A couple months back, after more than 8 years of service, my trusty Garmin Forerunner 60 bit the dust. In need of a new watch to help record my workouts, I surveyed the field of new fitness watches and activity trackers and settled on a Pebble2 +HR. I loved the relatively sleek design of the Pebble and the customizable watch faces, but the companion app lacked a lot of basic features and less than two weeks after receiving mine, Pebble announced their acquisition by FitBit along with a statement indicating they could not promise the watch would remain functional in the future. So, back went the Pebble, and I ordered up this Garmin Forerunner 35 (FR35) as a replacement. After living with it for about a month, here's how it stacks up.HARDWAREOverall the hardware is acceptable, although far from stylish. I do have a couple of quibbles though. The "Analog" face, isn't completely terrible, but the "Digital" face is ugly. The digital time readout is legible, but the giant Bluetooth connection indicator and battery status stick out like a sore thumb. My Pebble offered a much more elegant face (along with dozens of other options) that was able to show a digital time display along with the current weather, current HR, and current step total. It would be nice to see something more along those lines offered here. Another minor complaint is with the wrist strap. While plenty comfortable for 24/7 wear, the diagonal line texture seems to trap chlorine and soap residue and requires a thorough scrubbing every few days. I'm also disappointed to see that it's connected to the watch via two star-head screws. When the strap inevitably fails, I'll have to hope Garmin has replacements available. A standard watch strap would have been much preferred here.WORKOUTSI have had the chance to try the FR35 out across a varied set of workouts including swims, indoor treadmill runs, and outdoor runs. When outdoors the GPS tracking is as accurate as my phone's GPS. I compared measured workout distances between the FR35 and MapMyRun and found the total distance measured to be extremely close. The heart rate accuracy provided by the wrist strap is good, much better than what I saw on the Pebble, but it's slower to react to changes than the Wahoo chest strap I compared it against. Given an additional 5-10 seconds to respond to a change in effort, it seemed to +/- 5bpm compared to the chest strap about 95% of the time. If that error bothers you, you can pair it with an ANT+ chest strap during workouts instead (like the Wahoo Tickr or any recent Garmin strap).ACTIVITY TRACKINGThe FR35 seems to count steps fairly accurately. It does a pretty good job of rejecting random arm movements that otherwise inflate step counts. While I generally find the distance calculation based on pedometer step counts to be laughably inaccurate, I was reasonably impressed at how close the total calculated distance to the actual distance on a treadmill run. While I wouldn't necessarily rely on this to measure out mile splits, it's close enough for casual distance guesstimation.The sleep tracking works quite well and is automatic. I find it logs my actual sleep and wake times within about +/- 10 minutes of when I actually fall asleep and it does a good job of rejecting time spent reading in bed. The sleep tracking graphs breakdown sleep into light and deep sleep periods (although, without knowing how these periods are calculated it's hard to read too much into these) as well as movement levels. I'll be very interested to monitor my sleep levels over time (hours and quality) to see how my general feeling of wellness changes as the amount of quality sleep time I'm getting varies.It's hard to comment on the accuracy of calorie tracking without access to a physiology lab. The calories burned are tracked, and it's kind of useful to look at the trend over time. I wouldn't rely on the number of calories burned as reported by the watch to be super accurate though (if, say you're monitoring caloric input/output).NOTIFICATIONSWhen connected with my phone, the notifications are usable. Text messages and phone calls (and other notifications if I desire) buzz through to the watch face. It's enough to know there's something that may require my attention and a glance at the screen provides enough of a summary to decide if I need to pull out my phone or deal with the notification later. While I have found getting these alerts on my wrist pretty useful, this particular feature falls short of what the Pebble offered. There's no queue or timeline for reviewing notifications as there is on the Pebble and I find I miss the ability to simply scroll back through previous alerts.BATTERY LIFEThe Forerunner 35's battery life is outstanding. I get between 8 and 10 days between charges, and a full charge takes only a few hours. This is much better than I expected and ensures I only miss a few hours of activity monitoring per month. Given the time of year, I've been doing most of my running indoors so I've made light use of the GPS, I expect as the weather warms up and I do more outside running with the GPS on, I'll lose a couple of days of battery life, but I expect I should still make it a week or so between charges.APP/WEBSITEI've used Garmin's connect website to log my swims and runs for years now, so most of the experience there is familiar. The website provides access to my workout history so I can compare runs and swims against previous efforts and see improvements over time. Now that I have the FR35, I get access to my sleep, all-day heart rate, and activity tracking data there as well. The app for my Android phone is decent. It can be a little confusing navigating through the various screens, but overall, all of the information I would care to look at is available, often presented in easy to digest charts and graphs.FINAL THOUGHTSOverall I find the FR35 to be an excellent activity tracker and workout companion, but only a mediocre smartwatch. A few tweaks to the software allowing for some nicer watch face options and a better interface for dealing with notifications would make this a five-star device. Still, even with these shortcomings, I find myself wearing it 24/7 and imagine it will be on my wrist for a few years reliably logging my activity until my next upgrade.