch with Advanced Dynamics, Slate Gray

This watch is feature rich with solid battery life and ‘just works’ reliability, and a good value for what you get. It’s a great new addition to Garmin’s line of Forerunner watches.Before buying this, I used a Garmin Forerunner 35 for several years. That was a very good watch for tracking runs, and I also used it for other workouts like cycling and rowing. I loved its long battery life of about 1.5 weeks to 2 weeks the way I used it, plus physical buttons which I find much better for controlling the watch during runs than a touch screen. It also has a good quality heart rate monitor and some sleep-tracking capabilities.The Garmin 245 Music can do all this, plus adds additional workout tracking capability, and ability to wirelessly communicate with a Garmin running dynamics pod which gives additional data about runs. It also adds a pulse ox sensor, and ability to store up to 500 digital music tracks on the watch and broadcast to earbuds/headsets/speakers via bluetooth. It is more waterproof than the 35. It can track several measures of indoor lap swimming in a pool, but not open water swims or scuba. Finally its watchbands have quick release connections to the watch body, making it easier to replace them if needed or desired.I’m not sure I must have any of these things but was curious to try all of them. I am pleased with their implementation. The music feature is especially well done. It pairs without problems with my bluetooth headphones and speakers. I have good audio quality throughout my runs, arm motions while running do not cause any problems. I’ve copied .mp3 tracks to the watch from a Windows PC that uses Itunes to store my music library, using the watch’s USB cable to transfer the files. I’ve installed the Garmin Express software on the PC (a free download from garmin.com), and methods to copy individual music tracks or playlists are straightforward and work fine. Garmin supports music services like Spotify and Deezer as well, but I haven’t tried that and can’t comment on how well it works. There are decent controls on the watch for playing tracks or playlists, and adjusting volume. There are a separate set of controls for that within my bluetooth headset (Plantronics BackBeat Fit 3150), and those play nice with the watch.The battery definitely drains faster while using its GPS and streaming music via bluetooth. Garmin claims 6 hours battery life for these conditions, which sounds roughly consistent with my own experience. That brings me to one of my few quibbles with the watch, which is that I wish its battery life was somewhat better. There’s no escaping increased power consumption when using GPS and bluetooth, but it would have been nice if they’d fit a battery with more capacity into the watch. It’s not terrible as-is: still much better battery life than Apple watches, and lasts a week to a week and a half if I ‘only’ track runs with it, use the pulse ox sensor, and don’t stream any music. It seems slightly worse than the Forerunner 35 when using the same features, but I was hoping for the same or better. If you want more battery you can buy a Fenix or more expensive Forerunner. It’s still good for what it does and the price, though.This watch seems generally well regarded but I’ve seen a few negative reviews that say its GPS accuracy is not good, or not as good as older Garmin watches. That has not been my experience. GPS accuracy seems just as good as my Forerunner 35, which is excellent. In fact, the 245 can also do GPS and Glonass together, which I tried while visiting Iceland. I’ve heard that Glonass can be helpful at hi latitudes. It worked well for me, though I didn’t do careful experiments using GPS only versus GPS + Glonass to quantify differences.The watch has a lot of capability and it’s a challenge to design an interface to easily access it all using the watch buttons. Garmin uses several of the watch buttons to descend or ascend within menus, or select options. There is also a circularly scrolling ‘wheel’ in one menu to enable or disable different kinds of connections, or power the watch off. It all works and is reasonably easy to find, but some items are buried a bit in menus, at times the clicking around can feel inefficient. Not sure there’s an easy solution to support so many features, though. There is a lot of flexibility to customize and specify on or off for different sensors and connections, kudos to Garmin for giving this much control. The Garmin Connect smartphone software is a good companion for uploading workout data and displaying. It works reliably through a bluetooth connection between the watch and phone, and is well organized. It requires you to upload the watch data to Garmin’s cloud, then communicates with the cloud to display different aspects. I don’t love the cloud aspect, it would be better if they provided an option to store the data 100% locally (on the watch and phone only, with no internet involvement). But if you can live with the data being on the cloud, the software works well and has good visuals for displaying all the data.To summarize, this watch is a great product. It adds some nice extra features to the more basic Forerunner 35/45 while not being overly expensive, and continuing to include everything I liked about the 35/45. It seems meant to be a ‘mid-level’ watch, and I think what you get for the price is a good value. If you want much longer battery life or more sensors, like a barometric altimeter, get another watch like the higher end Garmins. If the capabilities of the Forerunner 45 or predecessor 35 fully meet your needs, save a bit of money and get those. This watch is a sweet spot of Garmin goodness + bluetooth music streaming and some extra workout tracking ability for lowest price.

Spent a lot of time reviewing and researching smart watches online before deciding to go with this watch, versus upgrading my older apple watch to the next gen. And after living with it for a couple months, it’s everything I wanted and expected. I chose this watch because I wanted something that gave me maximum analytics in a lightweight package without breaking the bank as it’s my first Garmin watch. I’ve had 2 versions of the apple watch previously and various fitbit watch/trackers for running. Run 3-5 times a week, generally 4-6 miles per run outside over varied terrain.Pros:-Very light weight, barely notice it which is awesome for distance running. The larger Fenix series seem just too heavy and loaded with features I don’t need. My wrist is about 185-190mm and band fits perfect (if you have very large wrists band may be a bit small), face large and easy to read but not crazy big. And after years of black watches, went with white and it looks great.-Analytics are awesome, pulse ox gives you load tracking and vo2 max which are game changers over basic activity tracking numbers that iphone apps can give. You really don’t know what you are missing if you don’t have this, highly recommend ensuring any watch you get from Garmin has the performance tracking features to really motivate you. (was looking at vivoactive/venu etc in similar price range without this, glad I didn’t get them)-Music and apps like Starbucks card load easily via garmin app on phone. So you really can leave house with only this for a run, even though doesn’t have Garmin pay.-Battery life is amazing, I can go a week or more between charging even with gps runs, try that with a apple watch, can’t go even 2 days which is very limiting and annoying on weekend trips-Connects up easily with Runkeeper by Asics which I have been using for nearly a decade so I can still get historical comparisons. After your run, when you sync it up with the garmin phone app, it automatically loads it into the Runkeeper app as well.-Have had no problems with screen visibility or burnt out spots, it’s always on and light button works fine for low light situations.Cons:-The initial set up is fidgety to say the least. Took me repeating the same step often to get watch/garmin apps to connect with wifi, bluetooth headsets, runkeeper app, etc.. Had to restart phone, devices etc a few times. It’s frustrating but it’s not as bad as some reviewers described. And once things are connected, they stay connected. Haven’t had to reinstall/reconnect anything.-The buttons do sometimes stick a bit on the side as others mention, it’s summer and with long runs comes lots of sweat so taking it in the shower every couple of weeks does the trick to keep the white clean and the buttons working well.-Figuring out how to use new apps loaded on the watch is weird, seems like the interface wasn’t designed for them so they are stuck in a weird spot. Once you know where, it’s easy and they work great. But again, the software lets you down a little here.-It does have full pacing and training programs which give basic alerts via your bluetooth headphones or on your wrist with a buzz, however I prefer the coaching apps that speak to you and motivate you on your planned work outs so do still often run with my phone when I’m doing them. Maybe I’ll find an app that does this though long term, haven’t explored this as much.-Only default watch face ships loaded, but easy to download more and customize via the app. Wish there were a few more pre loaded but is what it is (Pic shown with the Crystal downloaded face).Finally, yes I’d buy it again. It’s the perfect light weight running watch for me. In the future may try the Forerunner 945 for the garmin pay, altimeter, thermometer, and a few more goodies now that I understand it’s set up more. But, $250 more for just those things seems like a lot.

This is a great GPS running watch. I don’t listen to music when I run, but I bought this model because it boasts slightly better battery life than the non-music version. I don’t use much of the workout and training stuff with the app but a quick glance shows it’s pretty decent.As for being a gps watch with pace tracking, heart rate, and step counting, this watch is very good. Especially at night, when it’s too dark to see the always-on screen, the backlight automatically turns on when you raise your wrist to look at the watch and the detection is pretty darn good; I haven’t had to press the backlight button a single time to check my pace/time. There are many options for the data displayed on screen during workouts so you can customize it to your liking. I prefer to see my pace/mile in the center, larger than the top and bottom which display the total distance and overall time, respectively. As for GPS, once you connect to satellites, it’s pretty accurate and tracks very well. It takes longer to connect if there’s a lot of cloud cover, but with the additional GPS options, the tracking is still good. I haven’t tried using this on a track yet, so idk about how precise the tracking is when doing laps but it would probably work well. When using this on a treadmill without GPS, it did not calculate distance the best, for a 1.5 mile warmup, it was under by 0.4 miles but I have fairly long strides.As a 23 year-old, this watch works great for what I really want in a GPS watch. A no-frills experience where I can see what I want to and when I want to during runs.

Upgraded from the Forerunner 235, which I’d had since 2016. The buttons started to gum up and be non-responsive on that one after 7 years of daily use and exercise, largely to be expected.This was a great and worthwhile investment, lots of new features and bells/whistles that the old watch didn’t have. Great and accurate GPS and heartrate sensor. I would say that the Pulse Ox O2 sensor leaves a bit to be desired, as I would likely be dead from hypoxia if my O2 was below 92% as frequently as the watch thinks it is. Also wish the manual was more simplified. This watch can do a lot, but I found that it was easier to figure it out through trial and error as opposed to reading the thick book that came with it. Reminded me of a car manual. Other than those two things, pleased with this upgrade and will continue to use Garmin products for my workouts!

I had used an I watch for running for years. However, all my friends in my running club uses a Garmin. They were messing around with features that I thought were really impressive. So, I decided to try one. I didn’t want to spend a ton of money on one and not like it. So I bought this one. It is phenomenal. It links to my favorite Running app Strava, and any other running app you could think of. This is a great entry level Garmin watch.