My experience with updates is not very good. More often than not things that functioned before do not after the update. I want to suggest that updates are rolled out differently. Examples of these experiences: with the VA HR, after one update no more messages were displayed, after another battery life was reduced by 50%; the same with the VA3, after an update battery life seriously deteriorated, altitude measurements went wacko, and since the latest update a few days ago, my phone and watch now disconnect when I'm further than 3 m away, which did not use to be a problem before.
So, this begs the question: what does Garmin do for beta testing? Whatever it is, it is not effective!. May I suggest the following: i) before an update, you inform by e-mail what the update intends to do; ii) you give people a choice to accept or delay the update. Personally I'd like to see a few months of real time experience by other users before installing an update, certainly after the mediocre update performance highlighted above.
In general the equipment is good, as long and if it functions as designed. The updates in my experience more often than not destroy the original performance, and that should not be the case.
