Disappointed with my Fenix 8

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. 

  • Thanks, I'll look into this. On item 4, I actually turned off phone notifications on my watch but I'm still receiving them whenever I sync my watch to my phone. I'm not sure if others are experiencing this. 

  • My battery is great, 2 weeks no problem on my F8. the crashes started recently. every time i plug in it seems to want to update maps, but if i manually update from PC it looks fine.. sometimes i wake up to a black screen and watch is no longer working, Battery is fine. 

  • Check your sleep mode and turn your device off and back on.

  • It happens sometimes during the day too. I had a treadmill run. Finished. Checked my stats. Then about 20 minutes after I looked and it was off again.  So no specific to sleeping or sleep mode. Just 1 of many times 

  • With the number of issues you list, call garmin support and they can walk you through each.

  • What do you mean check the sleep mode? Looks like 12:00AM was the last of the heartbeat data and I woke up to a black screen again. Took me a long time but got it restarted. Holding light button doesn't work well in this state.

  • While the Fenix 8 isn't as much of a dumpster fire as it was on release, still many issues/annoyances. Here are mine:

    1. Immediate crash and reboot when trying to load a course with navigation.  Same issue if I try and redo a previous activity.  Case open with garmin support on this.

    2. Activities have been consolidated and actually requires more clicks to get to what you want. (compared to previous watches').

    3. Fonts on the watch faces are way to small to see. Can't adjust them.

    4. I created a shortcut to change Text Size. When I click on it, the watch crashes and reboots. Case open with garmin support on this.

    5. The display dims so much in low light, it's impossible to see anything on the watch face.

    6. GPS acquisition takes much longer than Epix. Not like an hour or anything, maybe 15 seconds compared to instant on my Epix. When you're standing there at 5AM in 18 degree weather, it reminds you how the F8 isn't as amazing as a cheaper watch.

    Not broken per se, but I'm not a fan of:

    1. The buttons no longer have that satisfying click with mechanical buttons. The case is sealed and they had to change the buttons and they are more 'squishy' and often I have to click multiple times to select what I need.

    2. The titanium edition is now just the bezel, no longer the bezel AND back case like the previous Fenix 7/Epix 2. We are paying more for less. That sucks garmin.

    3. The box it comes in is smaller than the previous. For such an expensive watch, I'd expect a bit more presentation and for them to not cheap out.

    I have the 47mm AMOLED sapphire watch on the latest firmware. I got a $210 discount from my health insurance. I have the Epix 2 non-pro and don't dive and don't really use the F8 speaker/mic or voice commands. So what am I really getting that I don't have on my Epix 2? The new UI that I love and the flashlight and the new heart rate sensor, which is noticeably more accurate. And I admit it's insane with all these issues and for what I'm getting for the price, I'm out of my mind for buying it. But I kind of justified it by selling my Epix 2 later on for about $300. But even then, the purchase doesn't make sense. But I just wanted it..

  • For an expensive Fenix 8 that cost me $1300, I expect accurate distance tracking. It consistently over estimates the distance traveled. It's no better than the my cheaper Fitbit Versa 2 or Garmin Forerunner 55. I really don't care for all sophisticated issues being fixed with numerous upgrades. Just start fixing the basic stuff, Garmin, ACCURATE DISTANCE TRACKING!

  • Sent my battery logs to Garmin. They replied me yesterday stating:

    "Based on the battery logs we've received and reviewed we can see your watch is getting a projected battery life of about 11-16 days which, based on your watch usage and watch settings, is within our expectations. In your charge cycles you are performing around 5-7.5 hours of GPS activity (20-41 minutes per day).

    With this in mind having reviewed the sets of logs you sent in we have not found any cause for concern and the device does look to be working as we would expect."

    During the battery logging, my watch lasted slightly less than 10 days with 8% left. I did slightly less than 7.5hrs of GPS activities using auto-select mode for GPS settings.

    I tracked my battery % on paper and noted that my watch lost ~10% or more battery in less than a single day on 2 occasions and this is without any activities. For example, from 21 March 0125hrs to 23 March 0135hrs, my watch battery dropped from 47% to 14%. This is with 1x 60 min run (4% drain) and 1x 90 min run (4% drain). So 25% drain in two days outside activities. 

    My watch settings:
    Watchface: Portal
    Gesture off
    Back light 10% with 8 sec timeout 
    Alert tones off
    Button tones and vibration off
    SPO2 off
    Garmin share off
    Incident detection off
    Notifications off
    WiFi off
    Bluetooth off (on only to sync to phone, 2-3 times a day). 
    Based on fenix 8 specs for 47mm solar, battery life on smartwatch mode is 21 days (my watch actually stated 25 days on full charge based on my settings, so even lighter than Garmin's settings), and 48 hours for all systems for GPS settings.
    Based on everything I just said, I can't believe Garmin is stating 11 days is considered normal based on my usage, and that >10% battery drain in less than a day outside of activities is within specs.