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Instinct 3 HR spikes, mini-display not aligned, and other bugs

5901242
3 months ago

Hello,

Got a new I3 solar for about a week now, and I have noticed several issues, at least some of them seemingly quite common among users. So here's a list of things I have noticed so far:

  1. the content in the mini-display is clearly misaligned in some cases, in others it is less noticeable but it seems that there's a general shift to the left
  2. so far I haven't been able to visualize the details of the daily summary, as every time I tried to do so the watch got stuck and I had to restart it --> see thread
  3. the battery charge indicator (both days and percentage) has fluctuated up and down randomly, like going from 91% to 86% all of a sudden, then again to 89%, within a half an hour time when I was sitting on my couch at night. So no activity going on, no settings change, and no sun of course. This happened again today to a smaller extent, when it went from 100% to 97% suddenly, and then again 99% a few minutes later.
  4. The HR measurement has been spiking randomly when walking, or even when standing still or sitting on the couch. I was wearing either my old fitbit sense or my girlfriend's Venu 3s which were reporting HR like 30 beats lower. At one point after a couple minutes sitting, my Fitbit was showing 72 hr, the I3 117. The I3 was sort of locked into this crazy spike and HR would not go down until I took the watch off and put it on my arm again.

It seems like a whole lot of bugs for a new unit, so I am wondering whether is it just me who is having all these issues or do other people have these as well? I would be happy to hear from Garmin whether these are something they are looking into or whether I have maybe a faulty unit? Considering returning anyway since this all does make it difficult to enjoy using the watch.

I have taken various photos of some of these issues, and am happy to send them over if someone from Garmin gets in touch! 

  • 0 3 months ago

    Personally, I experience none of the described issues on my Instinct 3 watches. I am really pleasantly surprised with the accuracy of the HR sensor, which reports almost always practically exactly the same HR as my HRM-Pro. Daily summary causes no issues (though I find it rather useless and redundant), and the battery indicator is pretty stable. The round window on the Solar model is correctly aligned too.

    The round window is not a software issue, rather a manufacturing defect - if you do not find it acceptable, I suggest that you request a replacement, since it cannot be fixed in other way. The exchange may perhaps help resolving the other problems too. If you keep the watch, I recommend doing the master reset to factory defaults with deleting all data. Although it is a big hassle to have to reconfigure it again, the full reset often helps fixing weird issues like misbehaving sensors, crashes, or freezing. If it does not help, then again I recommend contacting the Support - the behavior you experience is not typical. In my surrounding, I have access to 7 different Instinct 3 watches, and none of them show the issues you describe.

  • 0 3 months ago in reply to trux

    Thanks for your comments. I have tried to reset the watch already, since I did not have much data or things set up on it anyway, but still had some of the same spikes. I did contact support 5 days ago but no reply yet... In any case, I might just as well try to get a replacement from the shop since it is till very well within the return/exchange window. Then I can see if it was just a problem with this unit

  • 0 3 months ago

    I have had 2d instinct 3s and they all have very similar issues to yours apart from the window and hr issue. My battery percentage jumps around a lot. It restarts all the time when viewing glances. Daily summary just freezes the watch. I tried 2 different watches and the issues are the same so it’s definitely a software issue that needs to be patched. The glance restart issue is the most annoying.

  • 0 3 months ago in reply to 1941015

    Thanks for replying! I reset the watch to factory default twice but experienced all of the same issues. At some point the battery went from 94%, 27d to 93%, 34d while I was just viewing the glances. Definitely there's some software work to do there. I also want to point out in all of this, that I contacted Garmin support twice last week about the display and other bugs, and have not heard anything from them.

    So, given all these bugs and the misaligned display, I just decided to return it and look for something else. I found a Fenix 7 Pro selling for 100 EUR more than the I3 at an outlet, so I thought it might be worth checking out.