After the latest
round of Garmin updates, my Forerunner 645 watch can no longer sync with the
Garmin Connect calendar automatically. This means that if I want to schedule a
workout and have my watch automatically walk me through it, I need to connect
my watch to a personal computer and use the old "Garmin Express"
desktop application to manage the file transfer.
Needless to say,
this is highly inconvenient. As inconvenient as it is, it's worth keeping
things in perspective. Just a few years ago, this was the only way to do it,
anyway. It is only Garmin's technological advancement that ever enabled us to
move beyond hard-wired file transfers for workouts on running watches. We've
been spoiled by modernity. Still, no one likes moving backwards. This was a
functionality that I was enjoying from my watch; it's no fun to see it
disappear.
From what I can
tell, the newer Garmin watches, including their newest offerings just recently
released, do not have this problem. They synchronize automatically without
issue. My suspicion is that these new watches use a different bit of software
code to handle the transfer, and Garmin decided that it didn't want to support
the older platform anymore. I work in tech and have some familiarity with this
kind of decision-making. From a consumer's standpoint, it can be frustrating,
but ultimately it is an economic decision. Every technology company eventually
reaches a point where it has to decide how many of its resources it can afford
to spend on the support of older products and applications. The world of apps
and smart watches moves particularly fast, and unlike Samsung and Apple, Garmin
must support devices on multiple smartphone platforms. It is not always as
simple as maintaining the old code and adding new code. Imagine supporting
every watch on every version of Android and every version of iOS. It's a lot of
work, and it's not the only thing that Garmin does as a company. They also
develop and manufacture hardware, improve the state of GPS tracking technology,
and so on. Their latest app, along with their latest watches even track
menstrual cycles and can predict if you're coming down with a cold. With all
this new technology being released, I can forgive them for requiring me to
simply plug my watch into my computer from time to time to sync my training
schedule. It's a minor thing.
But I wanted to
write about it here on the blog, since I spend a lot of time blogging about
smart watches and reporting on their various technological issues. For those of
you shopping for a new smart watch and interested in guided workouts that sync
to your watch from your app, you'll want to choose a new Garmin watch, rather
than one of the older ones.
Coincidentally, this
is probably the most convenient time for me to experience this deprecation of
features. As I recently wrote, I'm not following the Garmin HR-based training
schedule anymore and had been modifying my workouts to involve pace targets instead.
That meant that all the future workouts that had been synced to my watch were
the old HR-based ones that I had been disregarding while I attempted to
re-configure all the workouts on my calendar. For me, it all works out fine in
the end. For the next day or two, I can complete my workouts "the
old-fashioned way," by simply using my watch as a stopwatch that tracks my
GPS data. No big deal. Then I'll finish editing my workouts and upload them to
my watch manually. Problem solved.
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