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Garmin Forerunner 305 Review (part 2) - Charging the unit



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The first part of this Garmin Forerunner 305 review looked at my reasons for buying the Garmin as well as what came in the box. In this part of the review we’ll look at how the unit is charged up to use.

So, how does the Garmin Forerunner 305 get its power?

Now, I have to admit, this wasn’t something I looked in to that much before I bought my Garmin, but I have to admit I’m very happy.

The biggest difference between the Garmin and my old Polar is that you can turn the Garmin on and off. This makes it much more of a unit for training, whereas the Polar is designed to be an all round watch… and therefore is always on.

The Polar has a normal watch battery in the unit, whereas the Garmin is charged from either a standard power supply, or (and here are the bells and whistles!)…. your PC’s/Mac’s USB port!!!

Charging the Garmin Forerunner 305

As with all electronic kit, when it arrives it’s not charged. How annoying is this??? When you get a new gadget you just want to play! Why can’t they arrive fully charged??? I guess it’s down to some health and safety regulation!?

Anyway, this is where I started to get confused. I expected one cable that simply plugs into the wrist unit. Instead you have to start by slotting the wrist unit into it’s cradle. Slotting is probably the wrong word. The unit just kind of goes in to the cradle. It’s hard to describe - but it just ‘goes in’!

The back of the Garmin Forerunner 305 wrist unit and it’s docking cradle

The back of the Garmin Forerunner 305 and it’s docking cradle

The Garmin Forerunner 305 in its docking cradle

The Garmin Forerunner 305 in its docking cradle

The next bit was really confusing, and wasn’t explained in the manual too well at all. The manual says:
‘Plug the small end of the AC adapter int the mini-USB port on the cradle. Plug the other end into a standard wall socket’.
This makes it sound like there’s one lead that’s needed. This isn’t the case.

Instead, there’s a single cable that plugs into the unit which then needs to plug into a socket on the plug - that then goes in to the wall socket…

The charging cable for the Garmin Forerunner 305

Once this arrangement is worked out and the unit is plugged in to the wall the display tells you that the unit is charging. When fully charged this is also displayed on the unit…

A fully charged Garmin Forerunner 305

And that’s about it. Fully charging the unit took about an hour out of the box. Since then I’ve kept the unit plugged in to my USB port whenever I’ve downloaded some data - so the plug unit is now back in the box. The main problem is remembering to turn the unit off after a training run.

Charging by a USB port is exactly the same as above - apart from the cable plugs in to the USB port rather than a standard plug…

The Garmin Forerunner 305 charging from a Mac


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(This entry was posted on February 20th, 2008.)

2 comments so far to “Garmin Forerunner 305 Review (part 2) - Charging the unit”

  1. Posted by: llewdis
    on February 28th, 2008 at 6:06 am

    Are you going to cover your impressions of using this device with the mac? I just purchased one of these, and am wondering how well it will work, or if I am going to have to use it in my parallels virtual machine….

  2. Posted by: mart
    on February 28th, 2008 at 10:27 pm

    Hi,

    First of all, thanks for your comment.

    As I said in my reviews so far, one of the main reasons I moved to the Garmin from my old Polar was Polar’s lack of Mac support.

    So far I’ve been very impressed with how the Garmin fits with my Mac.

    Motionbased.com now supports the Mac to some degree, and I’ve also been using Ascent - which is a dedicated Mac GPS analysis package.

    I’ll hopefully be posting articles and comparisons on both of these options in the near future.

    Regards,
    Mart

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