Garmin Forerunner 610 Update

Here’s my update for the last post about the Garmin 610…

Since the last review, I spoke with a women at Garmin support (based in the USA!) and she was very helpful. She agreed the GPS had a problem, and was willing to replace it, but they did not currently have any in stock. She suggested that I talk to the retailer to see if they could do an immediate replacement. I then contacted Clever Training, the Amazon merchant, by email and they said they would send me a replacement upon receiving the defective item. I packaged it up, sent it off and in about a week received the new 610.

I initially had problems setting up the new 610. The software required a firmware update, but the Garmin Ant agent software wouldn’t recognize it. I believe this was because I had previously activated the other 610 on the computer. I tried deleting the old profile, re-installing the software, etc but no-go. I finally gave up and had to use another computer to do the firmware update. There is obviously a bug in the Garmin software which they hopefully will fix in a future release.

For the most part the watch works well. There have been a few minor glitches. I once saw the display reset and start counting from zero after I had completed a mile, but scrolling through the screens seemed to fix it. The actual data appeared to have no problems so this just appears to be a display issue.

On slightly more annoying problem is that the Ant received won’t recognize the watch has data to upload, until I pull out the dongle and reinsert it. A minor problem, but somewhat annoying. Again, I hope this gets fixed in a future software release.

The GPS is definitely a step up from the 305 but for a lot of people I’m not sure it will be worth the 3x price premium. The 305 always felt like a prototype to me whereas the 610 feels like the finished product. Most of the new features are nice to have but are not really required. I won’t go into all the features here, but read the review at the DCRainmaker site if you want to learn more about it.

I’m updating my rating to 4 stars now, but might go to 5 once the software glitches have been fixed.

Posted by Al on 11/06/11 at 10:27 AM in Other