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Recent Garmin adopter here.
Just signed up to the months free trial of Connect+ to see if it offers anything useful.
Will no doubt forget to cancel it if it's not worth it, but it's the price of a pint a month.
I'm a sucker for full functionality, so have Strava Premium and even pay to help feed the hamsters here
log it then I have to go into strava and set it to private 3-4 times a day and I don't really want my house / supermarket / office shining like a beacon on the heatmap
Setup Strava with private as the default option. Iirc start and end of rides are automatically hidden now and if not you can set hidden areas easily enough.
Just remember if you set up an exclusion zone around your house, you can't actually get koms in that exclusion zone...... I was really pushing it hard for a couple of weeks before somebody pointed out that there was no way I could get the Kom 🙂
After the initial hooha Connect+ seems to have gone quite (and I've not given it a second thought). I have just noticed an interesting article from the Garmin Newsroom about a new, major feature update for certain smar****ches and selected Edge devices.
All the new features appear to still be free, perhaps allaying some of the fears that future function additions might be paywalled.
The only addition to Connect+'s features appear to be 3D maps and I've no idea whether these will actually be useful or worth paying for.
-- Edit --
STW's eccentric swear filter appears to object to tw*t in any context 🤷♂️
STW's eccentric swear filter appears to object to tw*t in any context 🤷♂️
always been an outlier, why prohibit smar****ches and not s****horpe?
EDIT - s****horpe is no longer allowed either 🙄
It looks like they're starting to stick some useful stuff behind the paywall, like the new Connect annual report.
Thankfully I never paid the annual report much attention as it depressed me to see how little I'd done. Happily ignorant and even less desire to start paying.
I'm also pleased to see that Garmin has stopped trying to persuade me to try Connect+, they've obviously had a look at how crap I am and realised getting me to pay for stuff I'm not going to look at is pointless.
some useful stuff
Meh. Define "useful".
FWIW I already get a good breakdown through VeloViewer, though that's also a separate subscription and requires that I use (free) Strava. As regards Connect+, all these little bits add up I guess. Maybe at some future point they'll add enough that I consider a subscription.
A quick glance suggests that it offers AI powered 'insights'
Strava's take on this is a "meh" from me. I don't need a pep-talk summary to say how great I did on a ride and it's just grabbing some stats and whatever description or comments I give to create some nonsense. I mentioned my head was foggy as in I wasn't in the right place mentally, so it described the ride's weather as foggy (it was a bright clear day) 😄
Seems garmin were late to the party on this, I've been uploading my data out of connect to chatgpt for over a year. Yes I'm a paid user at 20 quid a month for chatgpt (before anyone says it yes, I've got model training turned off) but its my nutritionist, physiotherapist, dietician, training coach, DIY assistant, gardening pro, policy writer, email responser, task planner, work assistant, I could go on and on and on for everything I use it for. I've caned it for the best part of 18 months, working for an AI startup using chatgpt sort of goes hand in hand and when I seen connect+ I was sorta like oh, so it's basically the same as exporting and screenshotting all of my activities and metrics and putting them into GPT for analysis and feedback long term, exactly what I've been doing anyway for the past 18 months with GPT.. OK.
Surely working for an AI start-up you don't need to pay to use the tools? If Connect+ does all the same stuff, why not use that and save a quid or 2 a month?
I've a business account through work that I use on my laptop and a personal account I use on my phone, our org tends to rely heavier on anthropic claude over openAI's offerings though.. But I don't exactly want to be uploading all of my personal data into my orgs chatGPT account, it would be a nightmare for the DPO if I ever decided to issue a DSAR in the future and as such it's written into company policy to use the business chatGPT account for business related use only as OpenAI are vague on their ROPAs and DRPs.
And I don't use Connect+ because ChatGPT offers loads that connect+ doesn't, if I have overuse injuries it can suggest physio excercises based on training load and the cause of the injury, I use terra to feed my nutracheck data over OpenAPI so I can ask my chatgpt "dietary wise what went well last week and what could I improve on?" and get tailored results to say, consume less salt, eat more omega 3 rich foods taking into account my recent excercise load.
The skies the limit, but ChatGPT can do what Connect+ does and a shit ton more!
Actually that does all.sound really interesting and useful...and it does sound like it does far more so that'll explain why you are using it.
Understand your thoughts on using a work account for personal stuff...I was being slightly tongue-in-cheek with my question but your answer has now got me thinking about what I could use it (would be Gemini most likely) for...
it's basically the same as exporting and screenshotting all of my activities and metrics and putting them into GPT for analysis and feedback long term, exactly what I've been doing anyway for the past 18 months with GPT
That sounds like a pretty major faff, though. Nothing like as easy as starting/stopping my activity and all the rest being done on the back end. The loss of Garmin Wrapped (or whatever it was called) is a shame, though. I see the Strava version is also behind a paywall.
It's really interesting that people see value in these 'wrapped' offerings. I've always been a bit meh about them, may be for the reason I dont ride as much as I'd like, but they always felt bit gimmicky.
Strava are now emailing me weekly updates, I need to turn that off in subscription settings.
Garmin tried to push me into lifestyle logging or something the other day, I read the description and it just sounded like an AI filter applied to the current data. I can already infer the outputs from the stats, I don't want Garmin to do it on my behalf.
It's really interesting that people see value in these 'wrapped' offerings. I've always been a bit meh about them, may be for the reason I dont ride as much as I'd like, but they always felt bit gimmicky.
People posting their spotify wrapped reminds me of a feature Greg James (and supermarkets) used to do where listeners would call in and he would guess what their loyalty card statement said, e.g. they were in the top ten buyers of garlic and herb soft cheese in Aylesbury or some such.