My experience with the Race S, and why I am returning to Garmin

dankcushions

I write this with a heavy heart as I really wanted to make this work. I LOVE the way the Race S looks and feels. The maps feature is amazing at this price point. Plus I love the branding, I prefer the app (Garmin’s is a cheap mess), and I have Finnish relatives

Alas… rather than just silently return the watch and move on, I thought I’d list my concerns in the hope that things improve at some point:

I can’t pause an activity whilst viewing the map. Indeed the pause (top) button doesn’t seem to do anything during navigation. I have to press the centre button ~3 times to get back to the activity screen, and then pause works. This can’t be right!? I really have to press 4 buttons to pause an activity every time I need to cross a road, or whatever? (I realise I could use an auto-pause feature, but that isn’t always ideal).
The turn notifications seem insane. I created a simple route via the app (I didn’t make it super granular, just tapped 3 or so points and let the app figure out the pathing), but the turn notifications were every 20 seconds or so, especially through parks where there are multiple branching trails, even if it seemed like I was just going along the ‘main’ path. But what’s worse is that the turn notification consumes the entire screen, hiding the map that would give you the necessary context. Can’t it just be an icon? An overlay? Half the screen? It feels like I’ll have to just turn it off entirely, which is a shame, but It seems like if your route has TBT (the default, and maybe even outside of your control if you use a third party route builder), then you are stuck with them. Should be able to turn them off globally in the watch.
Speaking of routing, it seems like the app treats trails the same as paths, when creating routes. I’m a road/path runner, but the app only has one ‘path’ category, so it seems to assume you’re a trail runner and will treat public footpaths through fields the same as a pavement. I am not sure if this is a solvable problem, but certainly google maps wouldn’t route you through such paths (idk about Garmin).
Miles + Celcius. The UK use imperial (miles/feet) for distance, and celcius for weather (sorry, I don’t know why either), but the Suunto app only lets you select imperial or metric for everything. But even then, some sports like swimming, make more sense in metric. All that should be configurable.
Smart watch notifications. Should be able to turn these off if you’re not wearing the watch, or doing an activity. dnd mode is fine but just like with phones, it’s typically a contextual decision that should be automated, rather than on/off.
Touch screen. I don’t know if it’s a bug or a design decision but the touch screen works seemingly at random. Eg, pause an activity > stop > Get the ‘end / control panel / discard’ scrollable list. You can only use the spinner here. Touch screen does nothing. Why? It feels like the spinner is the most awkward thing to use during an activity, if anything.

But I think the biggest thing for me is searching this forum and the reddit and seeing that a lot of these issues had been raised by others, sometimes years ago, with no movement. Where is the feature request/bug reports category for the watches? I don’t expect to be totally satisfied by any purchase but it’s important to feel like there’s some kind of feedback loop.