I will resist the urge to editorialize and just post the facts.
1) I have owned a Garmin Forerunner 205 for a few years.
2) With a year or two of purchase the device started to behave badly, randomly shutting itself off. I did everything I could think of to fix the behavior including many web searches and at lease one discussion with Garmin Support and I was never able to resolve the problem to my satisfaction. Based on the results of a Google search I just did it seems that there are now quite a few reports of this type of behavior within the Garmin Forerunner product family.
3) Last year when I was running I got caught in what I would consider a typical summer thunderstorm. It was a soaking and heavy rain, but again, nothing out of the ordinary. My Forerunner got water under the crystal. I did what I could to carefully and slowly dry the Forerunner out. In the end, even though the Forerunner didn't completely die it was damaged such that it was unable to hold any battery charge and thereby was totally useless to me.
Garmin Support offered some suggestions to try to remedy the problem but none of them worked. Garmin Support told me that the best they could do for me was to repair or replace the Forerunner (their choice) for $69. I had to pay the cost of shipping to Garmin and they would pay the shipping cost back to me.
1 comment:
I also have a Garmin 205. I had a problem in the past where it would lock up, but Garmin support was good, and told me how to reboot it. It worked fine and cured the problem. Also, I wore it in the water once during a cross country race that included a pond swim, with no problems (except that the GPS track spiked way off to the side while I was in the pond, but came back in line once on land). I am looking at getting a new GPS watch, though, for 2 reasons: (1) the new ones are smaller and lighter; and (2) I've heard some of the new ones correct for elevation. The 205 measures just "as the crow flies" distance, without accounting for inclines (i.e., it calculates the base of the trinagle, not the hyptenuse), and thus underestimates distance when the run is not perfectly flat. This is probably a bigger issue in Charlottesville than where I live, but when I run hilly races, it is definitely off.
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