Scientific Review - Many Garmin Watches Extremely Inaccurate

No. I’ve had a partner count at random points through an evening without me knowing. (Really must get out more :-) )

I agree with that. Competition is good in general for customers but i don't believe Garmin care for us so much. I open tickets in the past in the mails and support is like "fix it your self"

I think Apple take a different approach to the measurements completely. Not sure though. I don’t really have much interest in strapping a small rectangular phone to my wrist that would run out of battery before the day’s out ;-)

In any event it’s Garmin’s feature and for something as easy to verify as respiration rate there should be no need to assess accuracy by using other products… just count :-)

Might be useful to help decide which smartwatch to get instead of Garmin though… they all seem to be getting the sports tracking features now so Garmin certainly aren’t the only company worth looking at anymore.

FWIW, My Epix shows my daily respiration rate average as 12 or 13 bpm on most days, which seems to be about right for me. So not everyone gets 14!

Here is Garmin’s earlier response to me about this issue.

“Due to the nature of internet forums, people will express their personal views which they are entitled to do and we have no control over this. Our preference would be for them to contact us first so that we can offer support.

You will likely therefore, find other users that have experienced similar issues to yourself, and the same can be found for any electrical device and potential issue, but these do only make up a very small minority of users, and very few of these turn out to be genuine faults.  As such, whilst regrettably faults can occur, as they can on any electrical device, there are no known faults with these, which can cause this.”

A couple of notable points:

1 - Garmin support wish for us not to post issues on the forums as they don’t value the feedback on them (that’s a great way to make your most interested and loyal customers feel special isn’t it… those who frequent the forums troubleshooting the problems Garmin can’t be bothered to resolve themselves).

2 - They want us to contact support to resolve the issue first. This would be great if they actually solved the issues rather than simply dismissing them out of hand. As it stands I think we can read this as meaning “we’d prefer you not to go on forums publicising all the problems we’re trying to keep under wraps”

3 - Their initial response was to deny this was a known issue with respiration readings, whereas their latest response to me is to say this is a known limitation. That should be interpreted as “yes we know it doesn’t work properly but didn’t want people to know unless they were too persistent to ignore”

I’d send it back… must be broken! :-)

lol

PhotoPete said:

A couple of notable points:

1 - Garmin support wish for us not to post issues on the forums as they don’t value the feedback on them (that’s a great way to make your most interested and loyal customers feel special isn’t it… those who frequent the forums troubleshooting the problems Garmin can’t be bothered to resolve themselves).

That's a massive distortion of what they said.

Enlighten me as to what exactly they said then.