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Just about had it with the VA3

Former Member over 6 years ago

For the past several months the VA3 has been working out well. Asides from the occasional battery drains, I really cannot complain about the watch.

However, tonight I ran across a watch face that I liked and installed it. After tinkering with it for a short while, I decided it wasn't that great and uninstalled it.
Once I did, the watch froze up. I held the power button down until the VA3 powered down and when I powered it back up all of my daily stats were reset to zero.
My stats were saved on Garmin Connect but anything earned since the reset does not sync/add to those totals.

This experience reminded me of having this issue months ago when I was trying out watch faces to find one I liked. Every time I uninstalled a watch face, the VA3 froze and I lost all my stats.
It is frustrating that Garmin has not addressed this issue in the past several updates that landed and rekindles my suspicion that Garmin isn't very interested in supporting their software.
They make some good watches but still have a lot of work to do so what's under the hood matches the quality of the watch itself.

I hate giving up the years of data I have collected in the Garmin ecosystem, but if uninstalling a watch face creates a catastrophic failure maybe it's time to move on.

0 peterdedecker over 6 years ago

Do you change the watch face first to another one? (You cant uninstall the active watch face when you use the mobile app)

if you have a computer you can use garmin express which allows easier management of 3rd party content.

0 Former Member over 6 years ago

Yep. Each time this has happened the watch face I deleted was not the active watch face.
At first, I thought it might be a glitch in the coding by the watch face developer, but it has happened across the board regardless of who developed the watch face.

It's just frustrating to see things never really improving with Garmin software.
From battery issues to not measuring performance accurately to issues that crash the watch, it seems as if they cannot get things right.

I like the watch appearance of the VA3 and with the Garmin smart scale I have, moving to Fitbit would be costly. Plus I'm not sure I'd like a square watch.

0 Former Member over 6 years ago

It is frustrating that Garmin has not addressed this issue in the past several updates that landed and rekindles my suspicion that Garmin isn't very interested in supporting their software.

It may be that there isn't an issue for Garmin to address with an update. This is the first time I heard of this problem with the VA3. I may be mistaken, but it appears you're the first to post about this. Anyway, you may have a corrupt file on your watch that's causing the problem and a software update won't fix it. I had a similar issue with my 235 a couple of years back. I was fortunate enough to have a great support tech on the phone who walked me through deleting the bad file. I'd try the same, or even a factory reset, but that's a pain in the ass.

0 pgrey over 6 years ago

Yeah, the data/weekly data "accidental" reset is super annoying, I'm really careful to avoid it, as much as is practical.
I don't understand why it's even an issue, given that everything is "cloud sync based", why they don't propagate the days'/weeks' data back down to the watch, say after a reset.

FB is great like this, but their HR sensor has gotten steadily worse (for me, across several replacements/devices), to the point where my Ionic HR was basically a joke. My old Charge worked pretty well in this regard, and my Charge2 worked okay (until the battery died completely, on two units, after just a few months).
I was getting 50-60 BPM deltas, say if I recorded an activity, it was off by THAT much (so instead of a 155 average for a 2.5hr ride, I might have 95, as if I were hardly even exercising).
If you decide to go to FB (I think some people with lighter skin tone have better luck), I'd strongly suggest purchasing from a site that has a no-questions-asked return policy, for at least 30 days, ideally 2-3 months though.

My VA3 isn't "perfect" when I'm out riding or walking, particularly if it's cold, but if I make sure it's pretty well covered/insulated at those times, I get a pretty close representation of my actual HR (compared to both a chest and bicep strap), and in the summer it's often just a few beats different, say on a 3 hour fast ride.

IMHO, there's no "awesome" fitness watch in the market, currently. The new Polar units are probably the closest thing, but they fall short in some other areas, such as sleep and everyday "auto recorded activities", or they did, the last time I looked at reviews.

0 LBarter over 6 years ago

I had the same issue with a couple of watch faces causing a re-boot but, II only lost the data on my phone for about an hour a subsequent synch repopulated the watch's daily record. I am of the mind that it is the watch face that had a coding issue.

On another note I have recently tried the new Samsung Galaxy watch as a possible change from Garmin. After 2 weeks I returned the Galaxy. Beautiful screen a few more apps, awful battery, Samsung Health is a joke. The VA 3 with its great sport apps; I workout in the gym, hike, snowshoe and the added bonus of great golf capacity have brought me back from the all shiny and new but flawed Galaxy.

0 WillNorthYork over 6 years ago

I think it's a known issue that, sometimes, uninstalling a watchface either fails or causes the watch (usually VA3) to freeze. Usually it seems to happen with the current watchface.

https://forums.garmin.com/forum/developers/connect-iq/1437670-uninstall-a-watch-face

FWIW:

This is something we know about and are hoping to fix soon.