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Disappointed with my Fenix 8

9737709
5 months ago

Bought the Fenix 8 47m - Solar to upgrade from my Forerunner 945. Ever since I received the watch in early October, I've been disappointed with its performance.

1) Battery - my battery life is just bad. I'm struggling to get around 10 days of battery life and that is with minimal GPS activity. In my latest charge, I charged to full battery last Saturday at 2pm. Now it's around Thursday 12am and I'm left with 42% battery. This is with just one 50 min GPS run.

Settings: no pulse ox, only turn on Bluetooth to sync to my phone one to three times a day, no WiFi, airplane mode on, no music, brightness 10% with timeout 8 sec, no vibration and sound for button press, no light for gesture. Watch is updated as and when a new update is available. I think it's safe to say this is a much lighter use case compared to Garmin's idea of smartwatch usage. 

Currently using a connect iq watch face but it's the same one from my 945 days, and I have no battery issues with my 945. Also, have 2 connect iq apps but those are only used for workout activities. My 945 had 2 additional connect iq widgets as well but that didn't cause any battery problems for my old watch. Sad to say that my 5 year old 945 lasts longer than my brand new Fenix 8 even with more things installed. 

2) Crashes - I cannot believe the number of times my fenix 8 crashes. Sometimes while using the map for a short while, it crashes. I find that using touch screen in the map has a higher chance of crashing. I literally just tried to use the map as I'm typing this and it crashed. Also had it crash on me before when navigating around the activity page.

The worst repeatable crash I had encountered was after running marathon in late November and saving the activity. For that day, everytime I press the up button, the watch will crash without fail. Pressing the down button all the way to the last widget glance will also crash the watch. I don't know if that's got to do with the marathon activity, but for that day, I couldn't even touch the up and down button for fear of crashing it. Interestingly, once the clock struck midnight, the watch returned to normal.

Another negative point is once the watch crashes, any data between the last sync and crash will not be saved to garmin connect. Let's say I synced my watch at 8am, turn off Bluetooth for the rest of the day and my watch crashes at 6pm. No data between that time will be saved to garmin connect BUT looking at my watch, the data is still there (heart rate, stress level graphs etc). It is just not saving to GC. What gives???

Bugs - I don't have much to complain except for one thing - why am I seeing phone notifications even though I turned them off in my watch settings? I'm still seeing WhatsApp messages etc on my watch. Is this a bug?

Is my fenix 8 a dud? My Forerunner 945 worked so much better from day one. The forerunner 945 is expected to last 14 days and I could squeeze up to around 10 days even after 5 years of usage. My Fenix 8 is expected to last 21 days and I'm struggling to even get half the expected battery life. My fenix 8 crashes so much more in 2 months while my Forerunner 945 only crashed like 1 or 2 times from what I remembered after 5 years. 

  • 0 5 months ago

    I thankfully haven't experienced any crashes but I'm getting the exact same battery life. I've been off from running for a few weeks (aka minimal activity) and i'm getting 10 days of battery life. The maps loading are pretty slow as well. Otherwise I'm happy. But the reason I switched from an AW was for the battery, how is the thing that sets the them apart the most the one thing they failed at with a premium flagship product that cost over a grand? 

  • 0 5 months ago

    I thankfully haven't experienced any crashes. However I am getting only 10 days of battery life. Other than that and the maps loading quite slow, I'm happy. They say they are working on a fix but how is it the biggest thing that sets them apart from other manufactures is the one thing that its right on their flagship device? 

  • 0 5 months ago

    I had my first crash today during an activity trying to pan out on the map hit the up button and it reset! Crazy

  • 0 5 months ago in reply to 7768468

    Yes, I have experienced my map being just a grey screen and either taking super long to load or just refusing to load at all. With the battery life being so bad, I'm not even sure if the issue is due to software or hardware now. It's been close to 4 months since the release and Garmin still hasn't found a fix. 

  • 0 5 months ago

    There was a firmware update many weeks ago that addressed the crash when saving activities.  Are you on the latest firmware, 12.35?  After applying firmware update, did you restart the watch?  For external devices, do you have 'Auto Discovery; enabled?  If so, turn that off.  Wifi on?  Turn it off.  Also, try a full charge and use a stock watchface that shipped with the watch. Just because an IQ watch face from your 945 worked well, doesn't mean it's properly optimized for the fenix 8. 

  • 0 5 months ago in reply to 7000518

    That sucks. I hope garmin can fix these issues soon. We can't even use the core features properly with such problems. 

  • 0 5 months ago in reply to net1994

    I'm on 12.22 currently. Trying to see how long it can last on a full charge before updating to 12.35. My watch crashed when just navigating the activity page (before starting any activity) and not when saving activity so not sure if the fix is supposed to help with that.

    Usually when my watch updates, it will restart itself as part of the process. Do you mean that or manually restarting the watch again?

    Auto discovery is off, wifi off, Bluetooth off most of the time, airplane mode on, still facing poor batt.

    Yup I did try a stock face (portal on 12.22) on a full charge but batt could only last around 10-12 days or so (and that is without any GPS activity). Since battery life is similar, decided to just continue my fav IQ watch face. 

  • 0 5 months ago in reply to 9737709

    As painful as it might be, a factory reset might be needed. 

    Sometimes a fresh start works wonders.

  • 0 5 months ago in reply to kstate1980

    Hmmm does your fenix 8 watch have decent battery life? 

  • 0 5 months ago in reply to 9737709

    There are plenty of users that have great battery life and there are plenty of users that have poor battery life.

    You could have a hardware problem or a configuration problem. The only way to know for sure is to:

    1. Soft reset your watch

    2. Re calibrate the battery (you need to Google the process)

    3., Factory reset. After factory reset go slow in your configuration changes and check the battery drain as you go.

    4. Ir's never been mentioned to my knowledge but, if you have a lot of notifications from your phone showing up on your Garmin, it could help  to reduce them. As for me, I only want important notifications as rule (i.e. calls, text message etc.), It might not help but, it is worth a try.

    Be sure and  test your battery life for one cycle after each step above.

    None of the above may work but, if you go through the process, you should be able pin point in your configuration what is causing the problem or find out you have a hardware problem.