r/garminforerunner

Hey everyone,

I found this TPU/silicone-style screen protector case for the Garmin Forerunner 970 and I’m wondering if anyone here has actually used it.

Does it help protect the watch without making it feel bulky or ruining the touchscreen/display quality?

I mainly use my watch for running and gym workouts, so I’m trying to decide if it’s actually useful or just unnecessary extra plastic.

Would love to hear:

• durability over time
• touch sensitivity
• visibility in sunlight
• comfort during workouts
• whether it traps dust/moisture

Would you buy it again? Thanks!

https://preview.redd.it/0qq3l1do2h2h1.png?width=785&format=png&auto=webp&s=5a8427fb07c526a0df2f3aa72bebe6c299b534bd

This is not a rant to other developers or blast their work, so no drama needed from devs who sell their work to Garmin users. Keep calm and good luck.

If your Garmin watch has been hit with random freezes, reboots, or critical resets, especially when you open maps or start a heavy activity, you are probably blaming a Garmin firmware bug.

You might be looking at the wrong culprit. The issue is very likely that bloated, massive paid third party watch face you have running in the background.
I develop custom watch faces for Garmin hardware, and I want to explain exactly why these heavy apps are choking your watch.
The Trade-off:
Battery Life vs. Processing Power
We need to understand that Garmin watches use low power processors for a specific reason. A weaker CPU is the exact price we pay for that incredible multi week battery life. These chips are built for efficiency, not heavy lifting. They do not have massive amounts of system memory or processing pipelines to throw around.

What Happens Under the Hood:
I observe people paying money for watch faces, and a lot of them, despite those apps having incredibly huge storage footprints. Many paid developers pack their projects with massive custom fonts, unoptimized background graphics, and relentless tracking code.
When a watch face uses up that much storage, it causes massive background overhead. The processor has to work constantly just to manage that data.
When you leave that heavy watch face to do something intensive, like rendering a heavy topographic map with thousands of lines and data points, the low power processor gets completely overwhelmed. The system gridlocks. When the operating system detects that a process is stuck and cannot respond in time, it triggers a watchdog restart to protect itself. That is exactly why your watch reboots.
How to Fix It
If you are sick of the reboots, stop spending money on poorly optimized apps just because they look flashy.
Test it yourself:

1. Check the storage space of the watch face in the store. If the storage is huge, it is a major red flag.
2. Look for lightweight, well optimized watch faces that respect the limits of the hardware.
3. If you use mapping heavily, swap out the heavy stock maps for a clean OpenTopoMap file.

Do yourself and the community a favor: look at the storage space of a watch face before you install it. If the storage is huge, walk away. Instead, try to find good developers who actually know how to code for efficiency, and support them.
The moment you clear out the bloated background apps and feed the watch clean map data, the traffic jam disappears and your watch will finally stabilize. Keep your footprint light, choose quality and I wish everyone a good day.

Hi everyone,

I’m considering getting the Garmin Forerunner 970 and wanted to hear from people who actually use it.

How satisfied are you with its music capabilities, especially when it comes to Bluetooth connectivity with wireless earbuds? I’m currently using Jabra Elite 4 earbuds, so I’d be interested to know if anyone has experience with a similar setup.

I also tend to load large MP3 playlists (sometimes 1000+ files). I’ve seen a few posts mentioning that transferring big playlists can be slow or problematic, and that music playback might occasionally cut out during runs.

For those of you using it now:

• Has playlist loading improved?
• Is the Bluetooth connection stable during workouts?
• Do you still experience music interruptions while running?

Have these issues been resolved with recent updates?

Thanks a lot for your feedback!

Schwanke zwischen einer 42mm/43mm und der Standard 47mm, würde sie nur gerne im Alltag tragen und nicht nur zum Sport anziehen, daher die Frage, welche Größe würdet ihr eher nehmen bei einem handgelenksumfang von so 15/16cm

Danke schonmal für die Hilfe

So in summary all of them have things that are better than the other:

The Garmin 570 has speaker and mic which pace 4 doesn't have and has the garmin pay and Spotify that Coros doesn't have and the AMOLED bright screen that the Apex 4 doesn't have (and gen 5 HR)

The pace 4 is the best value for money but ofc for the price the build isn't as good as the apex 4 and it doesn't have the offline maps, right? and has better battery than even the 570 and AMOLED screen

The Apex has best battery and build and is kinda my overall favorite but doesn't have ofc the pay, the spotify and the screen is MIP+sapphire glass which SO MANY people I've seen complain about which makes me concerned

I'm thinking of heading to a store tomorrow maybe and see if they got the 3 but especially the apex 4 because if the screen is that bad then that's sad

I do mainly road running but I am young and inclined to maybe do some crazy challenges in the future who knows so I don't want something that has Apple Watch type battery for sure but I also don't want to get something with a huge battery and then regret it every time I look at the screen or can't pay something or the whole music situation

These are my options mainly because they're imo the best options for the lower price point (pace 4) and the 2 best (maybe?) for the mid range options, plus all of them quite recently released

I've been running with my phone in my hand for a WHILE and this upgrade has been needed for a long time and I think it's time to pull the plug and thus I want something that can serve me for a good amount of time preferably

this was a long rant but yeah, I'm very torn in my decision tree so I'll take any ideas and opinions to help debate in my head my options in a better light maybe x_x

What garmin should i buy with music
Currently have Fr 165 non music
My budget is around $600 Aud
Should i go with the new 170 music?

I’ve recently switched from an Apple Watch to a Forerunner 265s and I’m just getting to grips with all the configurations.

I’d amended the data fields for treadmill workouts to include speed rather than pace, as this is how the treadmill displays it, and thus is therefore fine for easy runs. However, I’ve just completed an interval run (Rolling 400s) and the interface and audio is using pace to prompt me. Now, obviously on my Apple Watch I’d be recording on my phone via the ‘treadmill’ tab, which converts the info to speed. However, I can’t seem to find any way to get Garmin to pull the ‘treadmill’ workout through from Runna so it gives me speed to adjust to.

It’s not a huge deal, but trying to remember what speed 05:15 should be on the treadmill in situ is a bit fiddly!

Anyone any ideas?

Hey, I just got my first ever garmin watch (first sport watch in general actually), it's forerunner 165 music.

I'm noticing that my heart rate on the watch barely changes tho. Even when I was sprinting on a treadmill and I checked the watch it said my HR is around 90 which I think was way off cause I was dying there lol. Anyone else experienced something similar?

I didn't start an activity on the watch, I just took a glance on the main screen.

The Fitbit deadline is today (Google account migration) and the data-deletion deadline is July 15. If you've been holding out and now want to move to Garmin instead of handing over to Google, this is the window.

I did this recently going from the original Pixel Watch to an Epix Pro Gen 2. The export and import both have undocumented gotchas, so a quick brain-dump:

WHAT TRANSFERS

- Daily steps, distance, calories, floors, active minutes

- Weight, BMI, body fat percentage (this one matters, more below)

WHAT DOESN'T (Garmin's limitation, not Fitbit's)

- Heart rate history (no import format exists for it)

- Sleep stages (same)

- Individual workouts (Fitbit doesn't export TCX from Google Takeout, only daily totals)

- SpO2, stress scores

THE BODY FAT THING

Garmin Connect normally only accepts body fat % from their Index smart scale (USD $220+). But the web import page at connect.garmin.com/modern/import-data also accepts body composition data in CSV form. If you logged body fat in Fitbit via an Aria or manual entry, it imports straight in. Years of history, no scale purchase needed. Almost nobody seems to know this is possible.

FREE TOOL FOR WEIGHT + BODY FAT UPDATES
https://www.wearableconverter.com/garmin-body-composition

THE EXPORT

Use Google Takeout, not Fitbit's older "Settings > Data Export" path. Takeout gives you the lifetime archive in one ZIP. The Fitbit dashboard export caps at 31 days per request, which is unusable for multi-year history.

THE GOTCHA NOBODY WARNS YOU ABOUT

Fitbit syncs to Google's servers in batches. Your most recent days in the Takeout export may only be partially synced at the time of export. If your Takeout ZIP is more than a week old, request a fresh one before doing anything. Old exports cause Garmin to reject the most recent month.

GARMIN'S IMPORT BUGS

Garmin Connect's importer shows "an error occurred with your upload" on a lot of CSV uploads. It's a known bug in their importer, not in your file. Hit retry, it almost always goes through. Don't waste time editing your CSV.

Full step-by-step here including the manual JSON parsing method if you want to do it yourself for free:

https://www.wearableconverter.com/transfer-fitbit-to-garmin

Disclosure: I built a $9 browser tool that does the conversion in one click because I didn't want to parse JSON by hand again next time someone in my family switches. Not pushing it here, the guide above is free and complete. But if anyone wants the URL, happy to share in a reply.

I feel like I keep going around in circles thinking I’ve found a solution but realizing there might not be one! Has anyone with this watch been able to upload a Strava map to their watch/listen to the turn by turn? I have a long run tomorrow and would love to know if this is a thing. Thanks!

Hi, I have now Race 2 and considering getting back to Garmin (previous I've got Venu 2 Plus).

Now the pricing for 570 in Poland is ~2200 PLN and 970 ~2700PLN.

What makes more sense?

I'm not using maps, but want to have all of training metrics (running economy is not that important for me for now)

Is 570 prone to scratching?

Also, does 570 and 970 contains this new firmware look like on Venu 4?

Thanks!