Two and a half year back I've purchased vivoactive 3. There's 2 years warranty in my country, so I'm basically half year after a warranty ended and I have a battery problem. I described it to czech support centre, and their answer is "Your watches cannot be repaired, but we can replace your watches for vivoactive 4 if you'll pay 3 200 Kč (130 eur ~= 130 usd) for that". Well what a generous offer, I mean those vivoactive 3 costed 3 800 Kč (150 eur). Ok, I know vivoactive 4 is more expensive, but is that it? I have had forerunner 225 before, and they died after 1,5 years basically turning into a brick due to battery issue.
The point is I know it's not "just" a battery issue. It used to work for ~6 hours during activity tracking and around 7 days without it, with backlight being set to short/30 %. Now it lasts around 2.5 days without activity tracking, but it can still lasts for around 5 hours during activity. Now that's a big difference. I understand it's not linear completely, but ~20 % drop during activity while having ~65 % drop while being "in watch mode" shows there's some problem in watches software or something.
I gotta say that the response is just brutal - saying you "throw your watches into a bin and purchase a new ones" for what? I mean not like that those money means I won't be able to eat or whatever, but I didn't really expected watches to last "just" for two years, and it's second time I'm having "same problem" with Garmin watches. What's worse, how do I know I won't be in a same position in a year or two? I mean it's not like people aren't complaining about "battery problem" "battery drain" etc.
I am fairly dissapointed with this. I even managed to get used to do factory reset pretty much after every run as it looked before there's a problem with gps still working after activities etc.
