Next Beta version after firmware 27.00?

I would not be expecting anymore releases for the F6. Certainly doubtful any would be backported F7 features, the F7 is getting on itself and probably soon the F7 forums will be full of "When will F7 get the F8 features" like this forum was annoyingly full of when the F7 was released.

The Fenix 6 was released 5 years ago now.

I also think that there will be no updates for the garmin 6x, but I don't see it justifiable because it went on sale 5 years ago, since it is still on sale in official stores, and at a not very modest price (it is not a cheap watch for the competition that exists).
That not updating products is a way of forcing you to buy a new model every two years? Okay, but do I think that's honest? Not at all!

fakeidtty said:

That not updating products is a way of forcing you to buy a new model every two years?

Nobody is forcing anybody to update to a new model. That's personal choice.

As for future updates? I suspect any major bugs that appear will be attended to but beyond that it would be unwise to get excited about whether additional features will be added in the future.

Yes.... Mine are randomly reboots when playing mp3 from the watch and "trying to use garmin pay" or playing mp3 and "using" an excersise program gym for example and changing screens or saving an excersise session... boom reboot. I know... I am an IT Tech myself, its not a bug, its a feature. a terrible one of that.

There will be no more firmware releases for the Fenix 6. Garmin Germany, whom I contacted because of multiple errors in my watch, which are also well documented here, told me in no uncertain words that Garmin has abandoned the Fenix 6, leaving us with all the remaining bugs. Thanks Garmin!

Garmin products must be very good or we are masochists, because with the Garmin service and after-sales service they have, I don't understand why people continue to buy a watch like this for this price.

I'm not saying that they provide improvements, but at least they should fix the bugs after two years of having sold it and having charged for it.

I've had my watch for ~3, almost 4 years now.  I've never had major problems with it (well, except for the one issue mentioned below that Garmin replaced the watch to fix). I'm sure there are some bugs and issues that people find, as is mentioned above, I'm not claiming it's 100% bug free.  But for the majority of people the watch functions perfectly fine and does what it's advertised to do.

This thread makes it sound like nothing on the watch works and it's riddled with bugs.  That's clearly false.

I agree it's a shame the last lingering issues with the watch aren't resolved, but it's hardly a non-working mess.  For most of us, it works fine.  That's why, when this one's life is over (hopefully another couple of years yet!) I'll buy the next Fenix/Forerunner model that takes my fancy.  For me this has been a great watch with minimal issues.

The one issue I did have with it (it started to register double button presses all the time) was quick fixed by Garmin with a replacement.

muppetman said:

This thread makes it sound like nothing on the watch works and it's riddled with bugs.  That's clearly false.

OK, let's have a look. Even with v. 27.00, my watch has the following bugs, which Garmin will not fix:

• Altimeter measurements are far from reliable, in watch mode as well as during activities and even after calibration. The consequence of this is that the value of height meters gained through activities is grossly wrong.
• GPS accuracy is still a sick joke. Even my old Polar V800 was better.
• Running activities with my RD Pod still show sampling errors, making the values derived from these measurements unreliable at least. The RD Pod sampling errors are not as severe as with former firmware versions since 21.00, but they're still there.
• During swim activities, the pool lane count as well as swim style recognition are still unreliable.
• During activities using GPS and/or external sensors (RD Pod, Watt meter on bike), battery drain is much higher than with previous firmware versions. This means that I lose about 3 days of battery charge left throughout an 1 hour activity with GPS on and about 4 days of battery charge. To show the relation: 1 hour of usage with GPS and an external sensor kills nearly 25% of the battery charge.
• Using watch faces from the CIQ store makes the UI of the watch unbearably slow. This is true even for Garmin's own watch faces, proving that this is a bug in the watch and not of third party watch faces.

All of these bugs are well documented in this forum.

Now, let's have a look at the activities I use the watch for most of the time:

• Running
• Biking
• Swimming
• Hiking

Now, please prove your point "That's clearly false" and explain to me which of these activities are not severely affected by the bugs still present in the current firmware. And please consider that Running, Biking and Swimming are the activities I bought the watch for in the first place, not knowing what would be ahead.

The watch isn't riddled with bugs.  Yes, some features have inaccuracies if you are looking for laser focused numbers.  Most people don't/won't even notice these problems. If half the features of the watch just flat out did not work at all then I'd say the watch was riddled with bugs/issues.  All those features you've listed work, sometimes they do have some inaccuracies though.   My point is, most of us do not care about a slightly inaccurate Altimeter.  The GPS is accurate enough for most of us, yes it's not Military Precision accurate, I agree, especially when running.  I honestly could not give a stuff if I'm shown on the wrong side of the street, or 10m is missed when I went around a corner. Nor could 99% of the users.

90% of users don't have a running Pod, or probably even know it exists.

The "Battery drain is higher" is the fact that your watch is aging and the battery life has gone.  My watch is exactly the same, and the same as 2 other people I know who bought the watch approx the same time as me.

I 100% agree with you you've listed valid "bugs", though really I don't think the GPS accuracy is worth getting excited about but I know from reading here that it's a big one for a lot of people.  Most people are never going to encounter the issues you mentioned, or even if they DO, they won't notice them or care.

My point isn't that the issues you've pointed out don't exist, they do.  My point is outside of a few very "everything must be super precise or I'm going to be upset" people, the average user does not care.

I can list additional issues with my HRM-PRO and my F6, especially with the "Upload stats after an activity" feature. None of them are so terrible that I feel like I've been sold a lemon though.  Yeah, it'd be great if they could get fixed, but overall the feature works as advertised.

For 95% of users (A percentage I've obviously made up) the watch works perfectly fine and they're happy.

I'm happy even though I'm aware of some of the limitations or broken edge cases.

muppetman said:

90% of users don't have a running Pod, or probably even know it exists.

I do :-) There were issues with it (metrics missing, for example no stride length). That was fixed. I can't say anything about sampling errors as I use Runalyze and the graphs with data from either HRM-Run or RD Pod look the same for the last 9 years.

muppetman said:

I'm happy even though I'm aware of some of the limitations or broken edge cases.

So am I! In some respects, the UI: many screens are clearer, my F6X is better than my newer Forerunner 955.