Garmin Forerunner 101 Wrist-Mounted GPS Personal Training Device

This is an amazing product for an amazing price. BUY ONE! I was originally looking for a good heart rate watch. No real reason for the heart rate part, jut thought it might be interesting but after stumbling upon this find and reading all the reviews I thought I'll give it a try. That was the best thing!!My original selling point was to use the personal trainer that comes with this devise, but to this day I have not yet used `him' and still think it's the best thing . . . . . . i have that bit to come!GPS is the way forward - How did I ever live without it? No longer do I need to look on Google or drive round the area to see how far I have/will run nor do I need to take the exact route home. Thanks to this little fella I just go where ever and it tells me how far I ran, my arrearage everything and calories burned. Hell, I even started to do more warm downs now as I know I have covered the goal before arriving home. I'm telling you, this is something we can all befit from.I have also used it for more silly things like clocking the top speeds of some friends and me on our mini motos. What a laugh.So many uses - The distance of a local bike rides we have done and even out of curiosity I took it to the last football match I was playing in to see how many miles we cover (it was 1.8 miles you know ).You can see I have run with this little fella. A review said that it is not very good under trees but I have never experienced this and I leave in a wooded area, so no idea how much coverage it needs to block out the signal? I say don't worrie. Batt life is good. Not yet changed them and it is not as big as it could be. In short - it rocks.

As a keen hill/road runner and walker I've being eyeing up GPS gadgets for a couple of years now. When they first came out they were over £300, but now you can get the basic Garmin Forerunner for under £100.I've been using mine for a few weeks now for offroad running, and I'm suitably impressed.Yes, as most reviews state, it does occasionally lose the satellite signal (in thick woodland), but this happens less often than I expected and not for long. It then plots a point2point line from when it last had a signal, so unless your weaving about under trees, it's still pretty accurate.On a 30 mile trip in the car it only varied by 1% on the cars milometer (which is probably a higher accuracy than the car).The virtual running partner is an excellent training aid as you try an keep ahead of your little LCD figure.Summary: Very impressed, so far, well worth the money. Only regret is that I could have paid a little more for the 201, so I could interface it with PC mapping software.

I bought this for my wife who's obsessive about distances and times. It was great for a year (no probs with losing signal). We ran with it 3 or 4 times a week and I used it for cycling too. It occasionally gave a weird speed or distance, but generally was very sound. Then last month it just stopped working (never used in damp conditions, and everything functioned except the GPS!) . I was about to chuck it away, having spent a frustrating month trying to fix it - and then after much searching of the internet I came across a reset process,actually for a different model, which I tried - and it put the 101 back into operation. Garmin's service and support in the UK seems weak, and it would be easy to improve their website FAQs/support. The quoted battery life is also very optimistic, we get about 5 hours for alkaline and about 4 for NiMH, which covers you for most routine runs, so it's a minor quibble: but I always put freshly-charged batteries in, each time we use it.

I've not had it long, but its much better than the Navman i've been using!I went for the 101, as i'm not bothered about uploading data or my heartrate, and so far so good! it takes a few minutes to get the GPS signals, but once it has them it hasn't let go.A good tool at an excellent price!

I use mine on every run, set to record each and every miles pace - I don't think the map features etc are much use but at the end of the run it does tell you accurately how far you went and how fast (or slow) your went. One key thing is that you do need to let it get lock before setting off and it does this better on the ground than it does on your wrist. The navigator mode isn't much to write about but it did get me back to my hotel in one very big and strange city. For the price its well worth it as an extra motivational aid - it will keep you honest about how far and fast you are running with the displays of weekly distance and average pace.

Like the other review that gave this kit 1 star, I had the same problem that the unit rarely managed to complete a run whilst maintaining a satellite lock. In frustration I ensured that my runs were across open flat moorland - perfect GPS country. Even then it would lose a signal for 3 miles at a time and when it found a signal again would assume that I had run in a perfectly straight line since its last fix. On several occasions it simply seemed to get bored and switched itself off. In the end I seemed to be carrying it for some extra weight to aid training, but decided that an extra bit of water was a far more useful load. Completely and utterly disappointed and it has put me off buying Garmins for good, despite the fact that most people seem to love them.

Great bit of kit

Works very well,only drawback is that it is very heavy on battery life,so need full charge before you leave.