Hi Team,
Recently I used a garmin messenger blue toothed to a pixel 8 running the Android messenger app. This is a first impressions kinda post but there are some fairly serious comments here that really need to be addressed.
1/ The product is designed to be used without the internet - why can you only enter a weather location using on-line google maps? why doesn't it switch to an offline google map when there is one available - just like the google maps applictation? in the middle of the tasman sea google maps was working fine using the offline map - garmn was dead in the water. When you are sailing you don't know your future location/time - you are at the will of the sea - setting up a dozen random locations before you leave is counterintuitive.
*** Messenger App needs to work with google offline maps for weather locations.
and/or allow manual entry of Lat/Lon of a future location for a weather request
2/ When you request weather for "My Location" there is no indication of the Lat/Lon of the location requested - then when you have moved to another "My Location" and refresh you can't tell if the weather is for where you are now or where you were then?
*** My location weather needs to display the Lat/Lon of the location for which the weather is applicable.
3/ When you are relying on messenger to provide weather data at sea you really need to know what weather model they are using - so this can be matched to the weather model that was used for the original routing.
*** Garmin to publish the weather model source (would be different for different regions)
4/ The weather forecast provided was highly (dangerously) innaccurate - I would like a refund - that was the worst $1.50 I have ever spent - a forecast of 14kn/18kn gusts with 0kn current was actually 28kn/+42kn sustained gusts and 2kn of current, OK for us on a well prepared yacht, but still a surprise!
*** Garmin needs to check their sources - this was not a reasonable weather prediction - it was so wrong I don't think the "My Location" was correct.
other than that the txt functions worked a treat - I'm still glad I have one.
- matthew
