What happened to the UI?

jmto said:

FlowState said:

Even if you think the voice assistant and voice commands are useless, lots of ppl have asked for voice notes, especially in the context of Venu 2 Plus / Venu 3, which have a mic (but no voice notes capability), and Garmin has finally delivered.

I haven't seen any of those.

I’ve seen this kind of request a few times in the Garmin forums and the garmin subreddit.

https://www.google.com/search?q=garmin+voice+notes

https://www.google.com/search?q=venu+voice+notes

The point is that ppl apparently think a watch with a mic would be a natural fit for voice notes. Even though Garmin could’ve supported voice notes through a bluetooth mic long before they ever put a mic in a watch, nobody really asked for voice notes until the built-in mic became a feature. Notice how, in one of snippets above, someone claims it’s impossible to record voice notes bc Garmins don’t have a built-in mic (which was true until fairly recently). Which again demonstrates that ppl strongly associate voice notes with a built-in mic (and ignore the hypothetical possibility of recording notes through a bluetooth mic.)

I don’t think it’s my place (or Garmin’s) to tell them that a built-in mic or voice notes are dumb ideas for a sports watch. Garmin would probably rather build a product that gives them what they want, and happily take their money.

Anyway, just saying what I’ve seen. I don’t think voice notes, voice assistant, or voice commands were randomly thrown in for no reason. Just bc you don’t see the value in this stuff, doesn’t mean others don’t. Saw a comment from a cyclist who said they like the voice commands bc they can skip to the next music track without looking down. (So voice commands might have some utility, despite the fact that obviously Garmin voice commands are gonna be a lot more limited than anything that can be done on a phone or a beefier smartwatch.)

Ppl probably said the exact same thing about viewing phone notifications on their watch. “Who needs that? Garmin is a real sports watch for athletes, not a toy like Apple Watch!!!1!” Well, you might be surprised how many ppl’s primary use of their Apple Watch is to look at notifications from their phone without taking their phone out of their pocket. Some would say it helps them get more work done bc there’s fewer interruptions.

I don’t particular care about phone notifications on Garmin watches myself, but I bet there’s a few ppl who absolutely would not buy a Garmin if this basic feature wasn’t present. I would probably scratch my head if Garmin released a watch without bluetooth notifications.

Now extend the same reasoning to all this newfangled voice stuff for “teenagers” that Garmin has decided to put in their latest watches.

I don’t use my phone’s voice assistant heavily, but I probably wouldn’t buy a phone that doesn’t have one, since I do see *some* value in it. Garmin is probably trying to capture customers who feel the same way about their watch.

jmto said:

Maybe the feature should have been put then to Venu series, not to Fenix?

Not to state the obvious, but their goal is to give ppl a reason to buy the new Fenix 8, not to reward existing Venu 2 Plus / Venu 3 owners. Venu 4 will probably have voice notes. Since Venu 3 was released in 2023, I’m guessing Venu 4 won’t be out until 2025 at the earliest, and Garmin probably doesn’t want to wait that long.

Maybe I am in the minority here. I don’t use the watch for diehard fitness but more basic stuff. Coming from years of using smartwatches I think Garmin did an outstanding job here overhauling the phone and especially messaging functionality. I also like all the other software tweaks. I do agree with everyone though the stock watch faces have dreadful aod and the stupid leading zero in 12 hour format. I will say I also bought it because realistically Garmin has the nicest watch by far in this type of market. I mean Apple is square and the new Samsung is a well circle and square. Cmon Garmin fix up these watch faces and all is well. It’s 2024 and watch faces are a huge deal now. It’s a fashion piece also you look at all day and night long. Put some more effort in to that part.

I came from a Fenix 5 years ago, to more recently an Epix Pro Gen 2 and i LOVE the new Fenix 8 and the UI.  Theres no way any company will always please everyone... I think its great!

As a smartwatch user I think the new interface is excellent. Love the new notification and call features but I agree the fact that you can’t see AOD is unacceptable. They also keep putting that damn leading zero there which is incorrect in 12 hour format as that’s what am/pm is for. I mean they make the best looking hardware and improve the software then totally botch the biggest thing you do on a watch. Tell time. It’s astounding these things aren’t discussed in testing and they are such simple things to fix but shouldnt happen in the first place

2529455 said:

The same thing happened when Porsche produced the Cayenne and then the Cayman.

Yeah, but Porsche didn't make the 911 the Cayenne, Cayman, you see?

2529455 said:

Should I be forced to buy two Garmin watches, or just one Apple watch if Apple get their battery life up there?

I'm fine with LTE in the longterm, as long as it doesn't kill reliability and battery endurance.

2529455 said:

I worry that there may be a handful of us in here who want the Fenix to remain some kind of elite status symbol that you can spot at the airport

Isn't that AW Ultra?

2529455 said:

We're beyond that now. Fenix is for everyone

It used to be a reliable tool, yes. But the strategy got me from occasionally testing betas on 6, over staying away from betas on 7 to disabling auto update since 16.xx on the 7. And I see this tendency in hardware evolution happening.

2529455 said:

Which is why we have the Enduro 3 which is better and cheaper than the Enduro 2. That's a good thing!

Sure, but those have one big problem for me: 51mm

PS: might also order a top shelf Suunto for the fraction of the price to see how it holds up wrt. tool like expectations. There's no sentimental bonding to brands with me

FlowState said:

I don’t think it’s my place (or Garmin’s) to tell them that a built-in mic or voice notes are dumb ideas for a sports watch.

Garmin has huge numbers on SKUs and this Fenix didn't change that at all. The Venu which had it would have been expected place to do that. People complain about the price and you get very expensive watches if you try to put everything to one watch. This also leads to people have pretty different ideas what is the Fenix series for.

FlowState said:

Saw a comment from a cyclist who said they like the voice commands bc they can skip to the next music track without looking down. (So voice commands might have some utility, despite the fact that obviously Garmin voice commands are gonna be a lot more limited than anything that can be done on a phone or a beefier smartwatch.)

This does not work like this? You need to press button to trigger the voice. So this use case does not exists. If you need to press the button to trigger it without looking down, then you can skip the song also, right? Probably someone trying to justify themselves why the mic would be good thing for their use cases.

FlowState said:

Not to state the obvious, but their goal is to give ppl a reason to buy the new Fenix 8

Hopefully this backfires and the price hike makes people not to buy this and they need to rethink this strategy. I kind of was expecting to buy Fenix 8 to as daily driver and keep this Descent as just dive only. But what I would get with Fenix 8, which I don't have and what the price is. What one would be getting: New HR sensor (I use it just for 24/7 so not a thing), mic/speaker (no need), Diving (would be nice, but already bought Descent).. and then.. that was it? If Garmin would tell more specs maybe there might be some things more, but as we don't know for example GPS-chipsets we don't know is there any improvement.

2529455 said:

jmto said:

Have you had AMOLED Garmin or are you just speculating that it wouldn't work for you? I have had my Garmin AMOLED on bike's handlebars without AOD. I just tap it if I want to see something from there.

I haven't, but I'm one of the weirdos that wants that map or metrics on the screen 100% of the time and glanceable so that I don't need to take my hands off the bars. More so when I'm mountain biking. I'm definitely not poo-pooing AMOLED, in fact I would prefer it for those times where I'm scrolling around a map during a hike and wanting to see small detail. It's just that the MIP display satisfies all of my use cases well enough and has that glanceability aspect which I find pretty critical.

Idk, maybe that's not so crazy given that the new Edge 1050 sports a super bright LCD, as opposed to AMOLED. Sounds like even Garmin is implicitly admitting that AMOLED may not be perfect for *all* use cases (whether it's to keep the cost of materials down on Garmin's end, as a review commenter guessed, or whether Garmin actually cares about keeping the display glanceable.)

DCR's review is kinda funny tho. This is the first paragraph:

As has been the trend for the last 2 years at Garmin, they’ve apparently grown tired of people complaining about their display tech looking like it’s from 1987. Following various Garmin watches getting brilliant and responsive AMOLED displays, it’s now time for the Edge series devices, starting with the Garmin Edge 1050. The unit now sports a brilliant 1,000nit display that’s as responsive as most cell phones. Except, with longer battery life than most cell phones.

He makes it *sound* like Edge 1050 got an AMOLED display, but if you scroll down, he quietly mentions that it's actually an LCD which is brighter and has higher resolution than previous Edge displays:

– Changed display to 3.5” Transmissive LCD display (with 1,000 Nits brightness, resolution 480×800)

There's something to be said about trends, marketing and buzzwords here. It's not enough to lead with "Edge 1050's display is brighter and sharper than previous Edges", reviewers have to say something like "the new Edge 1050 display is just like AMOLED!!1! (*)"

_{(*disclaimer: it's not actually AMOLED)}

Also reminds me of the forum thread where ppl argued about whether "Tactix OLED" and "Tactix AMOLED" are in fact 2 completely different models, and someone insisted that AMOLED is much better than OLED (source: trust me bro). It's hard to argue that every customer is making objective, rational purchasing decisions based on the relative merits of the various display technologies when you see discussions like that. It's more like "AMOLED good, everything else bad".

It is pretty interesting to me that whenever anyone brings up the glanceability aspect of MIP vs the forced dimming of AMOLED, everyone says "no problem, just turn your wrist, tap the screen or press a button - you should be ok with it since millions of Apple Watch users are ok with turning their wrist." I think DCR preemptively mentioned the wrist turn and it's-ok-bc-Apple-does-it in most of his reviews for the earliest Garmin AMOLED watches.

Yeah we can do those things, but isn't it objectively better if you don't have to? Can we admit that it's a step back in one respect, even if many ppl don't care about that use case? Instead of admitting there might be a usability tradeoff here, everyone wants to say "well now you have to use your watch differently, but nbd you will learn to love it."

In a sense I feel like customers are constantly being asked to adapt to tech instead of the other way around. This isn't always a bad thing, but it's interesting in light of the perception I've seen that many apps, services, and products are permanently broken in some respect or another, and there's nothing users can do about it. ("Everything is getting worse.")

One example is how the Spotify CIQ app doesn't even let you pick a song to play (you can only select a playlist.) Looking at videos, it seems every major CIQ music provider is the same (I've only tried Spotify out of the big guns tho). No reviewer ever mentions this, they all basically say that music player functionality on Garmin is perfectly fine. I know it's possible in CIQ - there's an indie app which supports this feature. It's also possible in Spotify to select a podcast episode, so logically they shouldn't have too many issues extending the same functionality to songs in playlists. (They can also preserve the previous functionality by putting a big play button at the top of each playlist.)

But obviously the big streaming music providers have decided that a dead simple UI is more important than an extremely basic music player feature (which is also available in the native Garmin music player btw.) Or maybe they all used starter code from Garmin that has the same limitation idk.

I do think Steve Jobs and Apple started a trend long ago where tech companies decide what's best for customers, and everyone just kinda accepts it now, for better or worse.

Just a quick note.  I had been using GlancePro on my 6xPro.  I just installed in on the Fenix 8 AMOLED 51mm.  It is really good.  Very configurable and you can set what you displayed in dimmed mode.  I'm really impressed.  It does not appear to be draining the battery at a higher rate but I'm only one day in.
However - Garmin should offer better faces than what came with an otherwise superb watch.