This happened to me this morning, to my intense distress and chagrin, on my brand new Garmin Fenix 5. Could NOT believe it. How could this happen to me again — with a Garmin.
I really wanted the Fenix 5 to work. I like it …
Well checked that the physical button was working by using it on the Menu and Control screens. It seemed to work. So, that was a relief.
I noticed that ALL the keys were unusually sluggish.
That got me thinking.
I was using the extremely data-rich ‘GearMin‘ watch face. (See above). But, the night before I switched the graph from ‘activity’ to ‘constant heart rate’. Occurred to me that this might be too much for the watch.
Update: Appears that it does NOT matter whether the ‘GearMin‘ graph is showing ‘activity’ or ‘constant heart rate’. The DOWN button will stop working at some point. So, here is the deal. The DOWN button will initially work with ‘GearMin‘ for some number of hours. Then it stops. Only way to reactivate the DOWN button is to (temporarily) change the watch face. I found this out, by trial and error over the course of last night and today. OK? Got that?
Changed the watch face –> to ‘ActiFace’. BINGO. Everything started working FINE.
So, that would be the first thing I would do IF you have this problem. Check with another watch face.
I also went and rationalized my widgets. Some I didn’t need.
So, this is in case YOU run into this problem too.
Related posts:
Search ‘Garmin’.