Back light bug during run mode

JES0012 said:

We both have 9.20 software.

Pretty sure you have 7.20.

So, as far as you were aware the backlight did not turn off for the 55 minutes before sunrise, not the entire duration of the run? What backlight brightness do you have set that you could not tell if it was off in daylight? Two things I'd do:

1. Check backlight settings
2. Hard reset - press and hold top left until power off then restart.

I'll be up before sunrise tomorrow for a swim so I'll have a look then and also look tonight while I'm in the house after sunset. Agreed, it is a bit of a waste of battery if the touchscreen is not working as expected. However, if the brightness is low enough that it's not easy to see if it's on in daylight at least that's not as bad as having it extremely bright.

Touch screen is disabled during activities by default so covering the screen would not be expected to do anything.

This only occurred during the activity of running. It does not occur during general use.

Sorry about the software version. You're correct. Good point on the touchscreen/palm thing. I have mine set to 20% and we were running directly east toward sunrise so yea, I couldn't tell if it was on or not but my gut tells me it turned off after sunrise.

Trying to avoid a hard reset. It takes forever to set up all the data fields and all. Definitely don't want to go through that more than necessary.

JES0012 said:

This only occurred during the activity of running. It does not occur during general use.

Easy enough to check even when sat in the armchair and just using a run activity.

Hard reset is not the same as full reset. Provided you sync first to transfer any 24/7 data, you'll lose nothing and have to reconfigure nothing.

It’s currently 18:04 here in New Zealand with sunset at 20:35. I have my F7 on my right wrist. Wrist setting is for the right, backlight settings for During Activity are: Brightness 60%, Keys On, Alerts On, Wrist Gesture After Sunset, Time-out 15s. I have a run activity started. If I press a key the backlight comes on. If I rotate my wrist to look at the watch the backlight does not come on. Stopped the activity, moved the watch to my left wrist and change the wrist setting. Same thing; backlight does not come on when rotating my wrist to look at the watch.

I’ll update this in a couple of hours after sunset.

It’s 15 minutes to sunset and the backlight on gesture is now working. So, all I can say is that the backlight on gesture doesn’t work (as expected) until at least 40 minutes before sunset. Not sure when gesture started to work but it’s certainly early in relation to sunset on my watch. I’ll have a look in the morning to see what happens before sunrise. 

I noticed the same thing this morning: started about 40 minutes before sunrise, the gesture control of the lighting doesn't work. During the day, on the other hand, it works as it should.
Looks like a software bug in 7.2.

I had a run activity going about 5 minutes before sunrise this morning and it worked fine. Gesture control of backlight was flawless. However, sunrise was at 0612 but the backlight was still being activated by gesture until 0636. It’s now 0648 and the backlight is not being activated by gesture.

In summary the backlight is activated by gesture after sunset and before sunrise on my F7 Sapphire Solar. However, the activation starts at least 15 minutes before sunset and remains active until around 30 minutes after sunrise. Outside of those times, ie during daylight hours the backlight on my F7 is not activated by gesture.

Whether the early activation before sunset and the delay after sunrise is by design is for Garmin to answer but it does make some sense. Light starts to fade before sunset and doesn't get bright until some minutes after sunrise so having the backlight activated early/late compensates a bit for the low light.

I think the backlight via gesture only comes on when it's dark. It won't turn on during the day, even though it should.

That's correct. Because I have mine set to after sunset. That was never my issue. The issue is that it stays on far too much when it is dark which unnecessarily drains the battery. When I go into run mode and stand still, the gesture works perfectly. But when I'm actually going for a run, the watch thinks I'm gesturing the entire time. This is definitely an issue that needs resolving. If I'm running an ultra marathon through the night, I can't have the watch backlight staying on for 12 hrs

JES0012 said:

That's correct. Because I have mine set to after sunset.

OK, but mine is not set to after sunset but does the same ...