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For the last 6 months I regret buying the FR965

Gogi
14 days ago

I had a Huawei watch GT2 for 3 years and it was great. It even had a microphone and speaker for hands-free calling, which came in very handy during long hikes in the hills and mountains. the accuracy of the sensors was around 85%, the GPS was solid, I paid €110 for it.

Because a friend had an FR935 watch and it was preaty the same as the GT2 and since Garmin was considered a manufacturer of watches whose sensors are considered the most accurate, I decided last January (2024) to buy an FR965 for €600. Until July, August 2024 I was very happy with the watch, accuracy of heart rate measurements, altimeter, sleep and nap detection, GPS... everything was really good and fairly accurate measurements. Then the big updates started, new functionalities were added and with each update new problems... heart rate accuracy, sleep and nap detection, altimeter accuracy, crashes.. and many other problems... why ? a watch that costs €600 and a watch manufacturer like Garmin should not be able to afford something like that. To be honest, I now regret not waiting a little longer and buying the Suunto Race S for almost half the price of the FR965.

How can I recommend a Garmin watch to anyone after all this?

@Garmin-Sierra please stop adding new functionality and focus on the stability of the watch and the accuracy of all the sensors.

  • 0 11 days ago in reply to Narziss

    Are you using windows on your desktop? I don't (for 30 years) and I am not used to this every day restart thing. I wouldn't accept it as a solution for something free, but certainly not for something I paid $600 for.

  • 0 10 days ago

    Software quality has tanked since I bought my 965 in 2023. 

    Saturday my 965 frozen during a race when trying to resume music play and reconnect to my headphones. It’s probably an edge case, but the feature is there and I expected it to work. 

    Due to poor quality I lost around .3 distance, some amount of time, and had to force reboot my watch during a freakin race. 

    Do better Garmin!

  • 0 10 days ago

    Unfortunately Garmin have it all wrong and they will eventually find out the hard way.

    Buying the latest device essentially means becoming a beta tester until they eventually achieve acceptable stability. By the time that happens the next model has been released and so it repeats.

    Who adopts a business model like this and expects to retain the types of customers they are trying to appeal to?

  • 0 10 days ago

    Does anyone have any experience of Coros and/or Polar? I'm looking for one with good maps, I love the rendering on them both and really don't see much difference between them compared to Garmin, except perhaps routable maps?

  • 0 10 days ago in reply to B1nny

    Unfortunately this is not true any more in the past year or so. fr965 has more and more bugs.

  • 0 1 day ago

    I must admit I'm slowly heading that way, never have I come across so many bugs and errors in software updates. Garmin seem to have a policy of rolling updates out to users, so they can report the bugs, rather than them doing thorough testing. If things don't improve I'll be looking for a company that can do the software updates properly.

  • 0 23 hours ago in reply to Johnthecyclist

    The PM's should be scouring this and the beta forums and collecting data, as these are probably the more technical users who can help them resolve issues ahead of time. Haven't seen any signs that they are incorporating this data, hope I'm wrong. I'm happy enough with my 165, glad I didn't get the 265 or 965 as for the money they wouldn't be worth it with the introduction of regressions and no real improvements to sleep or WHR compared to competitors, Garmin should be leading this as they are with GPS

  • 0 19 hours ago

    So I want to report back and add credit where credit is due. I have had issues with the race calendar notifying me of my race in morning report on the wrong day. 
    I reported this months ago. 

    Fast forward.. today I received an email that the most recent firmware, 22.20 or whatever version, fixes this issue. I haven’t been able to verify this, but I am inclined to believe them. 

    Certainly there are still plenty of things to be fixed, but it’s nice when a bug that you’ve been experiencing is fixed. 

  • 0 19 hours ago in reply to Johnthecyclist

    You're too optimistic. There are companies that push new features to production AND fix bugs that users report. Garmin doesn't have the latter. It seems the goal is not quality but quantity. Once a feature has been listed in the changelings... that's it. Nobody seems to care any more after that.

  • 0 17 hours ago in reply to flocsy🤠

    In my day job I run a team of software engineers, and that’s what we do. Push new features and fixes. Sometimes just fixes.