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Is the R50 Dead?

troymosley

It’s been months since the last update. Replies are generic auto generated. I see so much potential with this product and no action. Is there even a team assigned to the R50 anymore? Did I buy a 5k machine that is going extinct in less than a year? @garmin what’s the deal, can you communicate please. 

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    I purchased a Garmin R50 earlier this year and after 2 weeks the power button busted.  It literally just pushed in when I went to turn it on and busted.  I returned it and purchased another one and after a week the powered button would not work.  It didn’t break but it wouldn’t turn on.  I tried everything but nothing.  I returned that one and now I’m hopefully waiting for the next version which hopefully will fix all the bugs.  It’s a great unit but won’t buy another until they come out with an updated version like SkyTrak did.  Sounds like from your post that might not happen.  

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    They did a small push for updates when the PGA Show was happening in January, I think. The one where putting got bugged. After that, it's only been HTH stuff. I guess they cater to the subscription stuff, not so much the hardware stuff.

    They definitely have been out-developed by other LM manufacturers now, and with the lack of community interaction, other than the "please keep your suggestions out of the forums" replies, I don't think this is a priority at Garmin.

    The thing works pretty well the way it is. We should probably just come to terms with that.

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    I fear you are right, the R50 seems to be a dead end when it comes to development.

    I'm very sad about this and in hindsight regret to have chosen the R50. What seemed to be great hardware (and still is), backed by a powerful company turned out to be disappointing when it comes to the most important aspect - giving live to the hardware through powerful and adequate software.

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    It's starting to feel like it.  The software on this unit should be a lot better than it is and should better integrate with the rest of the ecosystem.  Just as an example, the fact that I can't do bag mapping on this unit and have it integrate with the caddie on my watch seems like a big miss. The G82 already has that feature so you'd think setting it up on the R50 wouldn't be too difficult. 

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    From an economic and business perspective I see little value in developing the R50 any further and that's probably what Garmin is doing so.

    That said, I also don’t think there is much more that can realistically be added. There are still many open questions around features such as dynamic loft, low point, and impact location. I am 99% certain that these are not technically feasible with the R50 partly because of the camera positions. To achieve this properly you would need cameras positioned above the hitting area. It can be done with low positioned camera's but it's very unreliable for sure. If this were technically possible I suspect Garmin would have implemented it a long time ago.

    From a business perspective it may therefore make more sense for Garmin to develop and launch a new model while focusing the R50 primarily on bug fixes and stability improvements. Sad but true.