GPS Watch? No Thanks. Top Runners Are Ditching the Data | Hacker News Reader

GPS Watch? No Thanks. Top Runners Are Ditching the Data

nytimes.com

8 pointsbookofjoe9 comments

It would be nice if, say, Garmin made a GPS watch that could sync via Bluetooth. It's shocking to me that there's only one on the market in 2023.

What kind of Bluetooth?

Most all of their current watches sync via Bluetooth to app on phone.

No, almost none of them do, unless you can work around it with gadgetbridge on Android.

Instead they sync over the Internet.

If you know of a GPS fitness watch that syncs over Bluetooth (not over the Internet, no account required), I'd be very interested for you to name it.

Garmin Instinct. Optional Bluetooth, stores data locally and is accessible via USB.

Again, no. It only uses Bluetooth for "messaging, alerts and notifications" and to use the phone's Internet.

It does not sync over Bluetooth.

https://www.garmin.com/en-US/p/621802

What the parent comment is saying is that you can connect via usb and access the data that way.

Of course, the easiest way to see the raw data is to write a python script to plot it, so it’s not exactly the most user friendly, but it’s technically possible.

Exactly, I hacked this together to produce GeoJSON from the Garmin Instinct.

https://github.com/arran-nz/fit-geojson

Even better than that, while some of them can sync over wifi directly, most of them sync over Bluetooth, to your app which must be logged in, which does nothing except use the phone’s internet connection to upload the data to garmin, and then the app needs to re-download all the data from garmin’s server before it can be displayed in the app.

So they can sync over Bluetooth… but in a format that garmin’s app can’t use or understand so you must be connected to the internet to actually see the data.

For a device which generally should work with bad/no internet, it’s completely insane.

https://archive.ph/X8fdf

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