Garmin 810 Reliability

Mr Dog

Hi All

Currently use my smartphone in conjunction with a Cateye to record my rides. Looking for a 'do it all' device that allows me to leave my phone at home whilst on holiday and the maps would let me be a bit more adventurous with my routes without getting lost.
However a lot of riders seem to have had problems with the 810. Have the bugs been fixed or is it just a flawed device?

napoleond

What problems?

Colinthecop

I thought the 810 had all its bugs sorted and it was the new 1000 that was causing problems for some users...?

Mr Dog

Taken from a Wiggle customer review;

"I have now had two 810's, the first had to be sent back to Garmin due to software problems. This 2nd one is no better, here are a couple of problems I am having with it.
1. Quite often on long rides following a course the until will freeze and/or shut down. Out of 5 times the unit will lose all ride data twice.
2. Guidance Navigation (turn by turn) CANNOT be turned off. If you are following a course the unit will inform you of a turn/bend in the road. It will change whatever page you were on and display the navigation page. If you have a number of turns coming up then then unit can't keep up and blacks out or does not change in time and I will miss the next turn. The only way to remove the page is to tap the screen however it will appear again when closer to the turn. I have gone without ride info (cadence, etc) for 3-5 miles due to the unit wanting to guide me on a bendy road.
3. The battery does not last as long as claimed. Yes I have turned off the blue tooth, HR, sensors also dimmed the screen.
4. The map can be slow to update where you are, I.e I know I have passed a point on the map however my little arrow is still not moving or I have passed around and carried on down the road and the map has froze however my other data box's are still working.
If you want a GPS unit then buy the 800, 500 or 510. If you want to use 'live track' then by the 510 or use the function on the Garmin App for a small price a month.
Do not buy this unit until the software has improved."

napoleond

I've not had any probs

Colinthecop

Is that a recent review Mr Dog...?

napoleond

It is, however he hasn't quoted the 56 4 and 5 star reviews...

slowbike

Mr Dog wrote:

Taken from a Wiggle customer review;

"I have now had two 810's, the first had to be sent back to Garmin due to software problems. This 2nd one is no better, here are a couple of problems I am having with it.
1. Quite often on long rides following a course the until will freeze and/or shut down. Out of 5 times the unit will lose all ride data twice.
2. Guidance Navigation (turn by turn) CANNOT be turned off. If you are following a course the unit will inform you of a turn/bend in the road. It will change whatever page you were on and display the navigation page. If you have a number of turns coming up then then unit can't keep up and blacks out or does not change in time and I will miss the next turn. The only way to remove the page is to tap the screen however it will appear again when closer to the turn. I have gone without ride info (cadence, etc) for 3-5 miles due to the unit wanting to guide me on a bendy road.
3. The battery does not last as long as claimed. Yes I have turned off the blue tooth, HR, sensors also dimmed the screen.
4. The map can be slow to update where you are, I.e I know I have passed a point on the map however my little arrow is still not moving or I have passed around and carried on down the road and the map has froze however my other data box's are still working.
If you want a GPS unit then buy the 800, 500 or 510. If you want to use 'live track' then by the 510 or use the function on the Garmin App for a small price a month.
Do not buy this unit until the software has improved."

Hmm ... looks like user error to me. We've got both an 800 and 810 - there are idiosyncrasies with both and I prefer the 800 (lucky as it's mine) - but we've not sent back an 810 yet ...

Mr Dog

Knowing my luck I'd be one of the 10% that would experience problems... and 10% is high failure rate by any standards :-)

lostboysaint

And where have you got the 10% figure from?

Colinthecop

Mr Dog wrote:

Knowing my luck I'd be one of the 10% that would experience problems... and 10% is high failure rate by any standards :-)

Although it would seem those that do have problems cannot fault Garmins customer service.

Which I guess has to give you some piece of mind.

jgarpotter

I took mine touring, first few days it was completely fine, unfortunately I then started to experience multiple crashes in a day (upto 8 times) and then on the last day it bricked itself - which required a hard reset, meaning I lost all my ride data from my holiday before I could upload it!

PK1

Mine has frozen on a ride about 5 times now. However this has only happened when I had courses loaded onto the SD card ( not following them at the time ). I am considering returning it. I have the latest 3.0 Firmware.

PK1

Froze again at lunchtime :-( . Returns label printed and boxed up. Rubbish !

slowbike

PK1 wrote:

Froze again at lunchtime :-( . Returns label printed and boxed up. Rubbish !

Not saying you shouldn't return it - it should work out of the box.
My wife's works fine - with courses on the SD card.

Perhaps there's an incompatibility with the SD card you have? Her's was supplied with the unit and has OS maps on.

You may be really unlucky and have a genuine hardware failure though. Problem is with dismissive responses like "rubbish" and no obvious attempt to diagnose it, we'll never know...

NeXXus

"a load of riders" where in reality the number of forum/internet/daily mail complaints are a minute % of the actual number of units sold.

PK1

Mine was a newly overhauled (NOH) unit. Probably passed tests in the factory, but not on my rides. Just unlucky I guess, most are probably fine. It's very frustrating when you buy an expensive piece of kit and it doesn't work !

slowbike

PK1 wrote:

It's very frustrating when you buy an expensive piece of kit and it doesn't work !

yup - concur with that one ...

My original 800 froze a couple of times - rather irritating, but I didn't worry about it - firmware updates and replacement units seem to have eliminated it ...

StillGoing

Mr Dog wrote:

Hi All

Currently use my smartphone in conjunction with a Cateye to record my rides. Looking for a 'do it all' device that allows me to leave my phone at home whilst on holiday and the maps would let me be a bit more adventurous with my routes without getting lost.
However a lot of riders seem to have had problems with the 810. Have the bugs been fixed or is it just a flawed device?

Where are all these reports and how old are they? There is nothing wrong with the 810, 800, 500, 510 or 1000. Buy any electronic or mechanical device and you will always get the odd one that has a fault. With Garmin devices, there is the added issue of some of them being owned by numpties who when they fuck it up, won't admit their error and instead go on internet forums whining about it not working properly. Garmin do have firmware glitches, but they eventually sort them out just like Apple and Android do.

topcattim

I guess a forum like this can never be a representative sample, but mine fails about once every 6 weeks, i.e. once every 1000 miles at the moment. Failures have included just turning off mid ride and refusing to load maps (after lots of fiddling with SD memory card, I got this sorted); switching off mid ride and deleting the course I was following along with one other (no idea why this happened); suddenly giving a totally unknown screen (with appearance of colour, like when you see oil in a puddle).

I have no idea why these have happened. As far as I am aware, the firmware is up to date, and I am using the SD card with the maps that Garmin sent.

If there was an alternative to Garmin that did what the Garmin 810 does, I'd buy it. I looked around for an alternative at the time of purchase, but couldn't find one with the same features. I have to say that I feel the same now about Garmin as I do about Microsoft - a massive brand that has simply failed to deliver for me.

Mr Dog

Simply looking at the reviews from the major on line vendors is where I get the 10% figure... not truly representative but all the same if I'm parting with the best part of £300 then I want the thing to work. The only time I'd use the mapping functions is on holiday, but I'd be pretty p1ssed if the unit crashed loosing all the data after a day climbing in the saddle. I'll decide over the weekend. Thanks for all the feedback as it goes a long way to help me make an informed choice.

Mr Dog

Well.. had the 810 for around a month now and it's refusing to upload rides either via bluetooth or usb.. any suggestions? :?

kingstonian

Mr Dog wrote:

Well.. had the 810 for around a month now and it's refusing to upload rides either via bluetooth or usb.. any suggestions? :?

Strange.

I'm no expert, only used mine for the first time yesterday and it uploaded my ride fine via Bluetooth. However, somehow by messing around with the screen I stopped the ride being recorded 2km into a 45km ride...........have subsequently figured out how I screwed up and won't make the same mistake again.

foot_loose

Had no problems with my 810. Excellent bit of kit.

How Far is too Far

I had an 800 for 2 years and 18000 miles use no problem.

I now have an 810 and it has been fine for 9 months and 12000 miles use.

Mr Dog

Mine is a month old and refusing communicate with either the pc or my phone. Just hope this isn't the start of a lengthy saga.. reloaded Connect on both the computer and the phone, re installed the device... jack... not what I expect for £300.

fatdaz

I had to send my first one back as it crashed in the very heavy rain on this year's Etape. I was hugely disappointed to end up loosing the stats for the ride - I don't imagine I'll ever do Tourmalet and Hautacam again. I have had intermittent issues connecting both the original and the replacement (refurbished) unit to my iPhone and PC. The Garmin won't connect to the phone about a fifth of the time and won't connect to the PC about a third of the time resulting in reboots, re-pairing and messing around until it eventually connects properly.

I love the device and wouldn't change it for anything different but something that costs the same as a laptop should function as designed every time and that's not been my experience with the two that I've had.

StillGoing

Mr Dog wrote:

Mine is a month old and refusing communicate with either the pc or my phone. Just hope this isn't the start of a lengthy saga.. reloaded Connect on both the computer and the phone, re installed the device... jack... not what I expect for £300.

Have you gone to Bluetooth and used "Forget device" to get rid of the original connection to the 810? Usually once you've done this and found the device again, the connection works.