We asked, and you answered. During last week’s historic Garmin outage in which thousands of watches worldwide suddenly crashed, over 500 of you emailed in order to tell us all about it. Some of you helped us add new devices to our list of the best Garmin watches that were affected by the issue, while others offered possible fixes.
Quite a few of you expressed your rage that you couldn’t use the GPS tools you spent a lot of cash on, and your desire to switch to another competitor smartwatch brand. One reader said via email: “The good news is I’ve just realised my FR265 is within the return period so it’s going back. Going to try Suunto Race S“.
Another said: “In four years with a Samsung watch, something like this has never happened to me”. Someone else said it all in four words: “Going back to Apple“.
Garmin is undoubtedly one of the most popular fitness watch makers out there, but Coros, Suunto, Polar and more also offer excellent, very competitive devices that frequently wind up on our best running watch list, to say nothing of mainline smartwatches like the best Apple Watches or best Samsung watches.
If a historic outage like last week’s event happened again, during the summer, when more endurance events and races are scheduled, it could be disastrous. Imagine every Garmin-wearing runner suddenly losing access to their device on the eve of the Boston Marathon, for example!
So, curious as to how far the anti-Garmin sentiment had spread, we asked our readers to reply in the comments and polled the users on our Whatsapp channel (which you can follow here): will you continue to use your Garmin watch, or switch to a competitor device?
Out of the 356 people who voted at the time of writing, 246 readers voted that they won’t be switching, and they do still trust Garmin to do a good job maintaining their devices.
In our comments section, Moh wrote: “Will I stop using my Garmin devices because of this? No. It was a shit-show, and seems to indicate very sloppy programming in their data read handling, but this is software and software breaks; Garmin aren’t the first or only ones to screw up, and probably won’t be the last.
I hope that, if nothing else, this will lead to them looking at their code handling similar situations, which should result in a more robust ecosystem (although I won’t hold my breath…).”
Moh’s got a point. Even if you switched, there’s no guarantee a similar problem couldn’t happen to anyone else, like Coros or Polar. No-one is infallible when it comes to software, and it’s likely Garmin is tightening things up behind the scenes to ensure this doesn’t happen again.
However, around one-third of respondents voted “yes, I’m switching” suggesting an undercurrent of negativity and dissatisfaction around the smartwatch brand. Garmin is probably big enough to weather the storm, and its devices have historically been synonymous with very high quality.
Still planning to switch, or been put off buying your first Garmin? Let us know in the comments below.
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matt.evans@futurenet.com (Matt Evans)
