Garmin warning!

[gnat23]

I know the Garmin GPS bike units have been a favorite toy of myself and several others on this board, so I figured I'd give a heads-up:

The Edge, apparently including the 205, 305, and 705, have a bit of an engineering flaw in which it will spontaneously turn off during a ride.

When it first happened to me, I thought it was my own fault. Turn back on, it talks to the mothership, hit start and keep going. But it has started happening more and more often now, to the point where it happened three times in the first twenty minutes of a charity ride. On the same ride, my boyfriend's 305 turned off *seven* times. And this is his fourth or fifth time sending it back to Garmin now.

A bit of net research has shown this not to be isolated to just us, either (so no local black-hole arguments here). A bit of a net hunt found that vibrations cause the battery contacts to disconnect, and that if one wishes to void their warranty fully, you can take it apart, clean and "refresh" (i.e., bend) the springs a bit, and try to waterproof it again with rubber cement. I don't trust myself well enough with small electronic bits to do it myself, but it's an option when you don't have anything else to turn to. http://forums.motionbased.com/smf/in...=6566.msg42076

The other option is to call Garmin and sit on hold for 30+ minutes, talk to customer service who says if you've had it more than a year, then it'll cost $99 to repair, or you can hold 20 minutes again for tech support, who then waves the fee. Weird. Anyway, you mail your toy in and wait for the refurb to show back up which will likely have the same problem sooner or later.

I'm mostly ticked for the following reasons:
- I wish Garmin would admit that this is a problem. There's no mention of it on their website, and since the 705 is starting to do it, there appears to be no idea of them, you know, fixing the root cause. We're not talking about mountain biking over jumps or logs, either, this is road bikes on pretty smooth stuff; are they really not designed to handle normal vibrations?

- I wish customer service was better. Or I wish there was another company's product that had the same functionality but better customer service so I could speak with my cash.

- I wish that I had some confidence that sending it in for refurbishing and feeling naked for 1-2 weeks without any data gathering really fixed it. Or that I could have an excuse to upgrade to a 705 and not only have COLOR MAPS! but also something reliable.

- You really haven't lived until you've been on a long ride, realized that the thing's turned off again, and you almost turn around and go back because you're so mad at the device. You start noticing that it's rather flat on top with rounded edges and wonder how many times it would skip across that lake right there... Do you keep futzing with it, wondering how many times you can sanely accept turning it back on during a ride or resign to the punishment of sending it in at the prime of the season?

Oh yah, did I mention that the calorie-counter resets when this happens, and that it's pretty random as to which parts of your segmented ride it keeps when it downloads to the computer? Grr.

-- gnat! (I miss my broken toy)