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Anyone had success with a replacement unit from Garmin?

Former Member over 8 years ago

I've sent my 820 off today, as instructed by Garmin, for them to replace it under warranty due to the repeated random / unreliable behaviour when trying to follow a route / course.

I really don't see how this can be anything other than a software problem, particularly as others are suffering the same problem.

It is possible, I guess, that there was a common hardware problem with early units and that it will be solved in the replacement unit. But I'm not confident.

Can anyone report back that they've had a replacement that has solved their problems?

0 Former Member over 8 years ago

It's just Garmin's way of playing for time while their software engineers cure some bugs and create new ones. :p
I've had a replacement and it was no different, but firmware 5.10 cure most of the problems that annoyed me.

0 looigi over 8 years ago

It seems to me that Garmin's customer support's job is to mollify complainers to get them to go away, not provide solutions. They do this by having the customer reboot, reset, change setting, and keep experimenting and reporting back until they wear that customer out, and if that fails, they send them a replacement unit, which works exactly the same. Evidently, all this is cheaper and impacts the bottom line less than doing proper engineering and testing in the first place. Perhaps they're trying to extract the maximum from the market before cell phones take over. My cell phone works better in all regards, GPS tracking, recording Ant+ and blue tooth sensors, displaying maps and information, sensing baro elevation, ambient temperature, magnetic heading, accelerations and rotations, navigation, and everything else. The only drawback is size and battery life, and perhaps weather resistance.

It might seem I'm being cynical, but I'm not. It's the only explanation I can come up with the explains how bad these product are.

0 Former Member over 8 years ago

No, you're not being cynical, I think you're pretty much spot on.

Users are different, though:

Some people, like myself, expect to have a nice, easy-to-use experience with the products they buy. They don't like having to follow forums every day, just to learn how to do work-arounds or simply how to use the darn thing.

Others seem to like this, to basically live on the forums, it's supposed to be a little hard to use the product, you have to have a certain skill, you get part of a kind of elite that can tell others that their product is fine, and there's probably a user-error causing the problems. A big plus is if you have to find and download 3rd party tools to solve problems, and if this involves you having to do some coding, you're in heaven.
This kind of user will also defend the product and the company producing it, no matter what.