Hello there, new to the Fenix line here with the 8 (51mm, AMOLED). My last watch was Amazfit's Falcon, a nice but very flawed watch that has been getting better with time. Ultimately I was lured over by the per-second tracking, flashlight, screen and battery life of the Fenix 8... but I have found the UI to be astoundingly bad by comparison. I am a programmer myself with decades now under the belt and understand perhaps a small portion of the difficulties involved in building something like this, so I am not a simple hater.
A few examples of the bad experiences:
- No support for automatic activity initialization. The reason cited here on the forums is that "this isn't that product", and well, that doesn't really fly. This will be a requirement on the next watch I buy, and I'm really hoping folks over at Garmin change their minds on this. I don't see how expecting an option present on much less capable models to be available on the highest end flagship is unreasonable. "This isn't that product syndrome" infects other portions of the experience as well, for reasons having nothing to do with limits of the hardware.
- Activities getting paused by notifications- I finish a walk only to find the watch didn't record a thing because I checked a text early on or midway through.
- No common, unified user experience across models. I wonder if there are different teams for the various models or something in their own silos- my girlfriend is returning her Venu 3, because there are simple things I can do (clear all notifications from the watch), she can't. This fracturing of the UI is creating somewhat of a nightmare for users, and I guarantee the same for Garmin. It would be much simpler on everyone if feature X is on "GarminOS" version XYZ on watches with ABC hardware feature(s), and everything is in the same place on every model. Specialization (Tactix, Running, diving, etc) can happen _on top_ of that. This will require time, and frankly willpower from architecture/product planning, and for Garmin to possibly get a bit deeper into the hardware game I imagine.
- Fenix 8 watch face customization is fantastic, but marketplace faces require app intervention to do the same kinds of customization. This could be a transitional phase however beginning with the 8... I can see why it might be technically impossible.
- General UI problems... I've found that unlike on the Falcon, where most of my interaction was via the screen, the Fenix is better driven via the buttons. This is welcome in some regards, but I can't go certain places from just the screen. I've also found that no matter "which way" I go in the UI, I can still end up in the same place (settings of some kind), and that there are multiple versions of the same settings page for different "focus modes". It just isn't intuitive, sometimes maddening. For instance, I know I turned on "always on distplay", but then randomly at night I find it locked off, with no explanation. (Sleep mode was doing this). I bet at least some of the developers implementing this recognized the obvious problems- if I'm not intimately familiar with your UI design, I have no clue what is happening or why. I'm not presented with a reason or remedy.
I think the biggest problem might be community engagement... with posts I've seen having no answer or reply from anyone on team garmin for common issues. Maybe Garmin can set up better paths of dialogue between the enthusiast base and the product + development teams. Some companies that are very community centric (Valve) expose issue trackers to the public. Enthusiasts frequently contribute to issue reporting, as well as the testing and QA part of the equation.
I am on the fence about returning the Fenix 8. The hardware is stellar (maybe the processor could have had more oomph), its flashlight is super handy, the display is gorgeous and the build quality is top notch. But at its cost, the issues I see, the complaints I see on the forums going unanswered leave me wary. Apologists can swoop in and make excuses for these things all they want but that isn't going to help these products get better. While many of these issues anger me, I'm more just disappointed. I'd really rather not go the Apple Watch route because of abysmal battery life... Amazfit doesn't have a good answer to my needs, Garmin fixed all of the problems I have from the Falcon, but now I have a new, worse set of problems unique to Garmin that each individually run right up to the "I've had enough" line.
Long time Garmin users, has a launch this turbulent ever recovered? The Falcon had some serious issues at the beginning, but prior to my "upgrade" they had all been resolved, save for things that require new hardware. Should I walk, or weather the storm?
