Lack of support?

I don't' think you'll ever get Garmin to admit a flawed product. You should really expect a Garmin device to have these kind of defects when you buy it. Not a good thing, but a fact unfortunately.
I have owned numerous Garmin devices and most of them behaves this way, especially in the beginning. After perhaps a year you'll have a stable device to work with so your only choice is to either sit tight or hope for greener grass on the other side and go for another brand. In my experience the grass won't be geener...

[QUOTE=an2njo; .... In my experience the grass won't be geener...

Sadly enough in my experience only the APPLEs are ...

Try sending email to Product Support. Point them to specific threads (especially ones that are > 4 pages long) about problems, lack of support, wanting to return the products, etc. It seems like the PR/social teams are aware of these issues (since I'm sure they monitor these threads) and can at least help escalate things internally and hopefully push hard on the engineering teams to fix known high priority bugs and to better test releases. The better the Garmin products perform, the easier their job is...

My issue is that twice now, I've gone through the proper channels to report the bug (My Vivoactive 3 has never received text messages, since day one), and both times it just ended with "OK, thanks. We'll get back to you" And then...nothing. The first time I deleted the mail thread, which bit me because when I asked what the status was, they said they had no record of the first report. So this time, I saved the thread, and periodically ask for status. And every time it "We'll get back to you if we need anything"

At this point, I'm just waiting for the fix so that I can sell this thing and be done with it. I'd sell it now, but I'd feel guilty about selling a flawed product.

I refuse to accept the notion that if you buy a new product it will have major defects for months after buying it. I accept there may be some minor flaws but these would be acknowledged and fixed quite quickly.

6 months and waiting to fix Sensors and HR broadcast is excessive. And to then refuse to acknowledge the problem is infuriating.

If this is future of Garmin I’m concerned

If this is future of Garmin I’m concerned

I wouldn't be particularly concerned about Garmin, because all manufacturers of consumer electronic devices do business in the same way. The bar is set very low, and I think that we, as a society, are willing to tolerate this situation. Just look at reviews -- people just seem to care about how many whizz-bang features a product has, and how little it costs. Reliability and consistency, quality of after-sales support, speed of bug fixes -- these are just things that aren't mentioned.

I would be willing to pay more for better-quality stuff with better support, but I seem to be in a minority.

I wouldn't be particularly concerned about Garmin, because all manufacturers of consumer electronic devices do business in the same way.

I simply can't understand why you are defending Garmin when we are talking about buggy products and lacking support. The kind of bugs we see with Garmin products are in many cases making the products useless, taking weeks and months for Garmin to fix, and that kind of severity is simply not common in the business.
My two first Garmin products are the Vivoactive 3 and the Index Smart Scales, and you don't need to spend much time in this forum to find evidence of major issues and no/slow support from Garmin.

By comparison I came from 2-3 years of different Fitbit trackers, and I never experienced any major software bugs that affected the usability of the product. Sure, the products fell apart, but the support was great and I always got a replacement within days.

I really want to like their products and if they worked the way they described them I too would love the company.

However I personally think they are underspending in R&D, releasing products which are not properly tested and then refusing to admit their errors. This to me is a poor business model.

I simply can't understand why you are defending Garmin when we are talking about buggy products and lacking support.

I'm not defending Garmin -- I'm attacking Garmin along with every other manufacturer of consumer electronics goods.

I see no real evidence that Garmin's business practices are any worse than anybody else's. I just had a look at the FitBit Charge 2 forum, and I see all the same kind of complaints I see over here -- HR monitor not tracking properly, erratic battery life, questions after-sales support, etc., etc.

We can all be lucky or unlucky with the products we buy. I own a car of a model that scores quite poorly for long-term reliability, and yet my particular one has been perfectly satisfactory. On the other hand, I've bought things from manufacturers who have a decent reputation for reliability, and which have failed in a very short time. There's a huge amount of luck in this business, and I don't think anybody can draw general conclusions just from his or her personal experience.

I do get the impression, however, that the VA3 is a slightly unfortunate product. It gives the impression of being rushed onto the market even more carelessly than is usual in the electronics industry. But, again, every manufacturer seems to have occasional products like that -- just look at the short and unhappy life of Windows Vista.

To say that Garmin is no worse than everybody else hardly amounts to a defence.

Sorry LarsTheBear, I realise I was a bit fast to criticise you there.
However, I still believe the amount, and severity, of some of the bugs combined with the poor support I have experienced in my less than 6 months of owning 2 Garmin products is at least enough to say that they're not better than anyone else either.

Yes, it might be a trend in the business to release products with "beta software", however I think we have enough evidence in this forum that Garmin is in the worse end of that scale.
To put it like this: I have owned quite a lot of different consumer electronics in a huge number of categories over the years, however I have never spent anywhere close to as much time in any user forum as I have after becoming a Garmin user.
Yes, there is quite a lot of poor consumer electronics out there, the difference is that Garmin is suppose to deliver premium products and we are paying a premium price.