I recently purchased the E model and started a couple weeks ago. I picked up a Garmin heart rate monitor chest strap for $24 or so on Amazon which syncs with the PM5 via ANT+ nicely and then transmits via Bluetooth to the ErgData app on my work iPhone 6. At the same time I'm launching the Rower activity in the Workout App on my Apple Watch. The Watch takes a pulse about x5/minute. I work in healthcare so I've been working on numerous devices integrated into our medical record system on the patient web portal so the patients can send data in themselves. The Watch seems to generally be in sync with the Garmin strap, though every so often it's showing say 64 BPM while the Garmin is showing 164 BPM. By using the Watch, it sends those x5/minute pulses to the iPhone's "Health" App so I have an insanely large data set to browse through later. It's so much data that it is unable to actually send it to my medical record, but there's a fix for that going into our medical record system in August. It's interesting that the vendor I work with (Epic) has apparently not thought of persons far more into fitness than I was - which is MANY people LOL. For work I was testing a Fitbit for months and basically threw it in a drawer after awhile since it wouldn't even charge itself despite being plugged in all day long. Plus it was an uncomfortable little bastard.
I have my eyes on getting a Google non-retail watch for testing. Google seems really disorganized when it comes to devices so I'm not sure how many hoops I'll have to jump through and if they will even realize that having a major health system testing it would be worthwhile. Much like Google Glass, it sounds like they plan on not selling the Watch directly either so even if I can test it, it may not be available anyway other than via loaning from a physician or research study.
Is there a phone App that saves a good amount of the HR data points that the PM sends via Bluetooth? It would be interesting to plot the Garmin against the Watch and ErgData doesn't seem to keep the HR data.
Cheers,
G.