how to get rid of the pause icon when at pause (or traffic light)

Is there a reason you have auto-pause enabled?  It was useful on older units with much shorter battery life, but I have yet to be in a situation that I needed to extend the battery life of my 1040 by using auto-pause.

I disabled auto-pause on mine.  The setting is buried in your profiles menu under Timer if you don't know where it is.

It has nothing to do with battery life. If you don‘t auto-pause the ride timer is still running which nullifies any time based rider stats: e.g. ride-time; avg speed; max time in Connect etc.. This is why the option is there and makes a lot of sense to switch it on.

This screen behaviour is annoying especially when you have to stop to check the map. 

I have a Karoo 2 (the 1040 will be going back once I get to my home base), this has a yellow strip along the top to show it‘s paused and is a perfect solution. But like the multitude of other bugs and poor features, Garmin do not seem to care what it‘s user base requires from a very expensive device.

You can see moving average speed and moving time In Garmin Connect for rides so auto pause being off doesn't prevent seeing that data after rides.  It does affect those numbers during a ride.

Fascinating enough, this is working perfectly well on my good old 1030 with the pause icon disappearing within a split second. So at some point, someone in the development team came up with the idea to make it even better and have a pause icon blocking the screen altogether. Why oh why.

Correct! With 1030 it worked perfectly.
Garmin prooves that when developping new gear, not everything needs to be changed.
Don't they learn from the past?

Anyone who has an idea how to contact Garmin or to ask for an update?

This is really a pain in the ass..

ronaldbr said:

Anyone who has an idea how to contact Garmin

...

Wongataa said:

Go to Garmin Support.  Put in the device you are talking about in the box and go go to the support pages of that device.  At the bottom of the page is a contact us section.  Pick the appropriate contact option and give the details to Garmin about the issue.

Also the Edge Explore 2 suffers the same Pause icon flaw. People have contacted Garmin many times about this issue, but no reaction at all and no new firmware. Come on Garmin, you can do better in listening to your customers!

Today, for the Edge Explore 2, contact with Garmin Support for this issue did answer them that it has been added to an open case as a feature request:
"This is currently by design. I have added you to a case we have open as a feature request."

So, also for the 1040 users... if the persistent huge Pause icon and the dimmed screen when at pause bothers you, please contact Garmin directly. You can email the issue via the Support page @ support.garmin.com.

The Garmin support page is like everything else Garmin. It's broken. I'm on a Mac, and with both Safari and Chrome, clicking the "Contact US For More Help" link does nothing. Maybe that's by design.

I’ve found that using on line chat facility is the best way of initially reaching support. I’m not in the US and it doesn’t work on my local site, so I need to use the US support web page.