Now that definitely leaves a bad taste in the mouth Mr Garmin.

You purchase a GPS in good faith, one that comes with a 12 month warranty and so when it breaks you send it back to be repaired. You can’t send it to Garmin since they don’t have a presence in Australia, instead you have to send it to GME, who are the “sole repair and distribution centre.”

When it comes back you assume that the replacement one has a warranty, then nine or ten months later that one breaks too… that’s when you discover that according to GME “they’re not real reliable,” but since its a repair unit it only has a 3 month warranty and it’ll cost you $209 to have your unrepairable GPS replaced! Staff at GME claim to be “only a repair shop” and that I have to discuss it with “Garmin Australia” if I’m not happy with the warranty, or that fact that two out of two Garmin devices have failed in under a year.

Searching about shows that there is no such entity as “Garmin Australia,” all references to a Garmin presence in Australia are directed straight back to GME! Garmin’s “international office” in the US won’t help, since I’m not in the US, and helpfully directed me to contact Garmin South-East Asia, which have a website in Taiwan that is solely in Chinese characters.

So two years of endless firmware hangs and two broken Edge 305 GPSs can be summarised as: nice concept, crap product, crap firmware, crap warranty and crap support.

Thanks Garmin.