How much better is it now?

I hate Garmin with a passion because their watches are effectively region-locked by language support, an insanely consumer-hostile move in this day. I was unable to use any features related to text or whatsapp messages because the watch shockingly could not decode messages in my native language.

Their software was also so flaky that I was woken up by a faulty vibration alert in the middle of the night multiple times during the few months I wore the Garmin Instinct Solar, and at least twice I was unable to fall back to sleep. That is, the watch was supposed to be in silent or DND mode, but the watch probably crashed or reset in the middle of the night, losing the silent or DND state, allowing an alert to go through. The sleep tracking was also very inaccurate, and sleep tracking is the single most valuable metric for me.

To this day I fantasize posting a video where I smash my Garmin watch to pieces alerting other people how bad it is. Still, the hardware was near perfect and it's hard to hate the watch itself. But because of the software issues, it was no better than a dumb watch to me. I hate Garmin the company.

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nradov 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

Garmin devices have historically had two regions for languages: Asia and everywhere else. I suspect this is due to some legacy limitations in their proprietary OS around Unicode support. Years ago, it was very difficult to implement full support for all languages on a single device with very limited hardware and battery power.

	▲	dchftcs 4 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Historically, in order to get support for one of the Asian languages, you typically had to buy the watch in the exact right country, not anywhere else.
	▲	nottorp 3 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		So how bad is it if you're "just" eastern european? I.e. latin alphabet but extra squigglies and ofc not an en_US locale.

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ashirviskas 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Same sentiment here. I constantly get 90+ scores when I wake up feeling like shit.

A 20€ chinese smart band combined with Sleep as Android provided much more accurate sleep tracking than a 800€ Garmin.

The only 2 garmin specific features I use are (compared to what I had before):

1. LED flashlight, love always having a pretty good light on my wrist (I'm talking about the actual flashlight some Garmins have, not the "use display as a flashlight" feature) 2. GPS that does not drain phone battery 3. Looks

Everything else for me is worse than a cheap chinese smart band.

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xarope 3 days ago | parent [-]

are you talking about the titan pg or equivalent? I've seen reviews so far saying GPS and HRM are not that accurate?

	▲	ashirviskas 14 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> are you talking about the titan pg or equivalent? No, first time I'm hearing about it, I was talking about garmin vs Xiaomi Mi bands