Garmin Bounce - Terrible product

I've been using Garmin products for over a decade - since I first had a garmin 310XT - and I'm locked into the garmin ecosystem.

So it was natural that when I wanted something to safely track my child's whereabouts and allow them to record their own activities, that I should trust the bounce brand. BUT -

The product is unsuitable. Battery life on my garmin 955 is around a week with pretty much daily activities. Battery life on the bounce is a day. Sure technically there is some charge left at the end, but it's dead by the middle of the next day if you don't charge it.

Worse is that it is not suitable for safety tracking. The number of times that it has been unable to locate my child. and currently has a system outage. What is the use of a tracker that cannot track. Garmin will argue that it's LTE issues, however, this should not have been released if it cannot be reliable.

Plus we had to send one back because it broke (after 18 months of use). Garmin customer support had us chasing around between USA, UK and our home country. Why? because the help feature on the website is not geo-fenced/doesn't direct you to the correct customer service dept. And although the replacement was quick and efficent, and the person at the end of the line was unfailingly helpful and professional, it was still a rigmorole to get the issue reported.

So we have a product that is not robust, has a poor battery life, and is inconsistent at performing it's safety function. What is it for then?

0 2358526 1 month ago

We live in Montreal, Qc, Canada, and we have two Bounce watches. They are mostly an unpleasant day-to-day experience. Reliability is not a constant.

For context, we have ensured the firmware on the watches are current, we reboot them regularly, and the app on our up-to-date iOS devices is current.

The app itself is.. Mickey Mouse. The latency is brutal. Messages don't arrive to the desired destination sometimes. Location tracking is so slow, and sometimes just doesn't refresh.

We're underwhelmed. Which is a shame because I very much like Garmin's suite of products for marine and running (back country).

So, I'm with you. I'm disappointed. It feels like Garmin threw their scraps into the Bounce solution.

0 Greg 1 month ago

The LTE is spotty in my area, thankfully it dos work great at my kids school but I do wish there were some sort of coverage map so I would know if the watch is glitchy or it’s because we are in a poor signal area.

I will say that the latest update did address my biggest issue which was permission levels for caregivers. We wanted our kid to be able to text their grandparents and aunts/uncles however that meant that location was exposed to anyone they communicated with. Most recent update allows for communication only without location so now only my spouse and I can see our child’s location but they can still communicate with contacts