Garmin has announced a successor to 2014's Garmin Swim, the Garmin Swim 2. The new smartwatch promises heart rate tracking in the water and is once again designed firmly with swimming in mind.
It packs in GPS as is standard with most Garmin watches and will monitor a series of tracking metrics in the pool or open water. Those include monitoring distance, pace, SWOLF, stroke count and distance per stroke.
Read this: Best waterproof smartwatches for swimming
The Swim 2 also log rests between exercises automatically, and track timed sets and log drills, which is a nice feature to have on board. Out of the pool, you can also track running and cycling giving it multisport powers too.
In design terms, the Swim 2 fits in with Garmin's current generation of smartwatches, and packs in five buttons around a 42mm case with a 1-inch round display. These control functions like starting and stopping workouts, logging laps, and navigating in menus. It's a transflective display, so not the full color one that you get on the new Garmin Venu.
It has a silicone strap, for obvious waterproofing reasons, which should be a major improvement on the tacky plastic strap that the original Swim 2 came with. The watch's overall waterproofing is a fairly standard 5ATM, meaning that you're fine to swim to depths of up 50 meters with it.
In terms of battery life, the Swim 2 should last for 7 days in smartwatch mode, while using GPS and the optical heart rate tracker will reduce this to 13 hours. In pool mode, the watch should last 72 hours, just in case you're planning any in-pool marathons.
Garmin's also brought some of its smartwatch features to the Swim 2, including notification support, step counting and sleep tracking. It doesn't have a built-in music player or Garmin Pay, though, if that payment support matters to you.
Garmin last made a swimming-specific watch in 2014, when it released the far more budget-friendly first Garmin Swim, which we were impressed with. Although its build quality wasn't the best, its tracking was extremely accurate, and Garmin is likely to have only got better on that front.
The Swim 2 is available now in two color options, slate and whitestone, which you can feel free to think of as grey and white. It's priced at , which means it's slightly cheaper than paying for a Forerunner 245, which does offer swim tracking features too.
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