fenix 5X+ bluetooth connectivity

My fenix 5X+ fails to reconnect to the phone after I walk away and I have to pair it again. I have had the watch for over a year and the phone for 3-4 months. This problem started last week. I also have a fenix 3 and a Forerunner 35 and they reconnect automatically when I get back close to the phone, which is what the 5X+ was doing until last week.

Typical scenario is as follows: the watch is connected to the phone and I walk away from the phone. The watch disconnects (normal). When I get back near the phone, it does not reconnect. Not only that, but the watch has disappeared from the phone's list of previously connected devices. I have to pair the watch to the phone again and redo the initial setup, and then all works OK again until I walk away from the phone again. I do not lose training data.

Since I do not always carry the phone with me at work, that happens multiple times a day. It is not a random thing, it does it every single time. I have rebooted the watch and the phone with no change. I have not tried to force the phone to forget the watch, I get that is next on my list of things to try.

So it could be a phone problem or a watch problem, but the phone works fine with the other two Garmin devices.

I am thinking of pairing the watch with my previous phone (a Pixel 2XL) which I still have but do not use due to no security updates to see if it's a phone or a watch problem, but it runs the previous version of the Android OS, so it may or may not be significant.

That's a bummer because this watch has a particularly great Bluetooth range, so precisely I do not normally need to carry my phone with me to get notifications while at work.

  • Update: as is often the case, all I have to do is report a problem on a forum and the problem immediately goes away. My watch has remained connected to the phone all morning, even though I have been in and out of phone range a lot, like a typical day.

  • Second update: the watch started doing it again (connects to Bluetooth but disconnects within minutes,). After a week, the problem was still there. I called Garmin. They walked me through a factory reset and now all has been good for about a month. I am happy again :) Note that it erased my custom data screens and button programming, but the apps and watch faces were still there, which was nice.