Okay. We are back. Welcome back to another episode of distance junkie, the official chase the summit podcast. This is technically episode two, but if you go back on the audio podcast, you'll find, like, 70 episodes of this. I've been doing this for a while.
Dave:If you're new here, this pause podcast is basically a place for me to just talk long form and talk about all the things that don't make it into, like, official videos on the channel. It's kind of like a place where I ramble, and, I do have some topics. I'm not just gonna ramble over nothing. Today, we're gonna be talking about the brand new Garmin Vivoactive six, some of the new features that come along with that because there's a lot. We're gonna be talking about the new Amazfit BIP six, which was just announced and released a couple of days ago.
Dave:We will be talking about some updates coming to the Wahoo KICKR Run treadmill that I'm personally very excited about even though it's springtime here in New England, so I've been running more outdoors. And finally, we will be talking about the heated debate or not the heated debate so much, but a heated topic that is Garmin Connect Plus. And holy smokes, there's a lot to cover there. In either case, this is the distance junkie podcast. I talk about all things here, like the fitness tech I just mentioned, but I also like to talk about, like, my personal journey in ultra running, trail running, my fitness journey, getting older, my kids, anything.
Dave:And soon, we're gonna be having some guests on here as well to talk about all this topic. So if you haven't yet, make sure to subscribe to the channel, to the Chase the Summit channel, because that's where this podcast lives. And make sure to check out the podcast over on your platform of choice, whether that be Apple or Spotify or whatever. It's widely available in audio form everywhere now. Before we get into all these topics, I do wanna give a huge shout out to the Patreon members.
Dave:If you don't know what Patreon is, it's basically just a place where you can help support the channel by contributing a couple of bucks every month. I'm gonna start doing more things over there. I'm thinking maybe, like, weekly podcasts or livestreams or just some behind the scenes content. Check it out. I have it linked down below.
Dave:And, also, I wanna give a shout out to the merch store where you can pick up a sweet chase the summit hat like this. If you're if you're listening audio only. Sorry. We also have where's the other one? Yeah.
Dave:The, nightfall hat as well. Really proud of these hats. We also have T shirts and all kinds of stuff over there. Currently, there is a big sale going on for clearance items. And I do have a discount code for listeners of the podcast that is Listen15LISTEN15.
Dave:We'll give you 15% off your entire order. So check that out in the description down below as well. This podcast doesn't have sponsors yet, so I'm just sort of plugging myself as a sponsor, if that makes sense. Okay. Let's get into some of these topics.
Dave:First up, we've got the new Garmin Vivoactive six. If you're if you've been living under a rock and you missed this announcement, yesterday, the Garmin Vivo act Active six was announced. It goes on sale, I think, on April 4, couple of days from now. And in short, basically, what they did is they took the Vivoactive series and merged a whole bunch of, like, Forerunner and Phoenix features into the Vivoactive lineup. The Vivoactive lineup has historically always been sort of a wellness and, like, general casual fitness device, and now they've really added a lot of features to morph it into more of a dedicated sport and running watch, which I'm pretty excited about.
Dave:The cool thing here is from the Vivoactive five, which came out about a year ago to the six, the price remains the same. It comes in at $299 here in The USA, which is the same as the Vivoactive five, but you do get a lot more for your money here. Things that are the same between the five and the six, you get a 1.2 inch AMOLED touch enabled display. That display is slightly brighter. And then the case size itself is the same.
Dave:So it's I think it's a 42 millimeter watch. Not a whole lot changed in terms of, like, the look and design. Comes in four different colors. It does come with the same Garmin generation four heart rate sensor, which is kind of a bummer. Like, I feel like when they came out with that new gen five heart rate sensor that you'll find on, like, the Phoenix models here, it was the opportunity to put that on, like, all of the new stuff.
Dave:But now in 2025, we're still seeing that gen four heart rate sensor used. They used it on the Garmin Instinct three back in January, and now again on this Vivoactive six. Not a huge deal. It's still a pretty good hot rate sensor in my testing, but you do miss, like, the ECG functionality and the wrist temperature functionality and things like that. But, like, generally, the heart rate sensor is pretty good still.
Dave:You do get eleven days of battery life in twenty one hours in a GPS activity, which is the same as the Vivoactive five and the same weight coming in at just 23 grams, which is a very light watch. Let's talk about some of the new stuff. Now the standout feature, just kind of odd. The big standout feature on the Vivoactive six is a new smart alarm. It's not, like, super smart.
Dave:When I when I first read this headline about the smart alarm coming to the Vivoactive six, I thought it was gonna be some sort of alarm based on, like, your sleep activity. Like, if you had a bad night of sleep, maybe had a sleep score of 50 or something, the watch would detect that and then, like, maybe delay your alarm a little bit. I I don't know if people would actually want that because typically if you're setting an alarm, you wanna wake up. What this does, this new smart alarm feature is basically a way to set your alarm. So say you set it for 6AM or something like that.
Dave:This smart alarm will gently vibrate the watch on your wrist for thirty minutes prior to that set alarm. So it's sort of a way to gracefully wake up, like gently wake you up from a from a dead sleep, rather than just a jarring alarm going off on your watch. It's an interesting idea, and it's it's odd that it's only new to the Vivoactive six at this time. But typically, with Garmin watches, what they do is when there's a new watch, they'll, like, a standout feature to it. And then down the road, we'll see that added to other watches via firmware.
Dave:So if you have a Fenix eight or a Forerunner or something, I would expect we see this, like, within a couple of months. It'll be added to the beta firmware and and then added to all the watches from there. But, you know, interesting interesting idea, and hopefully, works well. And then other than than that, we do get a completely new user interface on the Vivoactive six. The the interface in the past on these Vivo models, like I said, it was very, like, user friendly and colorful, and they kinda designed it more towards, like, general wellness and casual fitness.
Dave:Now they've kinda changed the user interface, so now it looks a lot like a phoenix model. So if you have a Garmin phoenix eight or an epix or something like that, it looks very similar, although they still tweak the design a little bit to have more of a, like, bubbly appearance. The corners are on a lot of the widgets are rounded. Some of the graphics are more colorful. Just a little bit more, I don't know, happier, I guess.
Dave:So a new user interface generally speaking overall. And, some of the bigger deals here is that they added 50 plus sport profiles to the Vivoactive six. This was a huge issue on the Vivoactive five and previous Vivoactive models where they kinda crippled the watch by not adding a whole lot of activities. For example, you could go for a run or a bike ride. But if you wanted to do more niche activities, they'd be completely missing.
Dave:So they added those to the six. Now I believe you can do things like hiking and trail running and things like that where previously those were activities missing. And on top of that, the more advanced running dynamics have been added. So now you're gonna get wrist based running power. You're gonna get vertical oscillation, ground contact time, left right balance.
Dave:Like, all those things you'd get on the higher end garments are now on the Vivoactive model. And another big new feature coming to the Vivoactive six is, course routing. So navigation and mapping. Again, on Vivoactive or anything with Vivo in the title or even Venue in the title, typically, you would not get mapping or navigation. Now don't get too excited here because this is a very limited form of mapping where it's gonna be that breadcrumb map.
Dave:Breadcrumb mapping means there's no base map. You're not gonna see roads or trails or bodies of water, anything like that. You're just gonna see a little squiggly line that represents where you are. And if you import a route or create a route in Garmin Connect, you'll be able to follow that in real time with a little arrow indicating where you are. Still very, very useful.
Dave:Glad it's added, particularly to the Vivoactive six because it's not a super cheap watch, and we'll talk about the price in a minute. Or I already mentioned the price. $2.99. So at $299, it's cool to see that Garmin's finally realized they need to add navigation and mapping, basically because everyone else is doing it. If you go to a KOROS, you can buy their cheapest model like the Pace, the Pace three right now, and that'll get you breadcrumb navigation.
Dave:And on the other hand, if you look at something like a MazeFit, which we're gonna talk about in this episode today, for as low as, like, 50 to $80, you'll get mapping and navigation. So at $300, they definitely need to add that from here on going forward. Now some of the interesting things here, there's a few other details like the workout animations are now in the Vivoactive six. You get a new activity for mobility, for flexibility and strength. Cool, I guess.
Dave:Not something I'll probably use. And there's some other Nuance features like you get more storage, eight gigabytes versus the previous four gigabytes, more satellite systems, even though the general GPS system is the same. It's not a dual frequency or dual band system. And you do get more data pages allowed per activity and data fields per page. This was a big annoyance to me on previous Vivoactive or other models like the Venue series, where Garmin would only limit your data pages to four pieces of information despite putting, like, these super high resolution screens on the watches that could handle way more detail because of the high resolution in in OLED screen, you were limited to four.
Dave:Now on the Vivoactive six, they changed that so you can add eight pieces of information or eight data fields per page. Welcome. I'm happy about that. And, again, all for the same price as the older model. So all good things here.
Dave:The one thing that's kind of a standout odd feature to me is they did add daily suggested workouts to the Vivoactive six, which is a cool feature and something I'm I've been testing out on the higher end models for a while. But they only limited the daily active the daily suggested workouts to the walking activity. So you can do a daily suggested workout for walking, but apparently not running. And I thought that was odd to leave out because, personally, in the circle of friends I have, despite them being athletes or not, I don't know a whole lot of people doing, like, walking activities. But maybe you do.
Dave:And if you do, it's there. So if you were looking yesterday for my review or initial hands on experience with the Vivoactive six, they didn't send me one. But I do have one in the mail. So, hopefully, in the very near future, I'll have a video up, with my full experience of the Vivoactive six. But for now, I'm just reading the specs and reacting to them.
Dave:And, generally, I'm I'm pretty happy with them. I mean, at $300, there's so much competition now that makes basically, if you look at a $300 watch in the climate, the the landscape of of watches right now, there are things like the KOROS Pace Pro that has more features arguably in, like, terms of being a sport watch. You've got the Suunto Race S, and both these watches are $350, the Pace Pro and the Suunto Race S. They both have mapping, like real mapping where you get a base map. It's not routable maps, but still it's there.
Dave:And in the case of the Suunto Race S, it's a much nicer watch. Like, the the build quality, you've got metal bits, and it's just more premium compared to the Garmin Vivoactive six here. The Vivoactive six is, of course, made completely out of plastic with a Gorilla Glass lens. The Syntaur Recess, you get metal bits. It feels a little bit more premium in the hand.
Dave:But I do think we're talking about different different users here. Right? Like, if you're interested in this Garmin Vivoactive six, you're probably gonna be prioritizing things like your daily health and well-being, and that's really where Garmin excels. You get things like body battery, stress tracking. All those things are just a little bit more fine tuned on Garmin as compared to their competitors, but the competitors are catching up.
Dave:So, you know, what happens with the Garmin Vivoactive seven down the road? I don't know. Will these other competitors get better wellness features that will be comparable and make this a harder sell? I don't know. I guess time will tell.
Dave:But for now, the Vivoactive six, I think, is a pretty compelling device, and I'm excited to try it out. So the next thing is a good segue into the next new thing that came this week, and that is the Amazfit six. So think about everything I just said about the the Vivoactive six and all the features and specs at $3,300, 2 hundred and 90 9 dollars here in The USA. The Amazfit BIP six comes in at $79. 7 9 here in The USA, of course.
Dave:So we're talking an $80 watch. And when you look at the landscape of $80 watches right now, you're typically gonna end up with some piece of garbage from a no name brand on Amazon or Ally Allied Express or something like that. No offense if you're using those watches and you like them, but, you know, from what I've seen, from those offerings, they don't offer a lot in terms of, like, usable data. So here comes the Amazfit BIP six. And Amazfit is a brand that just keeps getting better and better over time.
Dave:And I'm curious to try this one out. I don't have one yet, again, in the mail. I'll be testing and reviewing, and you'll see a video on the channel about that soon. But this watch for $79 gets you an aluminum bezel, a plastic case, so slightly better build quality than the Vivoactive six we just talked about. Comes in at 28 grams, which is insanely light and similar in weight to the Vivoactive six and gets you two weeks of battery life on a single charge along with pretty impressive GPS battery life.
Dave:You've got built in GPS with five satellite systems, and you do get a 1.97 inch rectangular AMOLED touch enabled display with 2,000 nits of brightness, which I think is actually brighter than the Vivoactive six I just talked about. But Garmin doesn't tote their brightness as a spec on their spec sheet, so I wouldn't know officially. But from what I've seen, I think this is a little bit brighter. It's also waterproof and has offline maps actual offline maps with a base map. So you will see roads, trails.
Dave:You'll see road names and little text on the map that's been added to Amazfit watches in a recent update a little while ago. And you do get smart notifications along with a built in microphone and speaker. So you can talk to ZepFlow, which is their AI assistant. You can interact with your phone, and you can take a main take and make phone calls from your phone by talking into your watch. Again, a feature not available on the Garmin Vivoactive six.
Dave:So we've got these two watches here, the BIP six coming in at $79 and the Garmin Vivoactive six coming in at $299. And as you can see, the spec sheets, like, reading the text here, it's kinda crazy where that $79 watch excels as compared to the Garmin. The Garmin definitely has some advantages. Right? Like, I've talked about this in many Amazfit videos where I review the Amazfit T Rex three or whatever.
Dave:It's got some shortcomings. Like, their their readiness score, their estimated v o two max, even their sleep score is a little bit wonky. Like, I could have a terrible night of sleep wearing an Amazfit watch, and it will still tell me I did pretty good. Like, I have a score of 80 out of a hundred, or I wake up feeling terrible in my whoop band or my Garmin is showing that I feel terrible with a low body battery or a low recovery score in whoop. But on Amazfit, it will still tell me I've got pretty good recovery.
Dave:So that's one area where a we Amazfit really needs to focus in and refine their product and their their software and algorithms is on the their readiness score, the estimated VO two max, all of the behind the scenes data. But with that being said, if you if you are looking for just a watch to track your runs and bike rides, get a good amount of data, have the ability to pair with external sensors, get offline mapping, all that stuff has become pretty solid on recent Amazfit products. Even their heart rate sensors have gotten a lot better. So I am excited to try out the new Amazfit BIP six. Interestingly, though, I was able to go hands on with this watch back in January of this year when I attended CES or the consumer electronics show.
Dave:Amazfit had the BIP six there, like a little demo unit that I was I was able to go hands on with and play with a little bit. And from what I saw there, it was pretty impressive for this price point. So stay tuned for reviews on both the Vivoactive six and the BIP six in the very near future. Okay. The next topic I got for you today is from Google and Fitbit.
Dave:If you're a Fitbit user, you're gonna wanna play pay close attention to this. So if you have a Fitbit watch or you're a Google Pixel watch user using Fitbit, I don't think this would apply to you, but pay attention anyways. Google's issued a big warning to Fitbit users. You need to migrate your Fitbit account to a Google account in the near future, or you're gonna lose data. You need to do this by 02/02/2026, so you've got some time.
Dave:But if you don't do this and you keep your Fitbit account without a Google account, you're gonna lose your data. That's a quick one for you. And finally, we've got one more quick topic for you. This one, I wanted to make a video about, but I didn't get around to doing it. This pertains to the Wahoo KICKR RUN treadmill.
Dave:So if you missed it, I posted a review about the Wahoo KICKR RUN, I wanna say about a month ago now. It's a treadmill I really like. It's got automatic incline and decline. It's compatible with Zwift in in a bunch of different apps on Apple TV or on your laptop or on your iPad for that matter. And overall, just a really nice treadmill, and both my wife and I trained on the Kickr Run basically through the entire winter using the treadmill.
Dave:So if you haven't seen the review video, go check it out. But if you did watch that review video about the Kickr Run, you'll you'll see near the end where I talk about some of the shortcomings, that one of the biggest shortcomings in the Kickr Run platform is lack of features within the Wahoo app directly for the Kickr Run. And the problem is Wahoo is primarily a company that makes bike trainers, cycling accessories, things like that, and they don't really specialize in treadmills. Now they do. So they've been making this for a while now, and now there's been a major update to the app to incorporate more features.
Dave:One big complaint I had in my full review that I have on the channel is that you need to use third party apps to really get the most out of the treadmill. For example, there's an automatic incline and decline function of the treadmill that works with Zwift. But if you wanna use it with with Zwift, you have to pay $20 a month in order to get that feature, and you're really only paying for that one feature. Just kind of strange. Watch the review if you wanna hear the full breakdown on that.
Dave:And then on the other hand, there's other apps out there like, KinoMap, which is really cool. But, again, that is a paid subscription. And from what I saw in the comments on that video is a lot of people like the idea of the treadmill and the quality of the build and everything because it it's it's a total tank, but they didn't wanna pay for additional subscriptions on top of the treadmill. And it almost seemed like a lot of people thought you had to pay for subscriptions, but that's not totally true. When you buy this treadmill, the Wahoo KICKR Run for $5,000 USD, it's a pretty expensive treadmill, you you get the Wahoo app on your phone for free.
Dave:And that Wahoo app has a lot to it. You can open up a dashboard and see all of the metrics while you're running, like your ground contact time, your distance, your speed, and everything. But what it lacked before was any, like, form of training, like a training database to do workouts or even creating your own workouts. It was kinda lackluster there. So now in a big Wahoo KICKR RUN update within the app, within the Wahoo app now, they've added a few things.
Dave:First of all, before this all happened, you could still create a workout in TrainingPeaks, and then import that into Wahoo and execute that on the treadmill. And that worked totally fine. But now with this big update, you can actually import a GPX file from any source. This could be from Strava if you're, like, using the course creation tool. You could even do this in Garmin Connect and export the GPX file from there or use something like Gaia GPS or Komoot and get a GPX file from there.
Dave:You can actually do this with saved activities, which is interesting, and we'll talk about that more in a minute. But with these GPX files, after you import them, the Wahoo app will actually overlay that GPX file on map data, and then it'll get the elevation of that course. So for example, here, I live in Massachusetts. So if I went and I downloaded the GPX file of the bat the Boston Marathon route, I could take that GPX file, import it into Wahoo, and then execute that on the treadmill. And what that will do, it was it will actually simulate the incline and decline of that route that I've created.
Dave:So in the case of Boston Marathon, I could run Heartbreak Hill virtually on the treadmill and simulate that, and get the experience of what that will feel like. Of course, running outside versus a treadmill is different, but still the feature is really cool. And on top of that, like I said before, you'll see recent activities pop up within the Wahoo app as well. And not just Wahoo activities. For example, my Garmin activities have recently been popping up in the Wahoo app as well.
Dave:And what this allows me to do is take a recent activity I did. Maybe I do hill repeats or something like that, and I wanna simulate that workout that I did outdoors on the treadmill. I can take that activity, save it at as a route within the Wahoo app, and then I can execute that on the treadmill. So you can take recent workouts. You can take GPX files and import them into the Wahoo app and and do it on the treadmill, which is really cool.
Dave:And the other update that another piece to this puzzle is, again, in the past, they were sort of missing, like, running specific workouts within the Wahoo app. Those have been added too. So now in the Wahoo app, you'll find a full library of workouts that you can do on the treadmill. These are things like interval runs or, like, hill repeats or all kinds of things. There's a whole library of different workouts you can do available for free within the app.
Dave:And all the stuff I just mentioned is free once you buy the treadmill. So there's no subscription. You don't need a third party app to do this stuff, and I think that's a huge advantage. I think this is also a good signal to us, the users, if you did buy this very expensive treadmill, that behind the scenes, they're working on improving it, and hopefully, it gets better over time. Again, if you haven't seen the full review, go check it out and take this little tidbit of information that I shared here with you when you watch that video.
Dave:Because when I criticize it near the end of the video, you can sort of ignore that and insert what I just talked about here, if that makes sense. So that's the Wahoo Kick a Run. The the last thing I wanna bring up in this podcast today is Garmin Connect Plus. And I'm honestly kind of afraid to even talk about it because it's a kind of a can of worms. And so if you haven't seen it yet, Garmin Connect Plus is Garmin's new paid subscription tier within Garmin Connect.
Dave:So if you have a Garmin Forerunner or Phoenix or Venue or Vivoactive or any Garmin device at all, this is a new paid option available to you. The important thing to remember is it's optional, and everything you had prior to this being launched is still available. So if you're a Phoenix user, you still have all of your stuff, your training readiness, your training load, your training status, all of your activity data. You can create reports behind the scenes, see your v o two max trended over time. All that's still there.
Dave:This new Garmin Connect Plus feature, this paid tier within Garmin Connect, it basically just adds five core features. You get their AI tidbits called active intelligence, which I just made a whole video about. It basically just, like, takes all of your metrics and uses AI to create a little paragraph to truncate it all into one digestible thing for you to read. It's sort of hit or hit or miss. Definitely watch my active intelligence video if you wanna learn more about that.
Dave:But, you know, the idea is it's similar to what Strava is doing, where when you go on a run, it looks at your pace and heart rate and maybe gives you some insight on what that activity did for your health. There's also live activity, which allows you to mirror the data from your watch over to your phone for indoor workouts. There is enhancements to the live track feature, which is they're actually pretty cool. It allows you to send a text message to your friends and family when you start an activity, and then they can view your location and activity in real time on a map while you're out there running your marathon or something like that. They added new social features, which are kinda silly in my opinion.
Dave:There's some new badges and and competitions and challenges you can take part in as a paid subscriber, and you can put a little frame around your avatar within Garmin Connect. Now personally for me, I don't use a lot of the social features in Garmin Connect because I use Strava, and Strava is way more social first than Garmin Connect. But if you are someone in Garmin Connect and utilize those features, maybe you're you'll make sense of this. And finally, there is a new performance dashboard. The performance dashboard is basically an enhanced version of Garmin's report.
Dave:So if you go on their website and you wanna make a report of your distance trended over time or your v o two max trended over time, you can now do that in the performance dashboard with way more features and way more customization, and it's honestly really good. Like, the performance dashboard alone is probably my favorite feature in this whole Garmin Connect Plus thing. But that brings me to the conversation of the price and the frustration of the users of Garmin Connect Plus or Garmin Connect in general. So Garmin's whole allure. But first, let's talk about the price.
Dave:The price is $6.99 a month here in The USA and $69 a year if you wanna pay annually. And so what happened was they launched this. I made my first video about it. That video got, like, 40 plus thousand views in a couple of days, which is kinda crazy. And people the general consensus of the users in the comments that I saw in that video is I can only classify this as outrage.
Dave:Garmin Connect Plus, like, single handedly lit the Internet on fire. And I mean that in there's almost no exaggeration there. So if you Google this, you go on Reddit, you go on Facebook groups, you look on the comments on YouTube even, it seems like universally, everyone's pretty mad about this. And I do get it, but I also don't know if there's, a huge cause for concern yet. So the frustration that I'm seeing from the users is the advantage to buying a Garmin watch for a long time, historically speaking, was you pay a premium for the watch.
Dave:They're expensive. You know, the one I'm wearing here is the Tactics eight. This thing's like $1,400. That's very expensive. So at that price, you sort of expect that you don't have to pay a subscription after you buy something like this.
Dave:And I tend to agree with you on that. And Garmin's not new to subscriptions. Like, if you look around, there's the Garmin InReach subscription. That is a pretty expensive subscription, but you're paying for a satellite service for satellite communication. That obviously has some overhead, and we need to pay for that.
Dave:There's even something like the Garmin four hundred nine forty five LTE that came out several years ago, and that was an LTE enabled watch that would allow you to share your location or send messages, without your phone nearby. And, again, that came with a subscription that was, like, $5 a month, and that made sense because we have an LTE. You're having a you it's basically a cell phone chip on your wrist that also costs Garmin something to send those messages. There's other examples of this, the Garmin bounce, which is a kid's watch. My kids actually use those.
Dave:Those have a subscription. But, again, they're LTE enabled. So to pay for that for Garmin to pay for that to use the satellite systems, which I think they use Verizon, they have to pay overhead. So we have to sort of pay to allow them to enable that service. That all makes sense.
Dave:But here, we're looking at Garmin Connect, and we're looking at features that, to be frank, I think should be free to all Garmin users with the exception of the AI thing. So if you don't know about AI and how it works or large language models, however you wanna word it, The ML or LLMs or AI, it's it's all kind of a blur at this point. But for a company like Garmin to leverage these AI features, they have to pay every time they use a token, I think they call it. I'm not an AI expert, by the way. This is just how I extend understand it.
Dave:So every time you query active intelligence, Garmin's AI feature, they're sending that behind the scenes to their large language model or some sort of token, and that costs money for every time they do that. Every transaction that happens between Garmin's Connect and the AI stuff, that costs money to them. So for that one example, that specific thing with active intelligence, I sort of get why they would wanna charge a subscription for that. But then if we look at some of these other features, live activity, that's the ability to mirror your watch activity to your phone. I feel like that should be free.
Dave:You own the watch. You own your phone. Garmin Connect is already there. There's no third party involved, and this is something that other competing brands are already doing. Apple does this.
Dave:It's included with your Apple Watch purchase on your iPhone. You can mirror the data to your phone and use it as a bike computer or something like that. Khoros also does does this where you can mirror your data from your your watch to your phone pretty much the same way. Garmin does have some advantages here. Like, they show workout animations and stuff included in that that live activity thing, which is kinda interesting.
Dave:But largely, again, I think this should be a a free feature. Now if we look at the live track enhancements. Live track enhancements allow you to send text messages and have a custom profile where you can set your own URL. For example, I could make my URL be Garmin.com/Dave or something like that. And then I could give that link to friends and family.
Dave:They could visit my page whenever and see all of my live activities. And if I was doing something like a stage race where I'm going out every day for, like, 30 plus miles, that could be a really useful feature. Now if I was trying to put on my Garmin hat, I guess this feature, you could lump as something that should cost money because they are creating custom URLs, making you a web page, and sending text messages, are not free for them to send. So I'll get I'll give them that. The the live track enhancements may be behind the paywall.
Dave:Though, I I still think with their profit margin, they could probably make this free. The social features. The with the unique badges and frames for your profile. Okay. Stick that behind the paywall.
Dave:I you know, again, I'm not a huge I I don't use that stuff. So whatever. Now the performance dashboard. This is a huge one because if you're a Garmin Connect user, you know that the platform at large hasn't changed dramatically for several years. They did an app refresh about a year ago where they kind of changed the layout of the app.
Dave:A lot of people didn't like it. Some people liked it. I don't mind it. But the reporting system built into Garmin Connect has been the same for, like, ten years. It works fine, but to be honest, it feels kinda outdated at this point, and I'd love to see it updated.
Dave:So now we get this performance dashboard feature as part as part of Garmin Connect Plus, which is literally just a better version of Garmin's own reporting feature. So you can make better graphs. You can compare things over time, and it's just better in every way. And I'm here scratching my head. Like, why does that have to be a paid a paid feature?
Dave:You know, they've had a lot of time to develop a new version of the reporting within Garmin Connect. This one with the performance dashboard, I think should be free. But, again, I don't work for Garmin, so I'm not I can't make these decisions for them. At the end of the day, I don't know if it's something we need to worry about yet. Yes.
Dave:Some of these features features should absolutely be free. Performance dashboard to be one example of this. But if you liked how Garmin Connect worked before this, we still have all those features now for free with the purchase of a watch. Nothing has changed there. And I see a lot of comments with a lot of concern that down the road, they think Garmin is gonna start moving stuff behind the paywall.
Dave:And I don't think that will happen. I think that would be a huge problem for Garmin for them to take something like training readiness or, training status and put that behind the paywall because their competitors are doing that for free. It would be a it would be a real challenge for them to ask a premium price for their watches and a subscription for basic information that we already get. I don't think that's gonna happen. Where my concern lies with Garmin Connect Plus is the future.
Dave:Right? I use this example in one of my videos. A couple of years ago, Garmin rolled out the training readiness feature on their watches, where it it basically uses an algorithm to look at all of your recent data from your activities to your sleep, to your v o two max, whatever, and rolls it up into basically a training readiness value from zero to a hundred to let you know how ready you are to take on more training on that particular day. And I find it to be very useful. My concern with Garmin Connect Plus is if they need another feature that is kinda like training readiness or some other new algorithm or new thing that they could come up with over at Garmin HQ.
Dave:Now that Garmin Connect Plus exists, would they move that behind the paywall? And that's I think that's where my concern lies. The the fact that moving forward, will all development in Garmin be for the paid premium subscription model, or will they continue to develop new features for the free model? But this goes back to what I just said, where right now, I don't think there's a lot to worry about. The question is, one year from now, will there be something to worry about?
Dave:But there is another side to this whole conversation about Garmin Connect Plus. And here, I will put on my optimism hat and try to look at this optimistically. For a long time, Garmin watches have been tiered in a way where when you pay more, you get more features. Right? So in order to get training readiness, for example, you'd need to buy a higher end watch like a Forerunner two sixty five or nine sixty five or a Phoenix, where if you opted for the inexpensive one sixty five, you know, for a couple hundred bucks, you don't get those advanced features.
Dave:And along with that, you don't get advanced metrics like your running power or ground contact time, vertical oscillation. Like, those things aren't available on the cheaper watches. And Garmin always did this in a way where it's a software feature missing from a hardware device. And a lot of the competitors don't do this. If we look at something like KOROS, KOROS takes the same software, and the same software is available on a $200 piece three all the way up to the $700 VERTIX two s.
Dave:Same software. The only difference between their watches is that it will be a hardware limitation. So you pay more to get more battery life and more features and better GPS or altimeter or whatever. The only difference between Chorus watches is going to be hardware related things. Maybe the processor isn't good enough to handle maps.
Dave:On the Pace three, they can't add maps. But on their other watches that can handle it, it will be added. So it's a hardware line draw drawn in the sand. If we look at Garmin or even Apple, for example. If you look at Apple, it's the same thing.
Dave:You buy an Apple Watch SE, you get the same software as the Apple Watch Ultra. That is significantly more money. Now jumping back to Garmin, they don't do that. They basically use the software as a way to drive upgrades. So if you want more features, you have to pay more.
Dave:The software is different on a Fenix than it is on a Forerunner one sixty five, and they use that to delineate their their product silos. Right? And that's been a source of frustration for a lot of users out there, particularly if you're shopping. Because if you go on Garmin's website, there's, like, you know, 30 different SKUs, 30 different models. Do I buy an Instinct?
Dave:Do I buy a Forerunner? Do I get a Venue? Do I get a Phoenix? And the difference between them isn't, like, super clear unless you're a nerd like me. But I wonder with Garmin Connect Plus there.
Dave:Right? It's another revenue stream for Garmin. It could bring their stocks up and maybe make the difference in hardware negligible to a point where maybe they start adding the same features from the top tier watches to the lower tier watches. And I say this because what we talked about in this episode. The Garmin Vivoactive six is a $300 watch, and they added almost all the features they could to it at a software level to make it almost like a forerunner.
Dave:Could that be the beginning of them adding more software features to their lower end watches? And is that because they of this new revenue stream they have from Connect Plus? Time will tell. I don't know. Again, that's just me being optimistic about the whole situation, and maybe that not that's not gonna happen, but it could be the silver lining to Connect Plus.
Dave:Yeah. I don't know. I mean, I know a lot of you are are frustrated about this, and I do understand the concern. And a lot of you are upset over the principle of the thing that you bought into an ecosystem knowing you paid a premium for the watch itself, and now they're asking for a subscription and putting things behind a paywall where you feel like you're entitled to them. And I think that's another thing they could have done better.
Dave:This is sort of a rant, but I think with Connect Plus, if they rolled this out and they announced that all, Garmin Fenix users get a free year of Connect Plus, or with your purchase of a top tier watch like a Fenix, you get a free year. I think that would make this feel I think the sting would be less painful, where knowing if you do decide to go in for one of the less expensive watches like a foreigner $1.65, maybe then you have to pay for the subscription. But if you buy the top tier, you get it for free. That's my rant. I think I've talked about Garmin Connect enough for this week between making two videos about it and responding to hundreds of comments about it.
Dave:I hope you get where I'm coming Anyways, I think that's all I've got for you this week in terms of news and rants and conversation in another episode of the distance junkie podcast. Stay tuned for more from this podcast. We're gonna have some guests on, and I'll be doing these weekly updates trying to keep you in the loop as to what's going on as best I can. We've got a lot going on in the very near future. Things are certainly picking up as spring approaches and more product releases are coming and firmer updates, and I think it's going to be a very busy spring.
Dave:But until then, I appreciate you for watching this podcast. And if you wanna listen to the audio audio only version, I highly suggest you check it out on Apple or Spotify. Follow me over there. Leave a five star review or thumbs up or whatever you can do on Apple or Spotify or any of those podcast platforms. And make sure to subscribe and follow the Chase the Summit channel for lots of new videos coming very soon.
Dave:And once again, I'll give one more plug to the merch store. If you haven't yet, check it out at ChasetoSummit.com, or you can get a sweet hat like this, a T shirt, a hoodie, and, of course, use that discount code at of listen 15, l I s t e n one five, for 15% off your order. One more thing. If you have a suggestion for the podcast or a new format or someone I should talk to as a guest, leave that in the comments down below. I'd love to hear from you.
Dave:And, until then, till next time. How do I end this? Yeah. I'll end it now. Bye.
