Hello,
I'd like to talk about my experience with Garmin within the last 1-2 years. Apologies for long post but I am fed up with them.
in 2020, I bought a 245 Music from the US (i am based in UAE) and it worked fine for 2 years. then suddenly a big dot appeared on the watch-face and there were other abnormalities like inaccurate heart-rate or it was stuck on a fixed HR value for long time.
Long story short, they said I could get a replacement if I pay sound $200 because warranty period had passed already.
I did not understand why the watch was malfunctioning in the first place but what to do, I had to pay extra money to get a new one.
Then I thought it was an opportunity to upgrade so I paid even more to get an 255 music (September 2022).
I started facing the issue in the summary in early days but I assumed that it was a firmware issue so it would go away.
but it kept on and on.
I reached out to the local team (https://amitintl.com/garmin/ ), they asked me a lot of simple basic questions.
Clearly issue has not been resolved for a month and they said I should talk to the global support.
2-3 months with global support, they basically enabled some advanced logging mechanism to understand the root cause of the problem and in the meantime my exercises were cut in the middle randomly. imagine your HR is in zone 5, you still have half an hour to go and everything goes off.
I understand that they were trying to figure out what the issue was but I had 4 months with terrible user experience.
after a while I stated feeling like I was part of their quality assurance team.
my wife used to have a fitbit and her watch was immediately replaced when we had an issue 2 years ago. I don't have to mention the apple user experience for comparison.
after months, they agreed to replace the device but I have to go back to the local team.
I did and no response for 2 weeks.
the only and not useful response I got from them came after my 3rd follow up in which I was looking for an escalation method to the global team.
and my issue is not resolved yet.
if you are looking for a sports watch in UAE regardless of the quality of their product (when it is working)
STAY AWAY FROM GARMIN.
