I live in Poland and I've bought Bounce 2 recently for a kid as a replacement for a chinese watch. This chinese watch worked fine, no issues with calls, had SIM card, SMSes, location. But connector died.
Since I already have my own Garmin watch and it's great I thought it will be the same experience with Bounce 2 for my son. I was wrong.
Experience is absolutely horrible. I have subscription that I bought right away and:
- connections from two of my phones (tested from both to check) to this watch almost NEVER work, they just drop with "retry" option. Some time after I called - but not always - watch will display notification that someone called. It doesn't matter if I'm outside, inside of a building, with or without WIFI. LTE coverage in my area is great, so that's not an issue. Generally fail:success ratio is around 95:5. I was able to make a call only couple of times during a week. All of the other attempts, and there were lots of them, failed miserably.
- voice and text messages have slightly better success ratio, I'd say 60:40, but often times messages just don't arrive onto the watch, even though phone app says "sent". Or they arrive after a while, sometimes hours later. Again, completely useless.
- location service failure to success ratio is around 40:60. On a positive notes - it seems quite accurate, which is a good thing, but I've bought an LTE watch and not an airtag for a reason.
- there is no option to remove all activities. "Other activities" is the option I cannot remove and my son keeps getting it opened somehow, even though I've remapped buttons.
Generally speaking, as a watch for a kid to make him safe(r), to find him or call in case of emergency or let him call - this watch is useless. It barely fulfills its main function and it's more expensive than other watches that work just fine in different conditions.
Now, I already contacted support, but what they offered wasn't really helpful. Generic tests indoor, outdoor, there is no repeatable outcome that came out during these tests.
I'm an IT professional and to me it just looks like:
- network reception is very poor, maybe due to cellular network arrangements or chipset used within the watch
- there is a suspend / sleep functionality that wakes device up waaaay too late for it to check on messages on time, etc?
- generally buggy / untested firmware?
I can no longer return the watch, as I no longer have a box for it, so I'm stuck with it and it feels like an unjust sentence.
Can Garmin do anything with these issues? maybe an urgent software update with UNTESTED connectivity options. I don't care if they are alpha at this point. I can be your tester if you don't have testers on board. I just want the watch to work as it should for the purpose advertised on product page.
While we're at it, it feels like the release of this watch was rushed. Crucial functionality is not working.
Android app version: 7.2.2 (241)
Watch firmware: 5.12 (DFU-21d910) - latest as of today
Watch shows 3 (?) bars for connection, but indicator is not too obvious to read, so it's hard to tell.
- Lucas
