Garmin Forerunner 305 Review (part 3) – Battery life

Since writing abut how the Garmin Forerunner 305 is charged I’ve been concerned about the battery life of the wrist unit.

On a couple of occasions I’ve put the wrist unit on to start a run just to be greeted with the ‘Battery level low’ warning sign!

Now, it’s nice it tells me… but once this warning appears it seams that the batteries have only about 5 to 10 minutes left. This concerned me, as I normally leave the unit plugged in to my USB port after transferring data. I was worried that I had a faulty unit.

The manual says to charge the unit for at least 3 hours before first using it… but instead I decided to follow my male instinct and only charge the unit until the ‘fully charged’ message appeared. So, yesterday afternoon I plugged the wrist unit directly in to a wall socket and left it there for about 5 hours.

After about an hour of charging via the wall socket the ‘fully charged’ message once again appeared, but this time I ignored it and left the unit plugged in.

The test came this morning – as I decided to take the wrist unit with me on a business trip from my home in Kent to Bristol. I thought it would test the unit’s battery power to the full, as a train journey would mean lots of searching for satellites, lots of speed changes, lots of direction changes, and therefore lots of writing to the memory.

Anyway, 7 hours 16 minutes and 240.9 miles later the unit is still going and is showing 2 out of 4 bars on the battery level indicator.

Panic over then… I should have been more patient before first using the Garmin. From now on I’ll also be charging the unit by the wall socket as much as possible, rather than relying on my USB port. And I’ll also not pay too much attention to the ‘Fully charged’ message!