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Descent mk2s firmware sucks

peersky
over 2 years ago

Dear Garmin team.

I don’t know how to name this topic otherwise. Im sorry.

I have these watches for 3 months now and more I use it - more I get disappointed.

Its like you don’t have a proper product owner for a watch or what the *** is wrong with you guys?

I have over 10 years of hardware, embedded and software engineering as well as product development and ux planning. And I clearly see you guys just didn’t even bother. 

You’ve made beautiful, best hardware piece on market, but even didn’t bother to make your native activities work properly for water sports

Ill just list a few examples:

- Your native tides app is showing wrong tidal data. The thing is discussed over few years on this forum and you didn’t even bother replying!!!! People can freaking crush their boars or die !!!

- Surf application is one of reasons for me to have it.

Why I can’t during surfing activity to drop a pin on map with my personal marks i.e to save location of underwater stone? Thats freaking reason I was buying this watches - to help me out! Why there is no manual for surfing activity setup???

I want to see way to setup and use gps map and point locations!

i want to see where im being pulled by current and at what speed

You guys didn’t bother even to get one surfer ux feedback, didn’t you?

moreover I get watches freezing without ability to even do hard restart if I try to enter map data fields in surfing activity setup. No testing at all??

- Inability to use iphone to sent navigation arrows to these watches.  I understand that apple might be restrictive on you because they want their own products to sell, but dont tell me a stories you couldn’t get a way around. 

- monitor highlight that works like we re in 90s. You could have light sensor for illumination regulating. You can run an AI reinforcement learning to improve detection of when Im lifting hand to look at the watch. Don’t tell me it’s hard, you get neural networks in the chipsets nowadays.

After all it’s a great piece of hardware. But Please, hire a good product owner with water sports background for your watches and give him few good software engineers. 
Otherwise it’s very expensive piece of crap, which i just want to throw out from a boat.

this message is saved, if I see you deleting it  - ill repost same stuff in all review platforms I can reach out

  • 0 over 2 years ago

    Feel free to reach me out if you need help, but please, show respect to your customers- get your work done in a professional proper alway

  • 0 over 2 years ago

    I share your sentiment 100%. Garmin makes pretty decent hardware but their software isn’t great across the board.   It’s almost as if the software head honcho likes ONE particular activity and the rest are orphans.   But they don’t listen much!!!

    My own experience is that I bought a Descent Mk2i as a primary dive computer.   Fabulous hardware. The dive screen customisation was awful.   Only one field which you can edit.  You can add a million screens but some info isn’t available and you can’t choose how many fields they have.   For the walk activity you can choose a primary screen with 2 values, 4, 6, etc.   not so for diving.

    sadly, all the info is there. The hardware is all there.  When I searched this forum, I found people moaning about this exact issue from as far back as 2 years!   Crazy!

    in the end I offloaded the watch and got myself a Mk2S which is a. Acknowledge unit and went back to my Teric as my main dive watch. 

  • 0 6 months ago in reply to 2520917

    Have you ever considered that some of the data on those screens are mandatory? 
    Information like Depth, No Deco Time and Dive time are always there. 
    And it is still possible to add 4 custom fields on a screen. 

  • 0 6 months ago in reply to Gerrit

    Yes, I have considered that but my gripe isn’t that I want to remove any mandatory info whatsoever. It’s that you just don’t have the flexibility that you get with other activity screens. 

    yes, you can add a thousand custom screens, but to the best of my knowledge, as of today, you cannot add air info (like GTR and pressure) on a custom screen.   Basically I cannot configure it to have GTR, pressure and temperature on one screen (as far as I can see). 

  • 0 6 months ago in reply to 2520917

    They chosen to have pressure on a dedicated page, and depending upon the amount of pressure sensors connected there is not much room for other stuff. I assume GTR is the equivalent of NDL which is there by default. So temperature is missing then. Unfortunately you can’t have it all. 
    I have added 2 custom screens, of which one is more statistical data that I rarely access, so I use a total of 5. Possible for technical dives you might want more. 

    If you find the number of screens to much, you might be better off with a dedicated (large screen) dive computer that can display most data all on one screen.