I've been a Garmin user for 14 years and I wish someone would take the GPS, heart rate, and IMU sensors out of my Fenix and put it in an open-source product.
But GPS is really hard to get right, especially if you want weeks of battery life.
Garmin have been a decent company (in the ethical/moral sense) to be a customer of for many years, but I think they're slowly losing that reputation. Yes, my 2018 hardware still does everything it did in 2018, no, I don't pay for or currently have a need for Connect+, but they're running out of hardware optimization opportunities to push people to new devices, and appear to be seeking alternative ways to maintain growth.
Watches are now roughly in the same spot as phones - form factory is largely complete and each new version is a small iteration over previous generation, with changes that most people don’t care about.
That being said - feature I LOVE added recently-ish that made really happy I’ve upgraded my many years old garmin was a flashlight (proper one, not screen brightness). It seemed like a gimmick but it’s now one of most used features on my watch - walking dog at night, looking for kids toys under the bed, fixing things around the house, looking for things in the bag, etc.
I use the white screen backlight "flashlight" on my Fenix 6 every day for getting out of the bedroom without waking my wife in the morning. It's good enough to do that, not nearly bright enough to be useful for taking the dog out at night or fixing stuff around the house, for those tasks I'd use the screen backlight to search for my headlamp in my backpack and then use that!
The only change I'd want from the new watches would be the emergency satellite messenger that the new Fenix 8 Pros have. The feature isn't as good as my dedicated InReach Mini 2, but like the flashlight it would be always on my wrist. However, the new watches are $1300 luxury items now, that's not the price of a fitness watch: it feels like they're no longer marketing to my tax bracket.
I've been a Garmin user for 14 years and I wish someone would take the GPS, heart rate, and IMU sensors out of my Fenix and put it in an open-source product.
But GPS is really hard to get right, especially if you want weeks of battery life.
Garmin have been a decent company (in the ethical/moral sense) to be a customer of for many years, but I think they're slowly losing that reputation. Yes, my 2018 hardware still does everything it did in 2018, no, I don't pay for or currently have a need for Connect+, but they're running out of hardware optimization opportunities to push people to new devices, and appear to be seeking alternative ways to maintain growth.
Watches are now roughly in the same spot as phones - form factory is largely complete and each new version is a small iteration over previous generation, with changes that most people don’t care about.
That being said - feature I LOVE added recently-ish that made really happy I’ve upgraded my many years old garmin was a flashlight (proper one, not screen brightness). It seemed like a gimmick but it’s now one of most used features on my watch - walking dog at night, looking for kids toys under the bed, fixing things around the house, looking for things in the bag, etc.
I use the white screen backlight "flashlight" on my Fenix 6 every day for getting out of the bedroom without waking my wife in the morning. It's good enough to do that, not nearly bright enough to be useful for taking the dog out at night or fixing stuff around the house, for those tasks I'd use the screen backlight to search for my headlamp in my backpack and then use that!
The only change I'd want from the new watches would be the emergency satellite messenger that the new Fenix 8 Pros have. The feature isn't as good as my dedicated InReach Mini 2, but like the flashlight it would be always on my wrist. However, the new watches are $1300 luxury items now, that's not the price of a fitness watch: it feels like they're no longer marketing to my tax bracket.
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Fully agree, the led flashlight is ridicously useful.