Battery drain on 18.14

Hi All,

I'm stil on 18.14 but I can confirm that you can exit from "battery drain mode" in easier way. After you finish your own activity, save it and return to watch mode, you can go to any activity (doesn't matter if it is GPS or non GPS), stay on startup screen for 10-15 seconds (not needed to start and discard activity) and go back to watch mode. And viola "battery drain mode" went away 

PS. Garmin Share disabled sometime ago but in my opinion it didn't change anything.

PS2. "Incident Detection" didn't enable and setup, my watch still says me "Please configure with Gamin Connect Mobile app", so I suspect it is disabled.

PS3. How it looks like on 18.15, did it help or?

So in essence for your last step, start any activity and don't mind your watch, because there is an activity time-out to save battery (oh the irony) and it will shut down the activity. Right? 

Any further updates on 18.15? How long does usually take for Garmin to release it to everyone? 

For my F7 Standard (still on 18.14) turning off incident detection was the key.

As far as I can see there are two levels of turning it off/on: In Garmin Connect app (under Safety & Tracking -> Set Up Safety Features) you have to give the acception to use incident detection at all.

In the watch settings you can toggle incident detection on/off per activity. It was set to ON by default on my watch for every activity though I had never given overall acception. After I changed that to OFF for each activity battery drain went back to normal after ending GPS activity.

Wow, this is good advice. I did turn off the global setting for incident detection. But after your post, i went into an activity and from there to safety tracking: and they were all enabled after all!

Turning it off, fingers crossed I wont be in an incident, and hopefully can enjoy more than 4 days on a charge now!

Thanks.

UPDATE: Ok I see it now, only when emergency contact will accept it and is active in "Incident detection". Now I can turn off for each type of activity, as default it is enabled.

I have already added emergency contact, turned on incident detection on my phone and still watch says "Please configure with Gamin Connect Mobile app". Watch restarted, sync done, still the same. Also watch doesn't see emergency contact.

I registered just to add a comment here. What Garmin is doing is completely unacceptable. The F7 firmware caused a stir and many commenters expressed their frustration, but the last firmware update for the Instinct 2 which was in August caused the exact same bugs. The I2 community is smaller which is why it didn't get as much traction. My I2's battery since August has been about 24-30h. Yes, you read that right. The I2 has become a one-day watch. I feel like Garmin's sloppiness and lack of care for its users has reached its peak. I was really considering switching to the new Fenix, but seeing the state of the firmware it was released in and how Garmin doesn't care about its current users I'll think twice. Shame on you Garmin.

I would highly recommend not to take rushed decisions, especially based on your emotions.

I was in nearly your place last week when I purchased F7XPro and since then I partially regret about this as my old 6X does not have any issues or at least I haven't seen any recent ones based on my day-to-day usage.

F8/E3 was also in my radar, but as it seems they also have tons of issues which is not clear if they will be ever resolved, so what I could do on your spot will be simply to wait and see how the things will develop in future.If you are not tight to their eco-system, then there are tons of other vendors which also offers watches on great price with great functionalities, I for example came from Suunto and not once or twice considered giving them a second chance.

Sadly to say, but Garmin as it seems to me its not what they are trying to advertise to others and there are tons of unsolvable problems around which simply annoy people rather than do any good.

My emotions are stable, but it's also hard not to be frustrated when I have to charge my Garmin every day for over a month. The long battery life was the main aspect that decided me to choose Garmin.

You're absolutely right that you have to wait for the F8 software to develop before deciding to buy it. At the moment it looks like a piece of crap filled with bugs. A lot of threads on Reddit of people who returned it after a few days.

My eyes opened very wide when about a week ago I came across a review of some new Chinese watch (company starting with the letter "A"). In a watch for 1/4 the price of the new F8, the maps and the entire UI were smooth as butter. Compared to it, the F8 looks like a watch a decade behind.

Garmin has great hardware, but the software is a fossil. They need to start making changes quickly, or users will completely turn away from them.

P.S. Interesting about your mention of Suunto. Was it really that bad?