Complaint to Garmin S.A.

[Goosebeak]

Herewith a copy of the letter I have just sent to Garmin S.A.

Sirs.

I am EXTREMELY unhappy with Garmin South Africa. Allow me to explain why - and please check the history of the unit detailed above which is itself a swap-out replacement for the original (faulty) unit purchased a few years ago.

Throughout the life of this unit, the firmware was glitchy, to say the least - a well-known fact to both yourselves and to users of the units. Having just recently upgraded the software to (AT LAST!!!!!!) a version that did not cause the unit to reboot randomly at the slightest provocation, I was able for the first time to actually use the Nuvi 1300 productively. After enduring some years of a basically useless Nuvi 1300, I at last had a streetnav GPSr that I could use. This state of affairs lasted but a few short weeks, until the unit froze during bootup.

Upon querying this with your staff, they said that they could try to 'hard-start' the unit if I brought it in to the Kimbult offices. Which I did - a huge distance, let me add, from my residence in Germiston.

Sadly, your help desk staff were unable to 'resuscitate' the unit - whereupon they offered me a 'swap-out' unit. Now, apart from the fact that I don't have the required R950-00 to throw around, I find it insulting that you could expect me to give you my old unit for, basically, the amount of R49-00 - Makro, amongst other retailers, is offering the Nuvi 42 for R999-00, straight. Lifetime maps (a slight misnomer, but that's another issue), included.

The value of the existing carcass (or R49-00) is hardly justified by the stated claim that "We'll update the unit for free here at the offices, it won't cost you anything" - I have uncapped, 4MB ADSL at home, so the cost/time of downloading updates is not a factor to myself. To give the devil his due, your frontline staff battle on valiantly and gamely trying to justify your pricing of the 'swap-out' unit (minus the value of the stricken 1300 unit - in this case at the princely sum of R49-00!) in the face of freely available, brand-new Nuvi 42 units available at various retailers all over this country.

When this anomaly was pointed out to your helpdesk staff, their excuse was that, as a retailer, Makro/etc. could play around with margins. Hardly a credible reason, if that means that Makro/etc.'s profit margin on a single unit is only R49-00 higher that YOUR baseline price AFTER 'trading-in' my old unit. An argument that I, quite frankly, don't buy.

Having been a client of yourselves for quite some time now, and having staunchly defended the brand - even in the face of the copyright debacle that saw TT acquire the rights to the original Garmap data - to say that I am disappointed and affronted is putting it mildly.

SURELY, having originally (and knowingly) foisted a unit with glitchy software onto the market in the first place (the Nuvi 1300), and forcing the consumer (myself!) to battle through innumerable software updates that never (until very recently) corrected the problem of random rebooting, you could do a lot better than try to screw me over and pretend that you're doing me a favour while doing so. I would suggest you come up with a more reasonable value for the old Nuvi 1300 carcass, and/or a better offer pricewise on the Nuvi 42, something that at least ameliorates the cost and inconvenience of having to travel to your offices to be confronted with a no-win situation from a company I used to admire and trust.

Yours faithfully (and disappointedly),

[fugglefeet]

An obvious model that was stricken with flaws, with a destined failure in the starting blocks.

Darryl

[dasilvarsa]

I've actually had a 3100 since they were launched.
The only 2 firmwares that work well are 5.1 and 6.2, I've actually had no problems as long as I stuck to these 2 firmwares.
If your unit is faulty you can get help to possibly fix it at noeman.org.

[Jan Horn]

Just for information here are the information on how to do a soft reset and a hard reset. I am sure that the guys at Garmin tried all that the could and I am posting this purely for information purposes.

Soft Reset
1 Turn on the Garmin Nuvi 1300.
2 Press and hold down the "Power" button.
3 Release the button when the main menu is displayed. The unit is now ready to be used.
Hard Reset
1 Turn the Garmin Nuvi 1300 off.
2 Press your finger against the bottom-right corner of the Garmin display screen. Leave your finger in place as you power the unit on.
3 Release your finger when the display screen asks, "Do you want to erase all user data?" Use your finger to tap "Yes." The unit will begin to reboot. Do not use the unit until the main menu is displayed. The reset process should take about 45 seconds.

[Jan Horn]

For what it's worth About 18 moths ago my old trusty Nuvi 200 S decided to freeze and no reset would coach it back to life. Seeing it was past it useful live I decided that scratching around would not do any harm. I was lucky that I made a complete backup of the unit when I first bought it and I had something to compare the original files with. What I found that when Garmin switched to the GMA system of unlocking the maps each time you update your maps a new GMA file get added to the internal or where you load your on an SD card a new GMA file is added to the relevant memory. Where you look after or have more than one unit their GMA files are included in the down load. These are relative small files and does not take up much space but are not necessary for the operation of the unit. I removed all the files that where obviously not necessary and compared the other file and folders with those of my original backup. The unit then fired up and I reloaded the latest unlocked map set for the Nuvi and update the firmware. Up till now it is still going strong with no further problems. I am sure that the problem was a corrupted file which could not be restored by a soft or hard reset.

[fugglefeet]

OK, so that blows the theory out the water that it could be a model related problem. Worth looking into.

Darryl

[Jan Horn]

If you google for problems with the 1xxx models you will get plenty of hits. At least 1 of my friends with a 1200 is experiencing freezeups. I recently updated his firmware and so far it seem the problem has been resolved. But then I have a few other friends with 13xx models that never complained. Also had a friend with a 215 that started experiencing freezeups. Frans looked at it when I down in Cape town and he found that it was caused by a flat battery. Seem to be a faulty charger. It froze again while Chris was down in JHB and he bought a Nuvi 50. I will see if he still has the 215 so that I can have a look and see if I can see something funny and maybe roll the firmware back to V4.4 . To me still the best firmware for the 2xx range. With electronics as you know what works for a problem on one does not necessarily work on another unit with a similar problem

[Goosebeak]

Thanks guys - I'll pop on over to noeman and see if there's any hope for my little Nuvi...

I must say I'm really disappointed with Garmin S.A. - they seem to have lost all their interest in customer service, and have turned into retail moguls - "never mind the quality, feel the width"........

Then again, I'm probably just a grumpy old codger. Or so my kids tell me...

[Jan Horn]

To share something which may be related. Updated the maps on my brother in law's Nuvi 500 to Garmap 2013.2 yesterday. The unit worked perfectly yesterday but this morning it started rebooting continuously. On the Nuvi 500 it is easy to remove the battery but that did not solve the problem. Removing the T4A SD card (preloaded card) restored the 500 to proper working order. Inserting the card and the problem came back. After reading the Q & A on the T3A website I down loaded T4A to the laptop from the SD card, formatted the T4A SD card and then using MapSource reloaded T4A to the SD Card and every thing is working perfectly again. It does not make any sense because a corrupted data on the SD card would have transferred the problem to my laptop and when reloading the data would have resulted in the data that I reloaded to the card still being corrupted.

[Jan Horn]

I am doing a bit of admin work and moved Goosebeak's topic over here from Around the camp fire,