I'm still having a torrid time with my 830's connection to my phone. LiveTrack managed to keep reporting for a whopping 3 minutes after the start of the ride, so those watching (and keeping an eye on myself and my son) had no realtime information from the device. But this time...
...I actually crashed :-( Nothing serious, but a bit of gravel rash and a slightly bruised ego. And my 830? Well, it detected the crash (yey!) and then informed me that as it had (once again) lost the connection to the phone (boo!), it could do nothing more than suggest that I call my wife to let her know. Seriously?
One of the key features that I wanted from my old 1000 was the LiveTrack feature so my wife would know where myself and my son were when riding and while that was horridly unreliable for the early months of its use, it has been pretty stable now for some time. A key reason for upgrading to the 830 was to include the additional connected features, such as crash reporting which my wife thought an excellent idea and would really put her mind at ease. And what have Garmin managed to do? Implement yet another unreliable bluetooth implementation that looks like it will take months to fix. Congratulations, you've managed to make a brand new device that works less well than my son's 6 year old Edge 510.
And what do support have to say? "You should probably factory reset the device". A device that is two weeks old. I'll only do that if they tell me, exactly, what will be fixed by doing it, and why it won't reoccur when I do. If they can't answer that, then I'm afraid they need to try a bit harder. I want to like the device, and the battery life has been excellent, but I think the chances of the 830 being sent back as "not fit for purpose" is becoming increasingly high now.
Rant over. I'll call support on Monday.