There are already lots of threads on this topic, just to link the ones I already replied to:
- https://forums.garmin.com/sports-fitness/healthandwellness/f/vivomove-luxe-style/257662/vibrations-waking-up-the-watch-after-update-to-3-90
- https://forums.garmin.com/sports-fitness/healthandwellness/f/vivomove-luxe-style/258030/watch-wakes-up-after-every-shake-or-vibration
- https://forums.garmin.com/sports-fitness/healthandwellness/f/vivomove-luxe-style/258850/screen-always-on-while-strength-training
- https://forums.garmin.com/sports-fitness/healthandwellness/f/vivomove-luxe-style/257563/gesture-turned-off-but-screen-waking-up-when-shaking-wrist-after-3-90-vivomove-luxe
There is also https://forums.garmin.com/sports-fitness/healthandwellness/f/vivomove-luxe-style/259189/reasons-to-think-10-times-before-spend-a-lot-of-money-in-a-garmin-vivomove-style-my-experience from an obviously unsatisfied customer. Let alone all the other threads.
I'm a vivomove Luxe user from the first minute (Oct 19) after owning a vivomove HR. The HR was not perfect, but it worked quite well. I also own an Edge 530 (after an Edge 520) and the Index Smart Scale. By (sad) experience I know that Garmin software quality sucks on product release and often takes loooong time to get better. It's kind of an up and down, some firmware updates are ok, others are a step backwards. Best examples are the Edge 520 firmwares after 12.5 (IIRC) that magically drained the battery much more (battery runtime about 50% of prev firmwares). There were no real improvements on this, customers were told that this is due to battery wear. (Full) firmware downgrade impossible - device virtually useless and can't be sold anymore. I lumped it, because the Edge 520 enabled me to have a lot of fun and its firmware worked more or less ok. Good quality is something else anyway.
The vivomove Luxe firmware on the other hand never reached this quality. This forum gives plenty of examples of what I mean. Just to name a few of them:
- Depending on the firmware version, the watch hands realigned themselves sometimes multiple times per week. I did not have this problem with 3.90 yet, but it sucked to have it suddenly after firmware upgrades.
- Gestures / reactions are sometimes impossible slow when doing strength training. You can never tell whether it registered your pause/continue tap or not. Correcting the repeat count is almost impossible. There were better firmwares, but none of them was really good. 3.90 is one of the worse. It bugs me everytime I do strength training.
- Sometimes, the watch won't react at all and you have to restart it by attaching it to the charging cable. Happens every now and then especially before starting an activity.
- Inaccurate heart sensor: You have to start an activity so that it detects the higher heart beat after about 10mins. Otherwise, it won't (Edge 530: 180bpm, vivomove 140bpm e. g.). Fine, it's a sports watch, why wouldn't you start an activity? Because when I do cycling, I don't have to - there's the Edge 530. Unfortunately, for whatever reason, the Edge does neither increase the intensity minutes nor does it record the heart beat for the day overview. So I have to start it on both devices to get more or less accurate results. Was never a problem for the vivomove HR, btw. (it recorded the right heartbeat w/o activity).
- When doing swimming, the watch freezes in about 4/10 cases when it loses connection to the mobile phone. Of course all activity data lost. Workaround is to disable bluetooth before doing the exercise. Don't know if it works now because due to Covid, swimming pools are closed.
- When doing longer exercises (e. g. long walks of multiple hours), in about 3/10 cases the watch stops the activity after some time losing all already recorded data. Worked ok in earlier releases (did happen every now and then), but in 3.90 it happens quite often - and it sucks.
- And then there's the new problem of the above given threads which render the watch more or less useless for me.
I really love the watch's design, hardware and its functionality. And I really tried to like it even though it's quite unreliable and the other above given problems. But the latest problems annoy me in a way, that I'm totally fed up. It's 2021 and I expect expensive products to just work without having to think of this and that workaround to keep it more or less running. I'd like just to have a watch that reliably shows the time and records my activities because this was the reason why I bought it. As of now, it only decorates my left wrist. I'm really disappointed and don't want to keep struggling with it.