Discovered today on these help forums that Garmin has had an ongoing problem it has not addressed for at least 3 years, and it is a critical one -- ensuring that Garmin users can rely on their devices to wake themselves up at the time they had specified through Garmin Connect. Many Garmin users have what they believe to be set-it-and-forget-it alarm wakeup times, and these users don't routinely adjust the exact time they want to wake up weekly (sometimes daily) like I do to accommodate my fluctuating responsibilities as a parent to an almost middle-schooler also juggling a demanding full-time job in media relations and mass communications. And these set-it-and-forget-it users - every last one of them - would have woken up one hour later than they had intended to today, as the United States set their clocks one hour back for daylight savings time. Syncing their devices and getting them to accurately display what time it currently is isn't the issue. The issue is that there is a disconnect between the alarm settings displayed in the Garmin Connect app and the alarm settings on the devices themselves. Want to wake up at 4 AM tomorrow for an early morning run? Ha! Good luck. Try, on this day, to set your alarm on the Garmin Connect app to 4 AM. You can't do it, because however hard you struggle with that scroll wheel interface, the time will display as 5 AM on the Garmin Connect app. When you sync it to your device because you weren't paying attention to what the time displayed as on the Garmin Connect app, automatically as most Garmin users do because most users fully trust Garmin and would never suspect that a company as credible as Garmin would let a critical problem like this linger for years unresolved, your device then quietly syncs up to that 5 AM alarm time. And if you try to cleverly employ a workaround "for the timebeing" because you're hoping Garmin will simply figure it out, and you set your alarm on the Garmin Connect app to 3 AM on that scroll wheel interface so the time time displays as 4 AM on the Garmin Connect app, guess what? Your device then syncs up to that 4 AM alarm time. But given that some Garmin users have reported that the problem appears to resolve itself over time, will it resolve by tomorrow and will your device buzz on your wrist and wake you up at 3 AM (your attempt at a quick workaround) or will your device wake you up at 4 AM like you want it to? Who knows? "The uncertainty of life is what makes life exciting," said no data-obsessed, exacting Garmin user ever. So, to be perfectly sure, you just have to delete all alarms on your Garmin Connect app and your Garmin device(s) and employ a more reliable method, which for most people is their cellphone or their standalone alarm clock. Because your cellphone or alarm clock isn't strapped to your wrist just have to and pray that backup method doesn't wake up everyone else in your household because attempting to explain this problem verbally to non-Garmin users is likely to fall flat. If they manage to derive one takeaway, it is likely going to be, "Garmin tech is unreliable." And is that what you really want, Garmin? Get it together, please. I'm tempted to buy an Apple Watch today and just deal with the less than stellar battery performance. Reliability is paramount, and Garmin just isn't.
