Notes About Health

The highly anticipated release of the Garmin Forerunner 405 GPS Watch disappointed throngs of GPS-wearing athletes who say it isn’t as good as the Forerunner 305.

Global positioning systems for vehicles are all the rage now, in part because they’ve only recently become affordable for the average person. The same can be said for wrist mounted GPS devices made to help runners add location data to other training metrics like heart rate, speed, and distance.

Early wrist mounted GPS devices were way too big and bulky to be practical. (Imagine wearing a GPS unit for a car duct taped to your arm while running.) Leave it to Garmin, the juggernaut of the GPS industry, to develop the next generation of practical wrist mounted GPS devices for athletic training. The Garmin Forerunner 305 hit the market in 2006 and was quickly adopted by athletes looking to take advantage of the location data it provides for their everyday training.

Two years later when Garmin announced the upcoming ship date of the Forerunner 405 just in time for spring training, 305 users sprinted to their computers to preorder it. The Garmin Forerunner 405 promised to be even smaller than its younger brother (the 305); small enough, Garmin claimed, to be worn as an everyday sports watch.

Garmin Forerunner 405 sales spiked at first (due in part to the pre-order enthusiasm of early adopters) but almost a year after launch sales are dropping behind that of the 305. It seems that the release of the Forerunner 405 brought down the price of the Forerunner 305 so much that is has become the preferred GPS watch for sale by Garmin at Amazon.com. Here are the three main reasons why Amazon.com users say they prefer the larger Forerunner 305 to the newer, smaller Garmin Forerunner 405:

1. the smaller screen on the 405 is hard to see while bouncing up and down on the trail.

2. the new “bezel” is difficult to use properly while running.

3. the battery is so small that it requires charging too often.

As technology advances, allowing our electronics to shrink even smaller, it seems that we reach a point where smaller is not better than bigger. This seems to be the case with the Garmin Forerunner 405, another casualty of the technology race.