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0 pointsLolWolf5y ago0 comments

My main problem with Garmin, and the one that gets me really hard when camping, is the fact that Connect requires internet in order to be able to see even basic statistics. I absolutely love my Garmin Vivomove Style, but because of the small screen I can't really see any activity other than very basic things, which requires that I fall back to my phone app... which doesn't work when camping or hiking because I don't have cellphone reception.

If they could fix this one problem, I'd buy more of their sports-oriented watches, but this is the one thing that I find really hard to deal with.

Otoh, the watch is phenomenal and beautiful, and I love having a watch that lasts 5+ days on a single charge and looks like a normal watch, but tells me my calendar and such, and can be used to track running and hiking.

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photojosh5y ago

I was bitten by this just the other weekend. Out in the middle of nowhere for an organised event, and the organisers said we had to use the backup route. I had it downloaded to my phone, but Garmin Connect won't work at all without an internet connection.

Ended up just using my phone for navigation, and even though I was recording GPS and heart rate the whole time, I'd only used 50% battery after 14 hours riding. Nice.

There was another guy at the campsite who was looking for someone who had downloaded the route. I AirDropped it to him, and he transferred it to his Wahoo bike computer with no trouble.

For shorter rides/runs, I use the WorkOutdoors app on the Apple Watch. It's only battery life that's an issue when the activity is longer than 6 hours. Just this morning I had the opportunity to go for a run a bit out of my normal zones, so within a minute I had sketched out a route on the phone and transferred it over to the watch. (That some of the paths I'd used didn't actually exist anymore was a separate issue, but I've already updated OpenStreetMap to fix that.)