Apparently Athlon is dropping a Xero clone at $350 MSRP. Info from Reddit.
If this turns out to work well Garmin just got Garmin'd!
Won't know till lots of them get out into the wild, but at prices with codes etc. that will probably approach $300, they are going to sell truckloads of these unless they are junk. Garmin is a super solid company, and that is worth something, but there's probably a lot of the hunting crowd or weekend dabblers that will spend $350 on a chrono but not $600.
It does have some nice features, perhaps more intuitive buttons, easy removal of a bad shot, ability to adjust the display screen data (something Garmin is normally really good at offering), better rating (IP67 vs IPX7) and for those that own athlon scopes the ability to put the data strait from the device into the ballistic rifle profiles for your setup, and get holdovers/ranges for their reticles, BDC etc. The buttons on the side I'm not sold on, when it's on a small light tripod pressing them could require two hands to keep the unit steady.
I do wish they'd both drop the negative display though, some idiot 15 years ago thought it was tacticool and it keeps hanging around. In almost every light condition it's easier to see a normal display compared to a negative display and all it does is force users to use the backlight in more conditions draining battery faster.
One area Garmin has always sucked for 30+ years is how they export and handle data outside the units from cycling to handheld GPS. I've read a lot of complaints on guys working with getting data out of the chrono as well. However, let's be honest, basically data handling in all of the chronos have sucked for years, so it's a pretty low bar. There's a lot of room for growth in the app with the Garmin for a Gen 2. It would be nice if they added the option to have rifle/bullet profiles where you could easily tag chrono sessions to a rifle/bullet profile, the ability to automatically add weather conditions, location etc. from the phone. Even the ability to track photos of groups etc. that would just merge a lot of what people want to track in a shooting session, and of course ballistic integration that automatically used the Chrono info.
That said it sure looks a LOT like the Garmin for a product that's been out less than 2 years, but that's not too surprising there's only so many ways to make these little products. We more quickly see similar looking products pop up after something makes a market splash these days, probably because it's so much faster/easier to bring a new product to market in 2025 as it was even 10 years ago. Also the shooting community and people as a whole just care less about such things these days. Just look at the Leofoto fiasco and now they are positively supported here and are the official Tripod sponsor of PRS!
