Audiobooks on the Run Post Script

The audiobooks on the run saga was about me trying to use my smart watch (the Garmin fēnix series) as a Bluetooth audiobook player, to eliminate the need to carry a phone on trail runs. Long story short it did not work as advertised and after the long exchange with Garmin support they replaced my unit, which solved the problem.

Until the problem returned.

So the problem itself was the Garmin watch could not multitask. It could play audio, or it could record an activity (such as a Walk or Run), but not both. This seemed to me like a resource problem (such as insufficient memory to run both tasks), but Garmin insisted they had never had such issue and therefore the hardware unit must have had been faulty and they replaced it.

This resolution was not convincing to me at all, but I could not dispute the facts. The new unit was able to play audio while recording an activity. I must have had accepted this fact, agreed with Garmin and put my "insufficient resources" theory to rest.

But yes, the problem returned last week. On the new unit. And then I started examining what exactly I did between the last time it worked and the moment it stopped. Yes - I connected the watch to my PC and the Garmin companion app offered me to upgrade the on-board maps to a newer version.

Could then the map update be to blame? The issue is you cannot un-update the maps once they are updated. Even the deep factory-default reset procedure does not do that (which is a problem, because then it hardly can be called a factory-default reset...). But I had yet another idea.

One of the greatest feature of Garmin watches is they accept uploading of 3rd party maps for offline use. And the Open Topo Map is just the greatest source of super accurate topo maps for any region. To me this is probably the #1 reason I love Garmin watches (despite many glitches that plague them). And of course I had a number of such extra maps loaded (and everything was working, audio included). But then - probably - the system map update was the straw that broke the camel's back.

So to test my theory I went and deleted the 3rd party maps. Bingo - the audio multitasking returned! 

So here is the updated explanation: the maps stored on the watch consume resources (most likely the RAM memory, where - probably - a kind of an index of the maps is kept). The more maps (and map updates) you have - the more memory they occupy and the less memory is available for other applications. It is sufficient to run the audio player. And sufficient to run an activity recorder. But not both at the same time. Clearly a software issue - I was right and Garmin was wrong.

Unfortunately this also tells a lot about the Garmin software platform and their development and service organizations:

• The software should clearly communicate when it cannot run due to lack of resources. On the fēnix platform it does not. This is scary, as it probably means they do not check if malloc() returns a NULL.
• The deep factory reset should really reset everything to the factory default state. On the fēnix it does not. This complicates troubleshooting, as there really is no way to get back to a factory default state.
• An issue reported by a user, and classified as a hardware issue, should be examined for potentially being a software issue. Garmin is not doing that. They probably do not believe that software quality matters...