(I’m trying to adjust my shopping habits for quality, long-lasting goods from reputable brands. This isn’t some hailcorporate thing)
(I’m trying to adjust my shopping habits for quality, long-lasting goods from reputable brands. This isn’t some hailcorporate thing)
Garmin. They have been churning out better and better stuff over the years. Its pricey, indeed, but both hardware and software quality is top.
Been using the Fenix 7 Sapphire Solar watch, which has amazing battery life, amazing sensors, top hardware quality overall and software is perfect for the job. Screen too is amazing (MIPS, not Amoled…).
Also using bike computer and radar (Edge+Varia), where battery life could be better, but easy to remediate.
There are competitors, but at the same price point I wouldn’t ever give up in Garmin for them.
I goddamn hate their avionics tho.
Aside from their love of rotary knobs garmin is mostly fine. Their GA autopilots are amazing. If only everyone used Collins I would be very happy.
Yeah, it seems like they finally invested in firmware and software programmers. WAY fewer issues than back in the day, still amazing hardware quality.
I have a Garmin Edge 840 bike computer and I do like it (more than the Wahoo ELMNT Bolt v2 I had before), but man some of the design decisions are just baffling to me.
Like why can’t I have tones for my notifications (for refuelling), without also having them for navigation? And why do notifications close themselves after 5 seconds? I always miss them because I either have the tones silenced and happen to be looking where I’m going instead of my head unit when they pop up, or I have the tones on I miss them because the navigation tones are so obnoxious I just learn to ignore all the sounds.
And why can’t I disable the virtual partner, and why the hell is the arrow on the map for the virtual partner bigger than the one that represents the actual rider?
/rant
I have disabled the virtual partner on my 520, so you should be able to do the same as well.
As tones, you can do some tweaking, and I read somewhere that the sound is a file that you can replace by connecting the unit via USB to PC…
Garmin entire filesystem tree is accessible from PC via USB (mtp)…
The 840 uses different firmware to the 520 and you can’t disable the VP at all. You can however access the file system as you described, so my workaround was to edit the XML files for the map themes and make the arrow for the virtual partner 100% transparent. The VP is still running of course, but that does fix most of my gripes with it.
I’ll have to check if I can do something similar for the sounds, but I’m not sure it will be possible since it’s just a beeper and I don’t imagine there are ordinary sound files that can be edited.