Activity Ben Drew

Magellan Switch Up

The Magellan Switch’s big brother, the Switch Up is a multi-purpose GPS watch that perfectly complements runners, cyclists, and triathletes. Like the Switch, the Switch Up has unique features beneficial to all types of endurance athletes.

Activity Pacer is Magellan’s version of Virtual Partner. The big difference being it provides some guidance on how to complete the workout within your set goals, including a calculation of when it expects you to finish based on your current pace.

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For triathletes, multi-sport allows fast and simple activity changes; the quick release mount makes wrist to bike transitions easy. And the battery extender pack – an extra battery that can be swapped on the watch – provides an additional 16 hours of battery life on top of the 8 hours with the included watch battery.

Screen customization is also a notably strong feature on the Switch Up. Not only can 6 data fields be personalized with information per screen, but the Switch Up supports 9 screens per activity. Additionally 9 different activity profiles can be set ahead of time to ensure that as you switch from running to biking to swimming, the data fields you need to see for each activity are easy to access.

Expanding on the Switch’s features, the Switch Up distinguishes itself with a built-in barometric altimeter, giving it much more accurate elevation measurements. It also has a temperature sensor and vibration alerts. And unlike the Switch, the quick release mount comes included with the Switch Up.

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Like the Switch, the downsides to the Switch Up are its lack of interval and advanced workout features – this means you cannot program custom workouts on the watch. The Switch Up is also big and chunky and isn’t suitable for wearing in non-exercising situations, both because of its size and its inability to display time and date.

PROS:

Highly customizable in both data fields displayed and the number of profiles that can be set-up
Battery extender pack – Magellan’s Switch and Switch Up are the only two GPS watches able to swap batteries
Activity Pacer – a nice improvement over Garmin’s Virtual Partner

CONS:

No interval or advanced workouts
Square-ish and bulky. Not a watch you would want to wear outside of exercising

WHO SHOULD BUY THIS WATCH

Runners

While lacking interval workouts, the Activity Pacer still makes this a nice watch for intermediate runners looking for some extra motivation while training. But it’s fairly complex for newer runners and lacks training aids (like interval and advanced workouts) beneficial to experienced runners.

Cyclists

With 9 activity profiles giving you the ability to customize multiple bikes and its compatibility with bicycle accessories like a bike speed and cadence sensor and a power meter, the Switch Up is a great GPS watch for advanced cyclists.

Triathletes

The Switch Up is waterproof, comes with multi-sport – which make activity transitions simple, and works with a quick-release mount, allowing speedy wrist to bike-mount transfers.

Swimmers

The Switch Up is waterproof to 50 meters.

Ultrarunners

With its customizable data fields, barometric-altimeter elevation tracking, and swappable battery, the Switch Up is capable of tracking long-distance events in a variety of terrain, while showing very specific data.

Hikers

With its breadcrumb map and barometric-altimeter, the Switch Up is a great hiking watch.