ATJ
Contributor
I haven't seen any, save an early connection issue. What are you experiencing?
These are just the issues that I have personally experienced and are unlikely to be the only ones. Some of them are genuine bugs others may be “working as designed” but the design is poor.
Deco handling. The handling of deco is not great. If you exceed NDL the safety stop is cancelled. I have my safety stop set to 5 minutes. If I exceed my NDL by one minute I’m “allowed” to surface more quickly than if my NDL was not exceeded! Even if you cancel any deco commitment before reaching 5 metres there’s no safety stop. Garmin actually fixed the last part in 4.00 but then broke it again in 6.00 (which in itself is a cardinal sin).
When you exceed NDL the NDL display is replaced by TTS (time to surface). I’m trying to remember if the watch actually displays the deco commitment at all. I have a feeling it doesn’t other than telling you to stay under 3m. I rarely go into deco so I can’t remember for sure. Basically, if you ever plan deco, don’t have the Mk1 as your only dive computer.
Dive start. The dive starts as soon as you descend below 1.2m but it needs more logic. The other day my buddy and I jumped in and she dropped a fin. I ducked dived to grab it for her. I didn’t go below 2m and was under for 30 seconds. I didn’t need to breathe off my regs. This got logged as a 30 second dive. None of my other dive computers logged it as a dive. They all have extra logic to prevent this.
Dive end. There’s a configurable End Dive Delay, the time the Mk1 waits after surfacing to actually end the dive. This allows for surfacing in the middle of the dive (find a buddy, bearings, etc.) without splitting the dive. This is a nice feature. The Mk1 originally added the delay to the dive time but they fixed that in an early firmware but still it doesn’t show a lot of insight.
The problem with the feature is that it doesn’t log the dive exit until after the end of the delay. This means you could get out of the water at the end of the dive and be 10s of metres away before it logs your exit. What is worse is that the Mk1 doesn’t turn on the GPS until after the end of the delay and only seconds before recording the location. This is not enough time to lock onto satellites and the location is often inaccurate. I’ve had it log my exit 100m away on land!
Surface interval. There’s a widget that displays your surface interval but no way to see it on the dive display. If you are doing a second dive there’s no easy way to see how much longer you should wait. All my other dive computers display the surface interval right there on the display when the computer is ready to dive.
Temperature. The temperatures logged for the dive do not match the temperatures displayed on the screen during the dive! On my Mk1 the difference is 2-3°C! For example, a dive where the water temperature is around 18°C as shown on the display of the Mk1 (and verified by my Perdix and Citizen) gets logged as 15°C! You can demonstrate the problem even out of the water by going all the way into dive mode and seeing the temperature displayed. Exit dive mode and bring up the temperature widget. Right now on my Mk1 dive mode shows 25°C and widget shows 23°C.
Fitness features
Intensity minutes. The measuring of intensity minutes is grossly inconsistent. I can rack up intensity minutes going for a slow walk but not on a fast walk when I’m left out of breath. It will often log intensity minutes while I’m walking back to my car after a dive even though the Mk1 is mounted on my camera rig and has no HR data.
Flights of stairs. It records the number of flights of stairs you take but is grossly inconsistent. I live in a two story house. Some days every trip upstairs gets counted. Another day I ended with zero flights even though I went up and down over 10 times.
Sleep. The sleep data is often screwy. For example if I sit in bed and read on my phone before getting up in the morning it gets recorded as REM sleep. What used to get reported as Deep Sleep now also gets reported as REM
Garmin Connect is a joke! There are so many things wrong with it I could start a whole thread about it.