Fenix 5X - 7.91 Public Beta

Hello Fenix 5X users,

We have new beta software ready for your upcoming adventures!

Fenix 5X: http://www8.garmin.com/support/downl...s.jsp?id=11665

Note: Please allow for the updates to propagate across all servers. There is no need to post that the link does not work. It will after a bit of patience.

7.91 Change Log Notes:

Added support for a Sunrise & Sunset widget. Settings > Widgets > Add Widgets > Sunrise & Sunset.
Added support for an Alternate Time Zones Widget. Settings > Widgets > Add Widgets > Alt. time Zones.
Added a setting to display a calibration prompt when using a power meter. When using a Vector, this will also allow the user to set the power meter crank length. Menu > Settings > Sensors & Accessories > Power Meter > Calibration Prompt.
Fixed an issue where the altitude on device wasn't accurate when using the Jumpmaster app.
Fixed an issue where Broadcasting Heart Rate was not working as expected, if accessed from the power controls menu.
Fixed an issue where a ConnectIQ watchface would flash when downloaded using the Garmin Connect Mobile app and the device would revert back to a stock watchface.
Fixed an issue where Flashlight would turn off when using gestures.

Please send all bug reports to [EMAIL="[email protected]"][email protected][/EMAIL], and indicate which model of the fenix 5 series you have in the subject line.

Please note that the public beta's are intended for non-APAC devices only.

0 Former Member over 7 years ago

Can you add default watchfaces from F3 to F5X?

0 SLACHIZH over 7 years ago

Just found it and don't know, maybe it was earlier too. Today morning I made stress test and after ending it left the result on screen and forgot to go out. After 6 hour it was on screen yet and dryed 60% of battery.

0 b1azk0 over 7 years ago

I haven't used map based navigation for a while and needed it today (on 7.91 beta software). It appears to me that compass is interfering with map readings. It was almost impossible to decide which direction should I run (left, right, straight ahead) in order to follow the course by looking at the map, as it kept rotating the map all the time. Only after a couple of seconds of holding my arm fixed (not so easy when running below 4'/km) watch would "fix" it's position and rotate the map in way that 12 hour would correspond to movement direction.

Anyone else noticed anything similar? Is there a workaround for this?

Since garmin started introducing widgets available by default in older models (sunset from F3) may I assume that things like zoomable elevation profile (sort of available in 910xt) will be introduced as well?

0 thalinor over 7 years ago

I haven't used map based navigation for a while and needed it today (on 7.91 beta software). It appears to me that compass is interfering with map readings. It was almost impossible to decide which direction should I run (left, right, straight ahead) in order to follow the course by looking at the map, as it kept rotating the map all the time. Only after a couple of seconds of holding my arm fixed (not so easy when running below 4'/km) watch would "fix" it's position and rotate the map in way that 12 hour would correspond to movement direction.

Anyone else noticed anything similar? Is there a workaround for this?

Since garmin started introducing widgets available by default in older models (sunset from F3) may I assume that things like zoomable elevation profile (sort of available in 910xt) will be introduced as well?

Its Garmin refusing to admit the compass is still broken and acting twitchy.

They can lie all they want: https://youtu.be/Y3XjwYFEaok

Notice it's today's date and the software version? They said this issue was fixed. They lied.

Edit: Because Garmin is going to try and blame electronic interference by my phone, here is Video 2 on a hard wood floor with NO other electric devices anywhere near the Fenix 5x. Watch the whole video it jumps around over 8 degrees back and forth at one point. Again this is on a hardwood floor of a house; a house that not moving back and forth and therefore the compass shouldn't be moving (idiots). I even took the tablet and moved it back over 3 feet away from the watch. It doesn't matter if I go in the back yard, put it on the ground, and have NO electronic devices within 100 feet of the watch; it's still spastic and unusable.

https://youtu.be/MZg8a858PqU

The problem is not fixed and I just went to a Best Buy, had the girl pull one out of the box, update it and it did the EXACT SAME THING. This is not an issue with MY Fenix it's an issue with all of them. That's why I'm filing a lawsuit against Garmin this Friday. FYI I'm suing Apple too for breaking their device too; I'm a complaint on lawsuit #9. I have them on a recording (Legal as I own a corporation and used my company line) lying too. Got to love idiot reps that lie thinking people aren't legally recording the phone conversation. I'm going to shove this so far down Garmin throats they will be tasting my you know what for years. Enjoy your lawsuit, I hate liars and Garmin is a bunch of liars.

So I spent $700, plus another $210 (Tempe & Tri HR). BOTH OF WHICH STILL DISCONNECT ALL THE TIME... STILL, ITS NOT FIXED. LIARS.

I'm supposed to send it back and wait a month without the device? Screw you. Spend a $1000 (god damn sales tax) total and have to wait a month because you made a bad update that screwed up my watch? No you god damn aholes send me a new one and I will send this POS back once I have a new one in hand. Better yet I will just sue you for 100x what I paid for the watch. Grief, aggravation, time wasted on the phone with tech support, time wasted writing these posts. I'm sick of companies destroying their own products for planned obsolescence. I bet the Fenix 6x will work just fine until September 18' when they release an update to break it like they did with the 5x update in September 17' which broke the compass. You are filthy scumbags. This should be illegal and other countries it's not only illegal but your CEO's and executives can be arrested. France is one of those countries. Time to contact my French friends, have them buy a Fenix (I'll pay for it if I have to) just to have your executives have an arrest warrant out in their name. I can't wait to see you guys get arrested trying to travel in Europe. The bad press from the lawsuit alone should tank your stock prices and cost you millions. Good that's what you get scumbags.

0 thalinor over 7 years ago

My $1000 worth of fitness tracker doesn't even count steps right and here is Garmin admitting it in an email. Yep even a $2 plastic analog pedometer can at least count steps right. I've been stuck in the 100k step challenge group for months despite walking 150k plus several weeks in a row. The group I created can't create a step challenge because that's broken too. The whole damn thing is broken, from Garmin connect to the actual device itself. And Garmin lied again in another email saying "were not seeing this issue". Oh really? Can you not read the notes on my account because as you can see from the emails below you admitted it was an issue!!!

ciq.forums.garmin.com/.../1301927.jpg

0 Sam201176 over 7 years ago

I haven't used map based navigation for a while and needed it today (on 7.91 beta software). It appears to me that compass is interfering with map readings. It was almost impossible to decide which direction should I run (left, right, straight ahead) in order to follow the course by looking at the map, as it kept rotating the map all the time. Only after a couple of seconds of holding my arm fixed (not so easy when running below 4'/km) watch would "fix" it's position and rotate the map in way that 12 hour would correspond to movement direction.

Anyone else noticed anything similar? Is there a workaround for this?

Hi,
I had exactly the same problem, sometimes I would be walking backwards on the map, while actually walking forwards of course :-)
Compass calibrations would fail, then eventually succeed, but the compass screen would be then frozen.
Only a master reset, ( sometimes needed to be performed twice) would unfreeze the compass.
I sent it back to Garmin England, and had a new watch in two days,the one I have now.
This one has a twitchy compass,but because of the new software it is now usable for me.

If you've tried to calibrate the compass and it is still problematic,I would try a master reset,if there's still no joy,I'd contact Garmin and go from there.
All the best and good luck.

0 sis651 over 7 years ago

Its Garmin refusing to admit the compass is still broken and acting twitchy.

They can lie all they want: https://youtu.be/Y3XjwYFEaok

Notice it's today's date and the software version? They said this issue was fixed. They lied.

Edit: Because Garmin is going to try and blame electronic interference by my phone, here is Video 2 on a hard wood floor with NO other electric devices anywhere near the Fenix 5x. Watch the whole video it jumps around over 8 degrees back and forth at one point. Again this is on a hardwood floor of a house; a house that not moving back and forth and therefore the compass shouldn't be moving (idiots). I even took the tablet and moved it back over 3 feet away from the watch. It doesn't matter if I go in the back yard, put it on the ground, and have NO electronic devices within 100 feet of the watch; it's still spastic and unusable.

https://youtu.be/MZg8a858PqU

The problem is not fixed and I just went to a Best Buy, had the girl pull one out of the box, update it and it did the EXACT SAME THING. This is not an issue with MY Fenix it's an issue with all of them. That's why I'm filing a lawsuit against Garmin this Friday. FYI I'm suing Apple too for breaking their device too; I'm a complaint on lawsuit #9. I have them on a recording (Legal as I own a corporation and used my company line) lying too. Got to love idiot reps that lie thinking people aren't legally recording the phone conversation. I'm going to shove this so far down Garmin throats they will be tasting my you know what for years. Enjoy your lawsuit, I hate liars and Garmin is a bunch of liars.

So I spent $700, plus another $210 (Tempe & Tri HR). BOTH OF WHICH STILL DISCONNECT ALL THE TIME... STILL, ITS NOT FIXED. LIARS.

I'm supposed to send it back and wait a month without the device? Screw you. Spend a $1000 (god damn sales tax) total and have to wait a month because you made a bad update that screwed up my watch? No you god damn aholes send me a new one and I will send this POS back once I have a new one in hand. Better yet I will just sue you for 100x what I paid for the watch. Grief, aggravation, time wasted on the phone with tech support, time wasted writing these posts. I'm sick of companies destroying their own products for planned obsolescence. I bet the Fenix 6x will work just fine until September 18' when they release an update to break it like they did with the 5x update in September 17' which broke the compass. You are filthy scumbags. This should be illegal and other countries it's not only illegal but your CEO's and executives can be arrested. France is one of those countries. Time to contact my French friends, have them buy a Fenix (I'll pay for it if I have to) just to have your executives have an arrest warrant out in their name. I can't wait to see you guys get arrested trying to travel in Europe. The bad press from the lawsuit alone should tank your stock prices and cost you millions. Good that's what you get scumbags.

Everything is working normally with the compass. Garmin just lacks a simple mathematical formula to round the numbers to the most stable and stabiilize the reading. But they don't work on it. Stupid...

0 justinhhamilton over 7 years ago

No intensity mins since day after install of 7.60
I will try a factory reset in the next few days.
Thanks for the update.
All the best.
::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
UPDATE:
Performed a 5x master reset,and Intensity minutes is working again.
:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
Update Intensity minutes has stopped working again after one ( 28:01:18) day, i wish it would remain stable!
:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
Update Intensity minutes are working again since 30 : 01 : 18? No apparent reason.

+1 for weirdness with Intensity Minutes... I did a 45 min Peloton Ride Yesterday and it yielded 152 Intensity Minutes. A tough workout nonetheless, but pretty sure I wasn't "Redlining" my HR to yield over 3x in Intensity Minutes

0 Former Member over 7 years ago

It's the constant problem with this development policy that gives issues to people out there who didn't sign up to become open beta testers.
A good examples are the compass and the pool swim bugs, not present in the earlier versions. By pushing out the betas too soon, ALL the users now have these problems.

Garmin keeps overreaching, promising features that either don't work or are pushed into the software poorly (such as the Vo2MAX calculation: you need to do the cooper test for that and that's DEFINITIVE, so it can't and shouldn't work the way it's implemented right now). With a 1yr/2yr timeline before the next model is released, there's only the absolute certainty that most of the resources/manpower are wasted into fixing problems that derive from features that couldn't have been planned for release in the contemporary model and that should have been slanted out for the next since the very brainstorming phase of the F5. Needless to say an eventual F6 will be affected by this policy exactly as the F3 was and the F5 is. The obvious result is that the best thing to do will still be to opt for Garmin's devices... 2 years after they are released. That means half the revenue for Garmin and don't think their competitors will sit idly by in the meanwhile. This technological gap (especially in the software) by Suunto and Polar will one day be closed. What then?

On one hand we have the finest piece of equipment you could find and the most thorough in terms of features but on the other hand many are glitchy and the defect of communication hurts the users as in the case of Connect Mobile whose services go down frequently either for maintenance or for scheduled patches. Behind the curtains they work a lot and very hard and GCM has improved much but again, these efforts are plagued and not really put into good light in view of the fact that without public warnings about patches and maintenance, many users keep resetting their phones, keep trying to pair and keep trying to solve notification issues, etc. that are normally working as intended.

While this happens (and it's the same as with the F5X: constantly overreaching), ordinary hardware failures get managed sloppily by local tech support centers and Garmin is forced to do one RMA after another wasting more and more funds in the process and having to employ more and more manpower on problems that this hastened policy generates.

I sincerely hope this may change in the future but it's almost hopeless since many of us have been telling Garmin for YEARS to sit down and fix existing problems before moving on to add new features. I personally submitted at least 20 bugs on the F5X and only 4, as far as I know, have been solved. Some of these are very nasty but luckily it's stuff you barely notice or are ininfluent in view of the main picture but others are quite serious (the blanks in the HRM Swim for example)... and now we come to the point of liability.

When you promise and you don't deliver there's no amount of money you can pay to your influencers (who, some of you still call reviewers) to hide the problems and sooner or later you end up in court. It takes but one court case in one year to have 50 the next and 1000 in the next year. I sincerely feel this could be averted by promising less and thus finding the resources to deliver those few promises fully.

We were all in a state of shock when Garmin represented the patent of the Exo antenna for the F5. Real reviewers have rated the GPS system of a watch that cost 750€ at its release date even poorer than the F3's which is inadeguate compared to its major counterparts and with no hope of improvement hardware-wise. There's no hope software-wise either, unless a different approach is taken and it involves the use of the cell phone connection. Countless features would benefit but Garmin has chosen not to. Still, the interaction with external devices should be paramount when you can't jump to the other side of the obstacle with what you already have.

The problem of liability lays right there. There's a limit of promises you can make without delivering until you meet someone who's going to hold you accountable and in the age of social media there's no telling how big the cascading damage can get. Thalinor's example about Apple is crystal clear.

I don't want to hijack a beta thread, which is supposed to be about reports and issues but here again I don't see why Garmin opens a project and doesn't coordinate all these helpers to achieve maximum effect. In a way Garmin is acting like this policy about projects (patents and choices), beta (communication and coordination), development (fixes and new features) and tech support (management of hardware failures) is inconsequential but this is not true. Ultimately, there are many users whose voices should be heard before moving on to the next project but Garmin simply doesn't want to.

Hopefully, Chris can bring these instances to the project lead and I would appreciate if you all seconded them in your own interest as well as in Garmin's.

0 Former Member over 7 years ago

It's the constant problem with this development policy that gives issues to people out there who didn't sign up to become open beta testers.
A good examples are the compass and the pool swim bugs, not present in the earlier versions. By pushing out the betas too soon, ALL the users now have these problems.

Garmin keeps overreaching, promising features that either don't work or are pushed into the software poorly (such as the Vo2MAX calculation: you need to do the cooper test for that and that's DEFINITIVE, so it can't and shouldn't work the way it's implemented right now). With a 1yr/2yr timeline before the next model is released, there's only the absolute certainty that most of the resources/manpower are wasted into fixing problems that derive from features that couldn't have been planned for release in the contemporary model and that should have been slanted out for the next since the very brainstorming phase of the F5. Needless to say an eventual F6 will be affected by this policy exactly as the F3 was and the F5 is. The obvious result is that the best thing to do will still be to opt for Garmin's devices... 2 years after they are released. That means half the revenue for Garmin and don't think their competitors will sit idly by in the meanwhile. This technological gap (especially in the software) by Suunto and Polar will one day be closed. What then?

On one hand we have the finest piece of equipment you could find and the most thorough in terms of features but on the other hand many are glitchy and the defect of communication hurts the users as in the case of Connect Mobile whose services go down frequently either for maintenance or for scheduled patches. Behind the curtains they work a lot and very hard and GCM has improved much but again, these efforts are plagued and not really put into good light in view of the fact that without public warnings about patches and maintenance, many users keep resetting their phones, keep trying to pair and keep trying to solve notification issues, etc. that are normally working as intended.

While this happens (and it's the same as with the F5X: constantly overreaching), ordinary hardware failures get managed sloppily by local tech support centers and Garmin is forced to do one RMA after another wasting more and more funds in the process and having to employ more and more manpower on problems that this hastened policy generates.

I sincerely hope this may change in the future but it's almost hopeless since many of us have been telling Garmin for YEARS to sit down and fix existing problems before moving on to add new features. I personally submitted at least 20 bugs on the F5X and only 4, as far as I know, have been solved. Some of these are very nasty but luckily it's stuff you barely notice or are ininfluent in view of the main picture but others are quite serious (the blanks in the HRM Swim for example)... and now we come to the point of liability.

When you promise and you don't deliver there's no amount of money you can pay to your influencers (who, some of you still call reviewers) to hide the problems and sooner or later you end up in court. It takes but one court case in one year to have 50 the next and 1000 in the next year. I sincerely feel this could be averted by promising less and thus finding the resources to deliver those few promises fully.

We were all in a state of shock when Garmin represented the patent of the Exo antenna for the F5. Real reviewers have rated the GPS system of a watch that cost 750€ at its release date even poorer than the F3's which is inadeguate compared to its major counterparts and with no hope of improvement hardware-wise. There's no hope software-wise either, unless a different approach is taken and it involves the use of the cell phone connection. Countless features would benefit but Garmin has chosen not to. Still, the interaction with external devices should be paramount when you can't jump to the other side of the obstacle with what you already have.

The problem of liability lays right there. There's a limit of promises you can make without delivering until you meet someone who's going to hold you accountable and in the age of social media there's no telling how big the cascading damage can get. Thalinor's example about Apple is crystal clear.

I don't want to hijack a beta thread, which is supposed to be about reports and issues but here again I don't see why Garmin opens a project and doesn't coordinate all these helpers to achieve maximum effect. In a way Garmin is acting like this policy about projects (patents and choices), beta (communication and coordination), development (fixes and new features) and tech support (management of hardware failures) is inconsequential but this is not true. Ultimately, there are many users whose voices should be heard before moving on to the next project but Garmin simply doesn't want to.

Hopefully, Chris can bring these instances to the project lead and I would appreciate if you all seconded them in your own interest as well as in Garmin's.

It's the constant problem with this development policy that gives issues to people out there who didn't sign up to become open beta testers..

While I certainly agree with some of what you are saying, I am also approaching this from another angle. I was sold an eco system, and eco system that does not work. Data does not properly sync between devices. The health stats you call into question in terms of reliability such as Vo2 Max I still find beneficial as a training tool as long as it is calculated the same way and is updated across my Garmin devices. It does not, nor do any of the other health stats. I have communication after communication from Garmin on this stating its on the roadmap, but never actually makes it into a build/sprint/scrum...

The issues I have with my 5x are minuscule compared to the 1030 Edge. I even had a chance to return the 1030 Edge, but was talked out of it by Shawn-Garmin because the functionality and reliability I was looking for was coming, and he verified it. But when? When the device is outdated and the competitors have had a working device for years at that point? I see the frustration starting to boil over, and the problem for Garmin is its coming from its most loyal, hardcore customers. Like I said, I don't agree with everything in your post Z-74 but I appreciate it, and as a heavily invested Garmin customer feel your pain.

My question is, who is running the dev teams? Who is listening to customers and developing user stories, and ensuring defects are included in teams work backlog? Why does the eco system not work together? And finally who is in charge of UAT and BTS testing... Time for some changes... The hardware team seams to have it together, these problems are almost all dev,

My immediate family currently owns (read I bought, and this does not count device we have owned in the past):
Fenix 5x, Forerunner 235, Vivoactive 3, Index Scale, 1030 Edge, Tempe, Virb Ultra 30