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Comment by incone123 | Hacker News Reader

I have a Garmin with a monochrome LCD face. Ok, it can't compete on price but battery life is a couple of weeks (and can top up with solar) so the proprietary cable is not a big problem.

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I was also a happy Garmin Instinct Solar user. It is until after two years it started to turn off whenever it vibrates. I disabled vibrations, but it's reduced to an expensive step counter now.

Were the vibrations actually useful? I have an old Garmin something or other on my wrist right now, and I disabled vibrations because unless I'm sitting around doing nothing and I can hear them, I'd never notice them.

They were for me, i.e. at work in the office where definitely I don't want to have sound notifications on. And since my phone usually lies on a desk, I don't want vibrations there either.

Seems like a battery issue. Probably the vibration draws too much current and the battery just drops its voltage. Have you tried changing the battery?

No, I didn't. Maybe it's not a bad idea. I read about the issue on the internet and it seems pretty common issue that sooner or later hits most of Instincts Solar gen 1.

I contacted Garmin support since I've seen that in some of the cases they offered generous discounts for newer models or even gave them for free, but in my case they offered me to pay almost a full price for refurbished Instinct Solar gen 1, that most probably would have the same issue after some time.

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