Just continue to charge your Garmin when you take a shower. I don’t understand why you need to change your habits. Are you worried about making the battery full at longer durations causing degradation? A smartwatch is fundamentally a disposable piece of electronics that last a few years.

The garmin has so much battery life that when it's at 10% and starts complaining that the battery is close to dying I still have about 2 days to remember to charge it.

And obviously you don't get penalised for charging it more often. Just charge it every Sunday if routine is a big issue.

I am currently using both an apple watch SE 2 and a garmin vivoactive 5 simultaneously. Even if the Garmin has better battery life, I don't really like it for 2 reasons: - the round watch UI is ugly and doesn't work with the other UI elements. Also I don't mind using a squared watch, I like it. My Casio is also square-ish. - the UX is terrible, the customization is terrible. The default watch faces are all quite ugly, and the Garmin app makes the customization experience even worse.

Also, I feel like the sleep is more accurate on the Apple watch than on the Garmin from a couple episodes that happened and in general from the differences in tracking time.

Also, as you already said, I just charge the watch everyday while I shower, so battery life is not really an issue for 80% of the time. For the other 20% it's really annoying... but I think a newer model (and I hope that the new ones will be even better on that side) will have better battery life. When the battery life will be ~48 hours it will be perfect for me.

From what I’ve heard, this is actually a problem with the exposed OS level api’s provided by Apple. Other manufacturers have solved this with on device workarounds. Doesn’t make it better though. I resorted to only the system only notifications (Phone, Texts).

I think a large percentage of your problem might be that you bought the most expensive model. Was the Ultra really the one to get?

It’s the thickest and heaviest, for one thing.

There’s a decent argument for the SE as the best Apple Watch for most people because it’s cheap and it does most of the things that regular people want out of a smartwatch.

In one social group I am part of, Garmin just became the new trend. Watches have historically been status symbols even more than they are functional. Someone drops a few hundred/thousand/whatever and then brags about the newest new and how they are on it, then others move over to keep up.

People often buy these kinds of discretionary toys with their hearts and do post-hoc rationalization with their minds. You can't figure it out because your heart hasn't brought you there so your brain isn't wasting time creating justifications.

For what it is worth, sometimes these trends die an early death when people realize there is no substance underneath the justification. At least in the Garmin case, most people I know are happy with the purchase, in that it does deliver on certain needs. Since it matches their expectations, they don't have to suffer any cognitive dissonance between the heart-to-brain justification and their lived experience.

For workout tracking depending on your sport the Garmin is way better- for swimming the lap counter and for hiking the trail maps on Garmin gets more granular and better for tracking. For phone integration the apple watch is better (I have it hooked up to take calls from the watch) so I ultimately went with the apple watch even though my triathlon training tracking was better on the Garmin!

Better running metrics. Maps. On-device routing. Longer battery life.

Some clothes have this technology called "pockets".

A lot of garmin watches let you download YT / Spotify or your own mp3s

Been using Suunto Run for a year and have been happy. The thing I mostly miss is Apple Pay and Runna compatibility. I usually have my phone with me for the former, and I'll be snagging the Race 3S when it supposedly launches in Oct.