Garmin Swim 2 GPS Smartwatch Review: The Ultimate Pool and Open Water Companion?

There’s a unique frustration every serious swimmer knows. It’s that moment, deep into a long set, when your mind drifts and the inevitable question hits: “Was that length 38 or 40?” You lose count, your rhythm breaks, and the integrity of your entire workout feels compromised. I’ve been there more times than I can count, staring at the black line at the bottom of the pool, trying to mentally retrace my laps. It’s the same feeling of uncertainty that creeps in during an open water swim. Am I on course? How far have I actually gone? Without data, you’re just guessing. This guesswork is the enemy of progress. It prevents you from accurately tracking your pace, measuring improvements in efficiency, and pushing your limits with confidence. For anyone who takes their swimming seriously, flying blind isn’t an option; you need a dedicated co-pilot on your wrist.

What to Consider Before Buying a Dedicated Swimming Smartwatch

A specialized swimming watch is more than just a waterproof gadget; it’s a key solution for transforming your aquatic workouts from aimless splashing into data-driven training sessions. Unlike a standard fitness tracker that might survive a dip in the pool, a device like the Garmin Swim 2 GPS Smartwatch is purpose-built to capture the nuanced metrics that matter to swimmers. It meticulously records your distance, pace, stroke count, stroke type, and even calculates your SWOLF score—a master metric for swimming efficiency. The main benefit is clarity. It removes all ambiguity, allowing you to focus purely on your form and effort, secure in the knowledge that every single length and stroke is being logged for later analysis.

The ideal customer for this type of product is someone who has moved beyond casual swimming. This includes club swimmers, triathletes, and dedicated fitness enthusiasts who use swimming as a core part of their routine. If you meticulously plan your workouts, care about improving your pace per 100m, or are training for an open water event, this watch is designed for you. Conversely, it might be overkill for those who only swim recreationally a few times a year or are primarily looking for a smartwatch with basic notification and step-counting features. For them, a more general-purpose fitness tracker might suffice, though it will lack the sophisticated swimming analytics that define this category.

Before investing, consider these crucial points in detail:

• Dimensions & Weight: In swimming, hydrodynamics and comfort are paramount. A bulky, heavy watch can create noticeable drag and become a distraction. The Garmin Swim 2 GPS Smartwatch weighs a mere 36 grams, making it virtually unnoticeable on the wrist during intense activity. When choosing a watch, always check the weight and profile to ensure it won’t interfere with your stroke mechanics.
• Performance & Accuracy: A swimming watch lives and dies by its accuracy. For pool swimming, the internal accelerometer must flawlessly detect laps and stroke type. For open water, a reliable and quick-locking GPS is essential. Furthermore, features like underwater wrist-based heart rate monitoring, drill logging, and pacing alerts are key performance indicators that separate the best from the rest.
• Materials & Durability: This device will be constantly exposed to chlorine or saltwater. Look for a durable silicone strap that won’t degrade and a lens made from chemically strengthened glass to resist scratches. A water rating of 5 ATM (or 50 meters) is the standard for surface swimming, ensuring the device is well-protected against water ingress during your workouts.
• Ease of Use & Battery Life: Touchscreens are notoriously unreliable when wet. As one user noted after switching from an Apple Watch, physical buttons are a massive advantage, allowing for confident pausing and navigating mid-swim. Battery life is also critical; you need a watch that can last through multiple sessions and function as a daily driver without constant charging. The Swim 2’s impressive multi-day battery life in smartwatch mode is a significant plus.

Understanding these elements will help you select a device that not only meets but enhances your training goals, turning your wrist into a powerful data hub.

While the Garmin Swim 2 GPS Smartwatch is an excellent choice for swimmers, it exists in a competitive market of GPS-enabled devices. For a broader look at all the top models, especially if your activities extend to the trail, we highly recommend checking out our complete, in-depth guide:

First Impressions: Unboxing the Garmin Swim 2 GPS Smartwatch

Upon opening the box, the first thing that struck us about the Garmin Swim 2 GPS Smartwatch was its focused simplicity. There’s no unnecessary flair—just the watch, a charging cable, and the essential manuals. Our Slate Grey model has a sleek, understated look that works just as well in the office as it does at the pool. The immediate standout feature is its weight. At just 36 grams, it feels incredibly light on the wrist, a stark contrast to some of the larger, bulkier multisport watches on the market. This is a device designed not to be noticed while you’re focused on your split times.

The soft silicone band is comfortable and secure, and the five-button interface feels solid and purposeful. Having tested countless smartwatches, we can confirm the frustration of trying to operate a wet touchscreen. Garmin’s decision to stick with tactile buttons here is a masterstroke for its intended environment. The colour display is bright and easily readable, even under the glare of indoor pool lights or in direct sunlight. Setting it up through the Garmin Connect app was a seamless process, taking just a few minutes to pair with our smartphone and configure our personal settings and pool sizes. It immediately feels less like a fragile piece of tech and more like a rugged, reliable training tool, ready to be put through its paces. You can see its full feature set and user reviews to get a better sense of its design philosophy.

In the Water: A Comprehensive Performance Analysis

A swimming watch’s true value is only revealed in the water. It’s here, amidst the chlorine and the exertion, that promises of accuracy and ease-of-use are tested. We put the Garmin Swim 2 GPS Smartwatch through an extensive series of tests in both controlled pool environments and the unpredictable conditions of open water to see if its performance lives up to its purpose-built design. Our deep dive focused on its core functionalities: pool tracking accuracy, open water GPS reliability, its biometric sensors, and the overall user experience powered by the Garmin ecosystem.

Pool Swimming Prowess: Accuracy and Advanced Metrics

In the pool, the Garmin Swim 2 GPS Smartwatch is in its element. Our initial setup was straightforward; we entered our local pool’s 25-meter length, a setting that one user amusingly admitted to fumbling initially before reading the manual. Once set, the watch performed exceptionally. Across dozens of sessions, its accelerometer-based lap counting was nearly flawless. Echoing the sentiment of one satisfied user who said it “hasn’t dropped a length yet,” we found its accuracy to be impeccable, whether we were doing steady endurance sets or high-intensity intervals. This reliability is the foundation of any good swimming watch, and the Swim 2 builds on it beautifully.

The device automatically detects your stroke type with a high degree of accuracy, especially for freestyle and backstroke. It occasionally confused breaststroke with butterfly during warmup drills, but this is a common quirk among wrist-based devices and it was consistently accurate during focused sets. The real magic lies in the data it provides. Metrics like stroke count per length, pace per 100 meters, and the all-important SWOLF score are displayed clearly both in real-time and in the post-swim summary. The “Auto Rest” feature is a standout, automatically pausing the timer when you stop at the wall and resuming when you push off. This is a massive quality-of-life improvement, eliminating the need to fiddle with buttons between every interval. We also found the turn-based pacing alerts to be an excellent training tool, vibrating on our wrist to help maintain a target pace. While one user reported a significant overstatement of distance, our experience, and that of many others, was one of high precision. This suggests isolated faulty units or specific swimming styles might affect results, but for the majority, the pool performance is outstanding and a key reason to invest in this specialized tool.

Conquering Open Water with GPS

Taking the Garmin Swim 2 GPS Smartwatch from the predictable confines of the pool to the open water is where its GPS capabilities come into play, and also where we found the most varied user feedback. It is a known technological challenge for any wrist-worn device to maintain a consistent GPS signal while submerged. Our testing confirmed this reality. The key to a successful track is patience. We made it a strict rule to select the “Open Water Swim” activity and wait for the “GPS Ready” signal *before* getting in the water. Rushing this step almost always resulted in a less accurate track.

During our swims in a local lake, the watch performed admirably for its class. The resulting map in the Garmin Connect app showed a realistic representation of our route, and the total distance was consistent with known landmarks. However, it’s not without its quirks. As some users have pointedly noted, the GPS track can sometimes appear “squiggly” or even show you swimming on land. We found that performance was improved by consciously extending the watch arm further out of the water during the recovery phase of the freestyle stroke, giving the antenna a clearer view of the sky. While we did not experience the “pathetic” results described by a couple of frustrated users, we acknowledge that factors like tall surrounding cliffs, heavy cloud cover, or a particularly low-in-the-water swimming style can negatively impact performance. The truth is, if you demand survey-grade GPS accuracy on the water, you may be disappointed. But for reliable distance, pace, and route logging for training purposes, the Swim 2 delivered consistently for us.

Beyond the Pool: Heart Rate, Battery, and Everyday Use

While swimming is its specialty, the Garmin Swim 2 GPS Smartwatch is designed to be worn 24/7, and it excels as a general fitness companion. A major feature is the wrist-based heart rate monitor that works underwater. This is a significant advantage, freeing you from the need for a separate, often uncomfortable, chest strap. We found the heart rate data to be valuable for gauging effort during a swim and tracking recovery. As one user confirmed after calibrating it with a chest monitor, the readings are surprisingly accurate for general tracking. However, for high-intensity interval training where rapid changes occur, a chest strap will always provide more precise data, a point reinforced by a user who noted discrepancies during a cycling workout.

Battery life is another huge strength. Garmin claims up to 7 days in smartwatch mode, 13 hours in GPS mode, and 72 hours in pool mode with heart rate. Our testing validates these claims. We easily got a full week of use on a single charge, including three to four hour-long swim sessions. This robust performance, confirmed by a user who noted the battery “lasts over a week,” means you can spend more time training and less time tethered to a charger. The inclusion of basic activity profiles for running, cycling, and cardio makes it a versatile, if not comprehensive, multisport watch. It’s a fantastic option for the swimmer who also runs or bikes for cross-training, making the Garmin Swim 2 GPS Smartwatch an excellent value proposition.

The Garmin Connect Ecosystem and User Interface

The hardware is only half the story; the software experience is equally crucial. The five-button interface of the Garmin Swim 2 GPS Smartwatch is a triumph of function over form. It’s intuitive, responsive, and, most importantly, completely immune to the problems posed by water. As one user who switched from an Apple Watch celebrated, the ability to pause, resume, and scroll through data screens with a definitive click of a button is a game-changer mid-workout. There is a slight learning curve, as an Italian user pointed out, to master all the advanced features like programming custom workouts, but the core functions are incredibly easy to access.

Once your workout is done, a quick sync to your phone opens up the Garmin Connect app, one of the most comprehensive fitness platforms available. Here, your swim data is presented in incredible detail. You can view maps of your open water swims, analyse your pace and stroke rate for every length of a pool session, and track your long-term progress over weeks and months. The ability to link your account to other services like Strava is seamless. Furthermore, the Connect IQ store allows for customization with a wide range of free watch faces and data fields, a feature praised by users. This powerful combination of a simple, effective on-device interface and a deep, analytical backend platform makes the entire user experience cohesive and rewarding.

What Other Users Are Saying

Across the board, the user feedback for the Garmin Swim 2 GPS Smartwatch paints a picture of a product that excels at its core mission, though it isn’t without its critics. A recurring theme of praise is its user-friendly, button-based design. One reviewer explicitly stated they “traded in my Apple Watch 6 for this” because the Apple Watch’s touchscreen was “hit and miss often becoming unresponsive when wet,” whereas the Swim 2’s push buttons provided easy and reliable control.

Many users, like one who declared they “like it. Bought for swimming, it hasn’t dropped a length yet,” corroborate our findings on its superb accuracy in the pool. Its value is also frequently highlighted, with one swimmer noting, “What there not to love about the Garmin Swim 2… when you pay just £139.99 for a new Garmin sports watch?”

However, the negative feedback is just as specific, focusing almost exclusively on the GPS performance in open water. One user bluntly stated, “If the GPS is this off then any of the other data isn’t worth a damn,” after their tracked swim showed them in central France. Another described the GPS results as “pretty pathetic tbh.” This starkly contrasts with other users who found it worked well. This division suggests that performance can be highly variable depending on conditions and user technique, a critical point for prospective buyers to consider.

How Does the Garmin Swim 2 Compare to the Competition?

While the Garmin Swim 2 GPS Smartwatch is a specialist, it’s important to understand how it fits within Garmin’s broader lineup of GPS watches. Your specific needs outside of the pool may lead you to consider a more feature-rich, albeit more expensive, alternative.

1. Garmin fēnix 7 Multisport GPS Watch

The Garmin fēnix 7 is the do-it-all adventurer’s watch. It’s built like a tank with premium materials and offers a staggering array of activity profiles that go far beyond just swimming, running, and cycling, including things like skiing, surfing, and mountain climbing. While it contains all the swimming metrics of the Swim 2, it adds advanced topographical mapping, solar charging options, and a much deeper suite of performance analytics for land-based sports. If your athletic life is incredibly diverse and you demand the absolute best in durability and features, and budget is not your primary concern, the fēnix 7 is the superior choice. For the pure swimmer, however, its extra features and weight may be unnecessary.

2. Garmin fēnix 7S Smartwatch Multisport

The fēnix 7S offers nearly everything the standard fēnix 7 does but in a significantly smaller and lighter package designed for more slender wrists. This makes it an interesting competitor to the Swim 2. It closes the size and weight gap while still providing the full suite of premium multisport and smartwatch features, including music storage and contactless payments. If you desire the power of the Fenix series but have been put off by the traditionally large size of flagship GPS watches, the 7S is the perfect compromise. It’s a premium choice for the multi-sport athlete who values a more compact and stylish form factor.

3. Garmin Forerunner 255S GPS Running Smartwatch

The Forerunner series is Garmin’s heartland for runners, and the 255S is a prime example. While its primary focus is running—offering advanced metrics like running power and race prediction tools—it is also a highly capable triathlon watch with excellent pool and open-water swimming modes. It essentially matches the Swim 2’s aquatic capabilities while significantly outperforming it for running and cycling analytics. If you are a triathlete, or a runner who swims for cross-training, the Forerunner 255S presents a more balanced and powerful feature set for your specific needs. It’s the logical step up for the athlete who considers running and swimming to be equally important.

The Final Lap: Is the Garmin Swim 2 GPS Smartwatch for You?

After extensive testing, our verdict is clear: the Garmin Swim 2 GPS Smartwatch is a phenomenal, laser-focused training tool that delivers exceptional value for its target audience. It consciously forgoes the jack-of-all-trades approach to be a master of one: swimming. Its greatest strengths lie in its lightweight, unobtrusive design, its supremely reliable button interface that works flawlessly in wet conditions, and its highly accurate and detailed metric tracking in the pool. It’s a device that gets the fundamentals right, providing serious swimmers with the data they need to analyse performance and drive improvement, without any unnecessary distractions.

Its primary weakness is the inherent challenge of open water GPS accuracy, an issue not unique to this device but one that potential buyers must be aware of. If you are a swimmer first and foremost—whether you’re chasing personal bests in the pool or training for your first open water race—this is arguably the best purpose-built device in its price range. For swimmers looking to elevate their training with data-driven insights, the Garmin Swim 2 GPS Smartwatch is a clear winner and an investment we wholeheartedly recommend.