Garmin is well-known for its intense fitness watches like the Forerunner 910XT — a big, complicated, waterproof timekeeper that’s basically designed with Olympians triathletes in mind. If you’re just a casual jogger trying to stay in shape, a watch that powerful is just intimidating overkill. Garmin’s newest fitness watch is designed for those of us who aren’t superstars — yet.
Coming later this year, the Garmin Forerunner 10 costs just $US130, and tracks the basic metrics that are interesting to people who exercise a few times a week. During your run, the watch keeps track of time and uses GPS to measure your total distance. The numbers are displayed large on the watch’s face so that they’re easy to monitor at a glance. The Forerunner 10’s Virtual Pacer helps you meet your goals by letting you know how you’re doing along the way so that you can make adjustments. And the watch also keeps track of personal records like your fastest mile or longest run so that you know what you’ve got to beat to be your best.
The Forerunner 10, like other Garmin watches, stores the data from your run so that you can upload and analyse it later on Garmin Connect. Using the online service you can look at helpful charts for simple calculations like average pace during a run, or you can plot stored GPS data points onto a map so you can see the path you travelled. It’s nothing overly fancy — just enough to show you that you’re improving.
At just 43 grams, the Forerunner 10 is Garmin’s lightest, most stripped-down running watch ever, which is really what most people are looking for. As we’ve seen with the success of the Nike Plus trackers designed for regular people, most of us don’t need granular metrics to keep up with exercise. We just want simple, actionable information to help us stay motivated. [Garmin]