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Maybe it’s niche, but if you do endurance sports like triathlon, you can easily become a power user. I think I did. You constantly look at your watch during wor
by belZaah 2mo ago
Maybe it’s niche, but if you do endurance sports like triathlon, you can easily become a power user. I think I did. You constantly look at your watch during workouts. It does navigation on trails, it measures your heart rate, tracks workouts, keeps pace during races. The metrics it gathers about hrv, sleep, rest hr etc are vital to adjusting the routine. It acts as a data recorder for multiple sensors: hr strap does a million running metrics, a separate strap does hydration, on a bike there’s a power meter. It supports my routine alerting me about the fast, timing my morning porrige (14 min). It’s my payment method on long rides when I need water and could play audio if I wanted to. I care about advanced features like multi-band gps and handover with my bike computer. It’s a vital tool, I need it for so many things. But vast majority of smartwatches do not cater for this crowd at all. Even the Apple Ultra feels like a toy. Garmin upper end stuff is where it is.
- semi-extrinsic 2mo agoYes, before I read the last sentence I was going to comment that this niche seems entirely taken by Garmin/Suunto/Polar.
- nradov 2mo agoExactly. Beyond all that, I also use my Garmin smartwatch as a scuba diving computer to track depth, time, and decompression.
- phrotoma 2mo agoI've got a pixel watch and would love to use it for navigation while running but (admittedly without much in the way of trying) haven't stumbled across a way to do this. What do you use to make it do that? Strava?
- drewstiff 2mo agoI assume you could set up a "walking" journey with multiple stops as waypoints on your phone then when you press start your watch should pick it up and give you the direct route between each waypoint. Not sure if that would sufficiently provide what you were hoping for.
- JeremyNT 2mo ago> Garmin upper end stuff is where it is. The problem for e.g. Google is right here. The Garmin stuff is so good at its niche (and passable at the other "nice to have" stuff) that the market is already segmented. If you're this kind of "power user" you're already in the Garmin ecosystem. It's tough for me to imagine what a Pixel Watch could possibly do to win me over (and I say this as somebody who has a Pixel phone and even had an Android Wear device early on).
- pandaman 2mo agoTbqh, it's the problem for Garmin itself - they want to sell new Fenix every year but the old one is already very good so they are segmenting their own product by holding off updates on the old watches for now but it's only going to work for so long until there is either nothing to update or they push down their value under that of competition's. E.g. Google could give Garmin a scare of its life if they made a watch with a MIP display, ANT+ support and power profile to run GPS for 8-10 hours - I'd buy such a watch from Google instead of Garmin just because Google is going to support it for longer (not that Google is known for longevity of its support but it's still better than Garmin's).