mgm

Had the first Apple Watch had a GPS, I would have bought one in a heartbeat. I was mainly looking for GPS track-logging and iPhone integration, as well as basic fitness tracking, but did not want to rely on my iPhone when out hiking in the wild. I found a good deal on a Garmin Epix a year ago (although it was still more than an entry level Apple Watch) and have generally been quite happy. With 8GB of memory, I also have offline topo maps of the US and Canada installed - no need for a data connection or an iPhone when out hiking. Day to day, it connects to my iPhone via BT and I get email, text message and phone notifications (answer and reject calls too), and I can read a good chunk of each message without having to pull my phone out of my pocket. Also, the battery lasts over a week between charges and even when using the GPS heavily, it lasts about 2 days. The downside of the good battery life, is that it's a chunky watch, nowhere near as elegant as an Apple Watch, which isn't exactly slim either.

With numerous firmware updates, the Epix has proven fairly reliable, but still, it can be laggy at times with an imprecise feeling touchscreen, and it does crash once in a while, and upon reboot, usually the time is *way* off, requiring a satellite lock to reset. That's a pain. Also, Garmin has seemingly given up fixing the remaining bugs on the unit and it has been at least six months since the last firmware update. Also, according to some Garmin forum members, the company has basically given up on this form factor, preferring to put their development resources into their better selling Fenix 3 line. So...

If an Apple Watch 2 comes along with a GPS, and slightly better battery life than the previous model (hopefully), I will likely take a chance on it. I am sure the iPhone integration, stability and overall user experience will easily trump the Garmin Epix. Also, the Epix does not have a built-in heart-rate monitor, which would indeed be nice to have. So... crossing my fingers on the new Apple Watch. Whether or not it proves as capable as far as track-logging while hiking, and whether or not offline maps will be available to download to it, well... we'll see I suppose. However, if the Apple Watch 2 doesn't deliver, or if the GPS model proves to be overly expensive, then at least I still have my Epix to fall back on. I am curious how many people skipped over the first Apple Watch due to its lack of internal GPS? I may well be a statistical outlier...