New update arrives for popular Garmin smartwatch with warnings of persistent battery drain bugs

Garmin has published another beta update for the Vivoactive 5, approximately a week after the arrival of Beta 9.16. To date, Garmin has kept the Vivoactive 5 on the same beta release strategy as the Venu 3 and Venu 3S, to which it recently delivered Beta 9.18. However, the Vivoactive 5 has now jumped ahead to Beta 9.19, skipping Beta 9.18 entirely.

Nonetheless, it appears that little has changed between Beta 9.15 that debuted two weeks ago and Beta 9.19 that has appeared today. Specifically, Garmin's changelog mentions the same new features and improvements, which are as follows:

• Added jump rope activity
• Added support for male audio prompts (requires a download of new audio files)
• Fixed an issue where music will randomly start playing
• Fixed an issue where higher rate of battery drain could occur with wrist heart rate turned off
• Fixed an issue where changing a setting during a golf activity could cause scoring to be turned off

The same applies to Beta 9.16, which Garmin delivered with a comparable changelog. Thus, it is unclear the way in which Garmin has refined the Vivoactive 5 since Beta 9.15, with no subsequent explanation offered. However, there are mounting complaints of high battery drain occurring after updating to Beta 9.19. Supposedly, recharging an affected Vivoactive 5 and rebooting does not resolve any associated bugs, with 0.25% drain per minute reported by one owner.

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