Buttons

5807278 said:

Too bad there is no way to back up the settings when replacing watches like that. 

There is, kind of. It involves connecting your old watch to a PC, copying a bunch of FIT files off of it (for example, activity settings are in the SPORTS/ folder), and (usually) copying the FIT files into the NEWFILES/ folder on the new watch. (In some cases, you copy the FIT files back to their original folder.)

Not all settings will transfer over (e.g. wi-fi, bluetooth and sensor settings will not be transferred), but you might save some time this way if you already heavily customized your activity settings.

On the bright side, if anything goes wrong with the restore procedure on the new device, you should be able to do a factory reset to fix everything, so there isn’t much risk here.

Here’s an official support article:

https://support.garmin.com/en-MY/?faq=hWholZ8uPZ6PboXu5Nf7d6 (this only details the kind of FIT files that are copied to NEWFILES/)

Here’s a really old post I made with some additional things that can be copied over (back to the original folder), like activity history, courses and segments. Ofc, with the advent of Physio Trueup, recent activity history will be synced over anyway.

[https://forums.garmin.com/sports-fitness/sports-fitness/f/forerunner-935/137954/backup-of-user-settings/763911#763911]

Note that the CIQ apps part of the post is obsolete now. You really can’t back up CIQ apps anymore since the app files (PRGs) are no longer accessible in the file system. But you might be able to copy over app settings (although it would be a bit of a challenge to copy them back to the new watch after reinstalling the apps from the CIQ store, since the app filenames are basically randomly generated on installation, so you would have rename the old settings files to match the new app filenames.) I’m not going to go into details here, but if you copy GarminDevice.xml from the old device and compare it GarminDevice.xml on the new device (after reinstalling your CIQ apps manually), you can figure out the filenames of the apps on your old device and your new device.

It’s probably not worth doing unless you have some really complex app settings that you need to save. (Probably just easier to take screenshots and redo them by hand.)

I've got used to it. it's not as good pushing it as my Epix Pro but it works and it feels firm when I press it.

Same here on 2 different Fenix 8's. Down button sometimes misses 1 out of 15 presses; other times it misses 2-3 presses in a row. All the other buttons work 99% of the time.

Aside from that issue, I'm good with the feel of the new buttons, mostly because all five have a consistent feel to them. My biggest issue with the Fenix 7 was the inconsistent feel of the buttons...one was squishy, one was clicky, one was double-clicky. The new ones (both with and without haptic feedback) seem to have a consistent feel for all five buttons.

My down button also has not been activating every once in a while.

Did you exchange to the new 8 and did it help?

I ended up doing the calibration and it's working perfectly fine since. Fixed it. 

Contact Garmin support. I exchanged through 3 watches, and they all started with or developed "dead" spots in the button presses. I finally contacted Garmin support to see if this was a known hardware issue that they would be fixing in the future, and to my complete surprise, they walked me through a software button calibration...fixed all 3 watches. I don't know if that process is available elsewhere on the forum or not, but Garmin support does have that available.

Can you say how to do calibration? Ia haven't heard about this feature 

Returned it all together. Realized my Fenix 7 pro is superior in every way.