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Review on πŸ” MOTOACTV 8GB GPS Fitness Tracker and Music Player: Now Discontinued by Manufacturer - Find the Best Deals! by Bennie Wilks

Revainrating 5 out of 5

Useless junk (even if it only worked for a short time)

I bought this product 8 months ago and I use it all the time for my daily work. The first 2-3 months worked well. After that, the headphone jack stopped working, probably due to sweat or rain. I contacted Motorola support and they pretty much told me they had no chance of supporting the product. Basically I shouldn't have used it in the rain or when I was sweaty. After a few more months, the volume up button apparently got wet as well. I stopped using it to play music, only logging runs as the headphones stopped working. So volume shouldn't be an issue, except for the screen jumping from Time mode or Work mode to the Music app and cranking the volume up at random times. This made things tricky because when I tried to see my run stats, the information from the Music app was displayed instead. I kept contacting Motorola, they assured me they would not fix the problem under warranty. Another month passed and suddenly the Motoactv stopped recording the distance in runs. Somehow it registered 0.3 miles and stopped recording further distances after that. No matter how far or how long I ran, it never got past 0.3 miles. I decided to try a factory reset to see if it was a bad setting that needed erasing. After that it never booted again; It just shows a black screen with white text stating the bootloader version. It also gets very hot when I plug it in. Of course I contacted Motorola again and of course made it very clear once again that the problem was not covered by the warranty. Thank you guys! May I ask what your warranty covers? For what it's worth when it actually worked it was nice to have a music player built into the GPS watch when it worked. If Garmin developed one like this, I would buy it. When the GPS was working, the accuracy seemed poor. I run one trail regularly and it was a bit further than my Garmin Forerunner 405 when it showed distances. I also run trails with distance markers and checked the accuracy of the distance markers with my bike computer. To be honest, even Garmin's accuracy isn't that great under trees; it can be easily turned off by 5-10%. However, Motoactv kept falling back by up to 30%. I couldn't believe it so I searched the Motoactv online forums. It turns out a lot of people have complained about this. Motorola's official answer? "The team did almost everything they could to tweak the MOTOACTV's GPS, so I don't think we'll see much of an improvement." In other words, they noticed their GPS didn't work as well as the competition, so did they do their best to improve it. They know it wasn't enough, but they gave up. Finally, the user interface is very problematic. Manually recording laps during track practice is painful, and when you stop the watch, e.g. when you stop to rest between laps on a course, the touchscreen becomes an end workout button that's too easy to press. Clicking this will restart the workout, which means your workout will appear as 2 workout breaks instead of a single workout. It's not the end of the world, just one of the many major annoyances with this product. Garmin's user interface is absolutely better than Motorola's. So, my experience with this product; Even when it worked, it wasn't very good and certainly didn't work long enough to be worth the money. I advise everyone to stay away from this product.

Pros
  • Electronics
Cons
  • Can't remember