My wife, in a rare act of leading me out to sprint for the win, bought me a Garmin Forerunner 255 for my birthday as surprise.
I’ve never really had one of these types of watches, or at least, fully utilised their capacity.
I also have a Wahoo Elemnt Bolt as head unit, which I like lot and has been great.
I’d be looking for the watch and head unit to work together etc
Do I need to/ Should I, swap the watch to a Wahoo Rival? Is that worthwhile? Critical? Rival reviews seem favourable, and it’s also cheaper, but I predict regardless of the financial strength of the business case I would make to my wife, it would still cost me political capital and lower my approval ratings in the polls.
Wahoo has no ecosystem so there is no benefit to switch to the Rival over having devices from two different companies. The 255 does a lot more than the Rival because it is a ‘wearable’ as in it tracks steps, sleep, various other metrics throughout the day, push notifications, etc. in addition to being a bike/run/paddleboard/whatever recording device.
If you use a Garmin watch along with an Edge device they both feed data into the ecosystem and it’s a nice plus to have everything synced up, but it’s not really necessary.
Wahoo stopped its watch product line and has been selling off stock at a huge discount. I picked up a Rival for 99 € around Christmas. It automatically transmits heart rate data to Wahoo head units, which is really nice. But I wouldn’t recommend getting a Rival, unless you know that
you won’t be getting any feature updates,
you don’t need a smartwatch and
you get it for really cheap.
Ultimately, I want an Apple Watch (Ultra), but we had other financial priorities at home as they say.
Personally my original Wahoo bolt is getting a bit old. I bought a Fenix6 (but really any Garmin watch that records power is fine - assuming you have PM’s)
Ultimately I just dual record everything but I use the Garmin as the device I upload to everywhere and use the Wahoo purely as a head unit & a backup incase the Garmin fails me one of these days.
If the issue is about Wahoo not syncing to the gamin ecosystem and you caring about garmin training status, you can use fitfiletools to change the recording device to a garmin model (e.g. a 540) and then upload to garmin connect.
Alternatively, you can just ditch garmin training status because it’s utter garbage.
The Fenix records arguably better GPS track than the original Bolt.
My bolt is also permanently reading 99 degrees and the elevation is garbage.
That… and simplicity really. Record everything via a single source, you don’t get double ups & you don’t have to re-upload your ride via the fitfiletools method.
There are some deals to be had for the Ultra. The 2 wasn’t a huge update so some dealers were blowing them out the door (if you don’t want the new colors). I have one with the Milanese band and love it. The whole thing is not as heavy as people seem want to complain about. I have scratched the area around the face, but the band still looks like it came right out of the box. We got $80 off on sale which wasn’t bad. (Yeah, it’s how much percent off?) I was surprised and disappointed at the scratches, but it does so much. I’m blessed to have it. Can’t wait to get it wet diving. (And I bought a Garmin G1 Solar last year! )
The true interesting part is getting the damn Milanese band to close. It’s a little tricky, but gets easier with time. It also has no scratches, and is wearing a bit on the wrist rest of my MacBook Pro. Oh, there is a slight lightening of the band color just down stream of the clasp assembly.
We got $80 off on sale which wasn’t bad. (Yeah, it’s how much percent off?) I was surprised and disappointed at the scratches, but it does so much. I’m blessed to have it. Can’t wait to get it wet diving. (And I bought a Garmin G1 Solar last year! 