Top critical review
1.0 out of 5 starsOverpriced, under performed and flawed!
Reviewed in the United States on July 15, 2020
I've delayed writing my review of this product until I've actually used it for a long enough time and used a lot of the features of it. A little background, this was my 4th Garmin running watch, this time I was looking for a watch that had a few more features, including using it as a daily watch and health tracker. I received my watch just before our family trip to the PNW for nearly 2-weeks in the summer of 2019. I used the watch for hikes, days that I went on a run, etc. The watch was a huge improvement over my 910XT because of these features, plus I could upload workouts via bluetooth. I typically run 2,000 miles a year, so with the watch I'd assume there are around that many miles logged, I ran 2 marathons with it, one in the Fall of 2019 and another on March 1, 2020. The watch was great. But over the past month or so, I've started to notice the battery life wasn't like it was originally, I had to charge it about every 5-6 days instead of my 7-10 days, I figured no big deal maybe I was using the battery up more than normal. Then about a month ago I actually wore my watch while swimming with my family a few times, and have continued. That's when the watch performance really started to decline. My watch now takes 3-5+ minutes to locate the satellite, and I'm from my house that I run from pretty much everyday. That's very annoying because that was a feature I was upgrading too. Also after my runs my watch won't automatically reconnect to my phone (iphone) I have to go into my phone's setting and reconnect pretty much 75%+ of the time, again this was a feature I was "upgrading" too. The last thing that I know about is the GPS tracking, my pace is all over the place, I'm a steady pace runner, I can go run a steady-state run and once I get into my groove I typically only vary by 0-4 seconds a mile for miles at a time without looking at my watch. When I look at my maps, the tracker is all over the place, it's way off, it loses signal and then picks back up, it's reversed direction and then reversed again. To be honest it's been really frustrating, especially since you are buying pretty much the top of the line watch they have, so I'm expecting a high quality product. I've contacted Garmin multiple times and we've tried to fix it by deleting files from the watch, changing settings, doing master resets, but all of these problems still exist. I've had a few discussions with some of the people I run with and 3 of the 4 others that have the Fenix 5 have all experienced the same issues, one guy bought his at REI and was able to exchange it for the Fenix 6, one of the other ones got a replacement from Garmin after only owning it for 3 months and the other one had just started experiencing some of these issues so has not done too much to try to fix the issue other than to do a soft reset. I will say that the watch is great when it's functioning and the Sapphire glass was well worth the upgrade because it's still perfect, the bezel around the glass is a little scratched up, but that's expected because I wear my watch all the time, unless it's charging. After multiple contacts with Garmin and because I'm just barely within the 1-yr warranty they will be exchanging it for a refurbished unit, I'm not super excited about that because I'm not getting a new watch, and it most likely will start doing the same thing again in the near future. I asked about exchanging it for a different model they said no, and my "new" watch would come with a 90-day warranty. I've always been a big fan of Garmin, but to be honest after this experience both with the watch and the customer service starting to slip, my next watch will not be a Garmin, unless my replacement ends up lasting me 3-5 years like my previous Garmin's. So based on my most recent experience with Garmin I can no longer recommend their product because the performance isn't like it use to be and the customer service has also declined where now they just want to close the case rather than satisfy the customer.
