Garmin i3 not up to the job?

[MaFt]

a couple of feet onto a hard surface as you were bending down... hmm... as you were bending down you gave the i3 a bit more momentum so probably the equivalent of dropping from 3-4 feet onto a hard surface. the i3 is pretty dense (i.e. small and heavy) so if it lands on a corner that's quite a lot of pressure (i.e. lot of force onto a small area)...

i don't see how any hi-tech item should be expected to withstand that and to be perfectly honest i think £90 isn't bad for a repair from the manufacturer.

phones are a bit more robust becuase they're designed to be carried about and thrown up and down travelling between pocket/bag to ear etc. a sat nav system is designed to be attached to the window of a car and get driven around...

i only have a 5p so you can keep the remaining 3p change

MaFt

[jjj]

I bought an i3 a few weeks ago, and I was very happy with it until I dropped it.

It wasn't a big drop, just a couple of feet onto a wooden floor as I bent down to pick up my keys. The result was that the LCD screen cracked inside.

I understand that the i3 is not “designed to be dropped”, but I would expect any small portable device to survive the occasional mishap. My other Garmin GPS units have managed it, as have a variety of mobile phones and PDAs - it's not ideal, but in the real world it happens from time to time.

Garmin's only response is to say that I shouldn't have dropped it and offer a repair for £91.80

If I had dropped it from a great height, or repeatedly, I wouldn’t be so concerned. However, for such a minor knock to require a repair costing more than 50% of the purchase price seems unacceptable to me.

Was I just unlucky, or is the i3 manufactured down to a price that means it can't survive the rigours of day to day life?

Should I get it repaired, or cut my losses and go for something else instead?

John

[Lester_Burnham]

Sometimes when you drop some devices, it can be a combination of the height, the angle, the surface that can cause damage, where in other similar circumstances you'd not have a problem.

At the end of the day, the i3 is low-end, budget, in-car GPS navigation unit. It's not one of those rugged-ised devices you sometimes see (eg 'phones, cameras etc).

I happen to think it is up to the task for what it does, and nothing (particularly) that you've wrote suggests to me otherwise. Accidents happen, and with a lot of technology like this, it can be relatively expensive to repair, compared with the cost, new, of the device.

As to what you should do, only you can decide, really - but I wouldn't cut off your nose to spite your face where this is concerned.

[Mr_Gonzales]

I only had mine a few days and it was on a high shelf so 4 year old GPS-obsessed daughter couldn't get it. Then I tried to get it down whilst holding a baby and knocked it - it bounced off the shelf below, bounced off the top of the telly, hit the wall and went down the back of the telly, hitting the skirting board.

It wouldn't power on, but then I found that the card had been released and I pushed it in, then it had lost sound but I remembered something on the forum about low battery causing loss of sound (2nd hand alkaline batteries) so a new set cured that. Not even marked.

Definitely depends where it gets hit - lucky that the screen didn't get whacked - the rest seems pretty sturdy!

I think £90-odd for repairs is good of Garmin - I would have assumed I had to get a new one if I smashed the screen, so it's good to know they'll fix it for less money!

[Mr_Gonzales]

Oh - and it was on my motorbike when I had a crash on ice at the weekend - about 20mph when it went down. I3 was still running and had hardly even moved on the mount. See - sturdy! :D

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