Does Anything Work Correctly?

OneGoodKnock said:

And before anyone mentions it i did my research before buying (that seems to be a stock phrase in this forum for some reason)

And yet despite the 'warnings' from posters you still bought it. Are you able to return it? Might be best as then you can buy something that works.

Yes. I'm just in the process of returning. Thanks

I agree that sleep tracking is poor and actually unusable. It doesn't have any correlation with reality. One even has to define his or her normal sleeping schedule manually that is quite lame. It's unfortunate that Garmin hasn't been able to make it work even in their premium watches that are very expensive. In terms of sleep tracking, current Polar devices are quite ok and if you want better then Oura smart ring is also nice. Also, have to agree with HRM inaccuracy. You cannot trust that it's correct. Sometimes it's showing like 80 when reality is 140 etc.

At least for me, there are also battery issues. Device's specs are saying that watch has 12 days in smart watch mode with constant heart rate monitoring on. Even with some manual optimizations (like putting bluetooth off during nightime) and backlight at 10 percent, it seems to be about six days that I get. Watch is quite new though, so it might get better.

I would be very disappointed if I had paid the normal retailing price. For me, those battery issues are the biggest issue. If it doesn't get better, I will definitely return this and buy something else. I would like to stay with Garmin (have had other Garmin watches as well), but I feel that their products are really overpriced nowadays. You get lots of bugs and weird issues and they are constantly releasing new products that mainly have new software features and non of them are introduced to little bit older models that are not even yet old.

I have also reported some issues and feature improvements to Garmin during the years, but no improvement.

Thanks for your reply. For me battery life is fine (maybe not as advertised) but coming from smartwatches that only last 2 days it's a pleasant change. My biggest gripe is the HRM at the moment which is totally broken. I go do a walk and it works fine for 20 minutes,then it just freezes and drops to 60 bpm for the rest of the activity. 

This then makes the rest of the metrics tha rely on heart rate data totally meaningless. 

I've also never come across such poor heart rate monitoring on the numerous smartwatches I've had previously that incidentally have cost half the amount. 

Surely if a feature is on a watch then it should work. If Garmin can't get HRM to work then they should remove the feature on future models. 

When i buy my next car i wonder if the car will only have 3 working wheels, but the 'workaround' will be to use the bus instead?

I also agree the sleep tracking is awful, comparing it to my old Fenix 3hr, where it was quite accurate. I have the HRM issues too, I think only on Hike, but not sure.

Otherwise it's good. I don't have battery issues. I easily get the promised 12 days battery life without any battery optimizations at my side. I even get 13 or 14 days sometimes. The secret is, that some watch faces are not optimised and the choice of a watchface greatly impact the battery life. I use X-Face, which seems to be better optimized even then the stock ones.

I don't care About sleep tracking. I want my F5+ to track my outdoor sports activities as good as possible and I want a good track navigation with maps, when I am in an unknown region (Business trip, Holiday, etc.). These things work great on the F5+ and I would definetely buy it again! 

As I do Endurance sports for 45 years now, counting the steps between sofa and fridge or telling me if I slept well or not is not what I bought the watch for.

That's excellent Alan. Many thanks

This is pretty much what happens during every walking/ hiking activity i do. This surely can't be right

got exactly the same problem with hiking activities since I bought the watch, reported several times to garmin that it has to:be a software bug as 24/7 tracking outside an activity does work basically. garmin does not acknowledge this as a software bug and even exchanged my watch and......to no surprise, the new watch has exactly the same problem. So whenever I go hiking now, without wanting to use the chest strap, I disable the watch HRM as i rather want to have no HR data instead of wrongs.

It's really ridiculous to me that this is even a thing. Anyways I've contacted the seller a few days ago in order to return or replace, I'm not willing to faff about with this pishh anymore.