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| FITSENSE SPORTS |
| by The Fitsense Team |
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fitness & training articles |
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How the New Garmin Forerunner 405CX GPS Watch Differs From the 405 If you are serious about improving your training and fitness, you might consider investing in a GPS watch. GPS enables tracking of speed, pace, distance and your route over a run.
The market leader by far in the GPS sports & fitness watch arena is Garmin with their Forerunner line of fitness watches. The Garmin Forerunner 405 was released around the end of 2007 as a successor to the 305 watch. Both watches featured the SirfStarIII chipset for much better GPS tracking than the legacy watches, but the Forerunner 405 has a smaller face and looks more like a sports watch than the chunky 305. It lacks some of the 305's mapping and navigation features, making it more a running watch than for navigation.
Garmin have released an upgrade to the Forerunner 405, the Forerunner 405CX, but what new advantages does this new Garmin Watch offer and is it worth an upgrade?
The most advertised difference in the 405CX is that, unlike the 405 it has heart rate based calorie computation. The 405 did not use heart rate data to approximate calories, making for less accurate readings.
What is important to realise about calorie measurement is that, if used for determining weight loss, the calories directly burned in an exercise session do not necessarily tell you the full story. When you have done exercise, your body continues to burn calories in a heightened metabolic state well after you have stopped.
Never-the-less, knowing an accurate approximation of what you burn while you are exercising is useful and this feature is likely to prove popular amongst athletes.
The second major difference and an extremely practical one for female athletes or for those with petite wrists is an alternative wrist band that can be changed (with a little effort) using a bundled spring-bar tool that can depress the band slots to take the wrist band off the watch.
Aside from these two differences, little else has changed, although the GPS accuracy has allegedly been improved, it is only an incremental upgrade over the 405.
Also note that the 405CX, unlike the new 310XT is not water proof and does not have an extended battery life that are the highlights of the 310XT GPS watch. The original 405 still presents good value if you want an allin one GPS Running watch purely for training and events. Click here to view the Garmin 405 product page
A full list of features contained in the Garmin 405CX can be found on the product page. Click here to buy now!
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