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 On: 2007-03-24
My primary motivation for getting Highgear summit is its altimeter related functions. When I go on a bicycle ride or just hiking, I want to know how difficult that particular trip was. And, of course, the more hills is on your way the more difficult your trip was. So I am much more interested in, whats called, Cumulativie Altitude Gain (CAG) than in just an altitude of a place I am at. CAG for a given trip gives you how much total you have gone up. In other words, your capable watch adds all your ascends and discard all the descends.
I owned Avocet for many yeras before I got Highgear Summit and will judge the Summit against Avocet. The biggest problem with Avocet was battery replacement. It could be done at the factory only. So every year and a half or so I had to send the watch to Avocet along with 25 bucks for battery replacement. There were no battery status indicator so there the potential for the battery to go dead just when you need the watch most.
HighGear Summit is more that 10 years newer gadget than Avocet so one can reasonably expect a much better and more advanced product. And in some ways it is. With Summit you can repace its battery yourself. Thats good. But Summit doesnt have battery health indicator either so you can still (and I was) end up with a dead one while you are in the middle of nowhere. Well, this is a minor inconvenience compared to its other flaws described in a moment. Summit got many more features and capabilities than my old Avocet. Some are more useful than the others and some are just curiosity. You can, for example, set an alarm to go off when you exceed a preset altitude. Yeah, you have that heart condition as not to go any places that are higher than 4,000 feet above sea level. So you set your Summit alarm to 4000 feet and off you go, feeling really safe on any hike - useful!!!
But Summit has electronic compass. This is useful and works very well.
It has Large, easy to read face and a backlight so you can read what it displays in the dark.
Weather display and weather forecast mode - fun feature.
Summit many modes make its operation more cumbersome. Specifically, one is forced to cycle through all display modes to get to the one wanted. True, you can get to the time display mode from other modes quickly by pressing and holding the mode button. In practice, however, this doesnt work very well because of Summit mushy buttons. So many times you press and hold and nothing happens. Very annoying. This is made worse by the fact that Summit buttons do not give audio feedback when pressed. That chirp you hear when pressing a button on most cheap 15$ watches. With Avocet, I would be riding a bike, and to get from one mode to another, I press the button on the watch with one hand while the watch is on the other hand still holding handlebars, not even looking at the watch but just counting the number of beeps.
Another, exteremely annoying Summit feature is the way its designers implemented the altimeter related readings. Yes, just like Avocet, the Summit keeps track of your CAG (Cumulative Altitude Gain) but unlike Avocet it:
1. The Summit must be in the Altimeter mode to track your altitude gain - very inconvenient. With Avocet you press the Start button to begin Altitude acumulation tracking and, predictably, stop button to stop it. Thus when you driving in a car back home from a trip and want to check your CAG, you go to a altimeter mode and if the car happens to go uphill, Avocet will not boost your CAG.
2. No way to save your current CAG and keep adding to it so you can have a total CAG for a given time period - something Avocet has. You can zero your CAG before starting a trip but keep your total CAG intact and learn how much you have climbed in say a year.
3. To actually see your CAG you need, of course, the Summit in the Altimeter mode but thats not enough; you have to press a button to see a scrolling, hard to read text that is followed by your max altitude. In the place where Summit could have displayed CAG, it shows "altitude bar chart" a silly, tiny, altitude vs time graph. It appears Summit designers woodenly copied Suunto that does pretty much the same thing.
I keep looking.
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