SiniMiniT4

That's fair. I went with it because my instructors said that it's better to learn on an analog face at first. I had the option to borrow one of their spares, but I wanted to get something of my own. Hopefully it works out. And I get your hypothetical scenario and it makes sense. I do think it was likely an innocuous decision such as you described. I'll try emailing them again with feedback but I still haven't received a response from them for the couple emails I sent originally, so I'm not sure if they'll get it. Thanks for the input. It shows that I need to adjust my expectations.

Actually I do have an instructor and asked him if he thought it was a good idea and he agreed. That's pretty much what we're going to have to do to work around this. I still think that if you're going to advertise a feature, it should be a first-class citizen and not an after-thought or alternative use for another, separate feature. At minimum, it should have been an aside for the playback feature and not called out as a stand-alone option. I say this as an engineer who is constantly having to reign in product managers from promising features to customers that don't exist. Perhaps that's where my bias is coming from.

Because you shouldn't need to jump out of an airplane to use a simulator. Kind of defeats the whole purpose, no? I'm a tunnel flyer who's going to go through AFF in April and I was going to add altitude awareness to my drills to start building the habit. I specifically purchased this altimeter for this functionality and would have gone with a much cheaper option had I known that it was just marketing bs. Also, the playback procedure is cumbersome to use as a simulator as it would require you to remove the altimeter every time you want to reset. Ideally, you'd have a mode on the back where you set your exit altitude and then use the two buttons on the edge to start/stop descent and reset to exit. Maybe my expectations are too high? I'd like to think that they're fair for $350.

Ok, that's infuriating. Why market a feature that doesn't exist? And saying the playback functionality IS the feature is disingenuous. How disappointing...

I hope it's not one of those button/light combos like the backlighting.

So, I ordered an Altitrack after reading on the product page that is has a "Simulator for student altitude awareness training" but I cannot for the life figure out how to get to that mode. I tried to RTFM but there's literally no mention of this mode. I emailed L&B a week ago but they haven't responded yet. Checking here hoping someone else has the inside knowledge to help me out.