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what brand should I buy next?

ziopaper
over 2 years ago

long time garmin fan here

loved the forerunner 205. Then years later bought an already old 310xt and loved it even more. Then got a 230 and it was perfect

Never I felt like complaining about the pace

I got a Fenix 6 and returned within a week because the pace was unusable. Based on reviews, the 955 was supposed to be amazing but:

- the rounding to 5 seconds in instantaneous pace is ridiculous (don't tell me to use avg pace please, it's like in the car you use average speed to decide if you are going too fast or not)

----- yes, GPS has tolerances etc etc. But I would like to see not rounding because if I accelerate a bit I would like to see a change. It's not even about absolute precision (is that the actual real pace?), it is about the watch showing a change if I slightly pick up the pace (and yes, also precision matters)

- the pace seems to have been filtered more in the recent releases - is it just the 14.15 or the combination of 14.15 and GPS FW 2.42, which only the folks in the beta have?

basically...we bought a premium running watch for several reasons. If I had known the would have filtered the pace (because that is the direction garmin wants to adopt to satisfy what they think most users want?), after returning Fenix 6 I would have looked somewhere else. If it was tested by actual runners, Fenix 6 for example should have never been sold. It is a magnificent watch that doesn't do the basic thing of allowing you to run intervals, not even those from their own garmin coach workouts (if you reply here to this saying your Fenix 6 works perfectly for you, and it probably does, but most likely you don't do intervals)

And now it seems they did this to the 955. 

We have watches that perform great at some point and then they change basic things that should have been working (since 2008 when I started buying garmin). 

Basically, I lost confidence in them

what should I buy next? Anybody out there that has both a newer, disappointing garmin and something else that works great for intervals training?

I will most likely go back to my 230, but I liked the bells and whistles of the newer watches. I am simply not looking to give up the basic training functionalities to have the cute body battery indicator

(yes this is a rant - sorry)

  • 0 over 2 years ago

    Right now I'm testing both Amazfit GTR4 and Huawei Watch GT3. Both so much cheaper and 1.43" amoled display with 14 days battery and multi GNSS dual band. Both support interval training but I don't usually use it. 

    Yes Garmin has more of a professional and customizable product. But it has to work flawlessly to justify costing 3x the price. Competitors are giving them run for customers money.

    I'm still with Garmin but slowly getting to know the other options in the market if the time comes for a change. In my case what annoys me the most are the ignored bugs and unfinished job with Kayak / Paddling activity. 

    And of course the stellar prices.

  • 0 over 2 years ago

    I'm in the same boat as all of you. What Garmin does with their software release (firmware and companion apps) is not acceptable. I'm in a similar trade and I would lose my job for such a poor quality. I would prefer far less updates but thoroughly tested. I would also like to see a less fragmented feature offerings. This will also help them in maintaining their products (less variations one has to maintain; won't happen if the features carry some licensing fees from third party vendors). 

    However, changing vendor, will only bring a different set of issues and forum interactions/complaints but on a different site. In a consumer market, with at least once a year new products introductions, the quality has to suffer. To alleviate this most vendors bring in planned obsolescence. Some make it public some don't but after a while you won't see any updates or signs of support activities for older devices and/or apps. 

    Should we ignore the poor job done by Garmin? NO. We need to pressure to deliver on their promises, after all we did paid for the watches. Should we hope and imagine others are doing a better job? NO.

  • 0 over 2 years ago in reply to 5258636

    I think the competition becomes stronger. There are many brands which improve their products consequently. Also in Garmins USP (navigation, training analysis, ...). We will see how Garmin will react to this development. In my opinion they have to focus more on proper products and software than the last years. So we will see!

  • 0 over 2 years ago in reply to Miky
    Miky said:
    With 955 I'm doing 400m, 1000m and 2000m intervals using lap pace.

    Here we are talking about builtin intervals (daily suggestion from Garmin) - this is what works out of hand badly. It's very short (only 60 sec long intervals) and it works with predefined data field. You must complete it with 30sec average pace - it is not possible.