Form Smart Swim 2

Verdict

The Form Smart Swim 2 are the best swim tracking smart goggles right now, but if you can live without a built-in heart rate monitor, the original will give you plenty of that great experience for less.

Introduction

The Form Smart Swim 2 are an upgraded pair of the AR swimming goggles Form launched in 2019, that now want to become a better and smarter swimming companion.

The smart goggles are now getting the ability to monitor your heart rate during swims and help you swim straighter to make sure you’re swimming more efficiently when you switch the pool for the open water.

Those new smarts do however come at an extra cost compared to the original Smart Swim goggles, which I still use long-term to track swims. So, are those new features worth it? I’ve been using them for indoor and outdoor sessions to find out.

Design

• Similar look to the first generation smart goggles
• The extra tech makes the Smart Swim 2 bulkier than an average pair of goggles
• Very comfortable to wear

The core design of the Smart Swim 2 remains very close to the first generation goggles, which aren’t being replaced and will remain available as a cheaper alternative to the Swim 2.

They still come with non-removable clear mirrored lenses and black eye seals, with five different nose bridges available to improve the fit. On the right side of the goggles you’ll find where the hardware like the motion sensors and battery lies. It’s now a smaller box of components that doesn’t stretch as far back on the goggles, though does mean you have to contend with some bulk still that you wouldn’t find on your standard set of goggles.

Tucked behind that box is the new integrated optical heart rate monitor. While the original Form goggles allowed you to wear and pair Polar’s Verity Sense heart rate monitor to track effort in the water, it’s now building this feature in so you no longer need to think about clipping another thing on during a swim.

While the strap has changed colour, the design and the way they secure to your head works the same. The added colour offers a boost in visibility, but ultimately there’s little change on that front in terms of fit.

I’ve been using the Form Smart Swim 2 goggles for a few months and have found them as comfortable as the first generation goggles. I’ve not experienced any sort of lens leakage but a noticeable increase in the level of suction they deliver around the eye seals, which greatly improves the fit. While it’s good to see the presence of the tech shrinking, I don’t think it’s radically changed the overall weight of the goggles, but it’s a clear step in the right direction to make them feel more like a standard pair.

Screen

• AR display used for showing stats and information
• Easy to read when swimming
• Brightness can be adjusted

The built-in augmented reality display hasn’t changed from the first goggle in terms of the approach and the experience of using it.

It’s an AR display based on waveguide technology that can display your metrics and stats on either the left or the right of the goggle lens depending on what you feel most comfortable with.

The first version was a great showcase of bringing a Google Glass-style approach to AR displays to something you wore in the water, and it’s more of the same here. It’s sharp, easily visible without feeling overly distracting, and the ability to adjust display brightness means you can make it better suited for indoor and outdoor swimming.

Like the first goggles, there hasn’t been a drop in performance of that display and while Form has begun to offer more information on that display, it still feels well optimised and works far better than other swimming goggles that have tried to incorporate displays into their goggles.

Swim tracking and battery life

• Heart-rate monitoring now built-in
• SwimStraight mode is great for outdoor swimming
• Battery life is shorter than the original Smart Swim

Form packs in identical motion sensors as the first goggles to deliver the same rich level of swim metrics, so it can capture distance covered, count strokes, stroke rate and pace. Most metrics are delivered for pool swimming. Once again, there’s no GPS to track open water swims, but you do still have the ability to pair them to an Apple Watch or a compatible Garmin to capture distance covered and pacing stats during open water swims.

The two big feature additions are the new heart rate monitor and the new SwimStraight mode. The latter will help you swim in a straight line by using the onboard magnetometer and digital compass. The heart rate monitor is built-in so that isn’t something original Form Smart Swim users will have access to. The SwimStraight mode will be made available to the first gen goggle but that is a feature that sits within Form’s Premium service, which costs either £13/$15 a month or £84/$99 a year. That also gets you access to Form’s HeadCoach in-goggle training feature, integration with TrainingPeaks and dedicated workouts among some other things.

I’ll start by saying that the core tracking performance in the pool hasn’t felt all that different from my time with the original, meaning that it’s great, and remains one of the best swim trackers I’ve used for metrics like distance travelled, pace and displaying those real-time stats. It’s also great at recognising when you’re resting in between sets. I’ve been testing them against the swim tracking on Garmin and Polar watches and the accuracy has stood up very well.

Getting into heart rate tracking, the key here is in making sure you get the sensor positioned right. It does need to be resting against your temple, which means wearing it underneath your swim cap if you choose to wear one. You also need to make sure it’s avoiding hair, which is easier for me but won’t be for people with longer hair. The display will indicate when the real-time heart rate is being captured and will prompt you to check positioning if it’s not picking anything up.

In terms of accuracy, Form has issued a white paper suggesting it has a 97% accuracy rate against an ECG-based heart rate monitor strap with deviation of plus or minus 4 BPM. In my testing, I used it against a Polar H10 and Garmin HRM-Pro heart rate monitor chest strap, which can be a tricky customer to keep in place during swims. I also tested it against optical wrist-based heart rate sensors on Garmin and Polar watches that promise to track heart rate underwater. I found that in general the heart rate data felt good for easy and steady paced swims. Positioning and placement is key here and there was just one occasion where I didn’t quite get the fit right and the heart rate dropped. Having that information to glance at adds another dimension to tracking, though as that white paper tells you, it’s not the most accurate way to track heart rate in the water, although it does seem to do a good job of it..

Heading into the open water and as mentioned, you don’t have GPS here and many of the metrics are built with pool swimming in mind. Adding an Apple Watch or Garmin watch into the mix will give you those extra stats you may crave and can display them on the screen, which maintain that strong visibility in the water too. The big story is the SwimStraight mode, which uses the magnetometer and compass and your head movement to make sure you’re swimming in a straight line.

Before you get going it will ask you to perform a quick calibration, which involves tucking your head into your chest and moving your head to either shoulder and then spinning around, which is definitely odd to do in the water. Once you hit ‘start swim’, you’ll see numbers on the screen to indicate your bearing. The goal is to aim for that number and when you deviate from it, it means you’re going off course. For a relatively inexperienced open water swimmer like myself, this felt like a really nice feature to have at my disposal.

In terms of battery life, there has been a change on that front. Form promises up to 12 hours battery of a single charge, which is down from 16 hours on the first Form Smart Swim and seems to account for those added sensors and shrinking down that package of tech on the side of the goggles. That’s a little disappointing, but these are thankfully not smart goggles that suck the life out of the battery in an undesirable way. Swimming for 40-minutes to an hour doesn’t see a horrible drain on battery and they’ll hold well for a solid week’s or workouts. They still use the same proprietary charging cable, which can charge them up fully from 0-100% in around an hour so you can top them up in relatively quick fashion to get back out there and swim with them.

App

• Works with both iPhone and Android
• Premium features are kept behind a paywall
• Can incorporate data from Apple Fitness, Strava and more

The Form App is available for both Android phones and iPhones and you’re using Bluetooth to set up, pair and sync your stats to it. It does that all in a nice and speedy fashion after you’ve finished your swim.

That app is broken into four sections. The first is your home screen to see your most recent swim stats and suggested workouts and training plans. Next up is your feed where you can see other Form users you follow and their most recent stats. There’s also a dedicated workout section where you can find all available workouts and custom workouts. This is a feature that is reserved for premium subscribers. The My Goggles section is where you can sync and tinker with goggle settings and that includes what’s displayed on screen when you’re swimming.

There’s support for third party apps to share data like Strava, Apple Health, Final Surge and TrainingPeaks. There’s also the ability to import workouts to TrainingPeaks though that’s a premium feature here. This also extends to Headcoach mode, which analyses data from your swims including head roll and pitch to suggest workouts and prompts in real-time to work on your swimming technique. You do also have the option to turn this on or off if you don’t want to use it. It’s a feature that’s now getting more personalised and it is useful if you’re still trying to hone your swimming technique.

There’s certainly a lot more going on in the app than when it first launched, so it’s worth spending some time getting to know what’s here and also weighing up whether you need to pay the extra fee for the full app experience. Without it you can still get your core swim metrics, share data to other apps and have access to both open and pool swimming modes.

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