What could Garmin possibly have been thinking when they limited course names to only fifteen characters (as illustrated in the accompanying photo). Fifteen character course name isn’t just an inconvenience, it forces users to create super cryptic names for their courses because there just aren’t enough characters to adequately name them. It’s reminiscent of the days of DOS when file names could be no more than eight characters.
While Garmin’s operating system will automatically truncate a course name to the first fifteen characters, if another route has the same first fifteen characters then only the first route will load. To make matters worse there is no error message to explain why the other routes didn’t load, leaving the user wondering what went wrong.
Why hasn’t Garmin addressed this weakness in their system? Why should they care? Competition. There isn’t much that my Garmin Edge can do that my iPhone can’t. But there is one thing my phone can do that Garmin can’t, and that’s display route names with more than fifteen characters. You need to catch up Garmin! You’re falling behind your competitors.
Ken Whittaker