Does that mean a Rolex would get bumped by a lowly Garmin as well? I get what you mean and in short, Garmin's are there for one purpose only....and thats activity monitoring. I personally do not think that the Apple Watch will ever replace a Garmin for those seriously interesting in fitness. What it will do is provide an all round device that should give people a good experience of fitness tracking amongst other things like notifications.
Have you tried any of the other apps like Nike or Strava etc, not sure if they give better tracking information.
Of course the Rolex would have to sit in its winder contraption while I was out for a run. I would expect this. But I would not expect to fork over twice the money for a device that alleges to do fitness but does a mediocre job of it for my needs.
I have tried most of the available iOS running, biking and walking apps. To varying degrees, they all do a great job on a sunny day in the summer but at this time they all suffer from the limitation of not locking the AW screen to avoid shirt-sleeve swipes. Locking the screen inside the Workout app is a new feature under WatchOS 2.0. Please note that this is not just a problem when running. This will affect many thousands of users this coming winter when they have heavy coats and gloves putting their Apple Watches into unexpected configurations and they glance down expecting to see the time and find they are staring at a weather screen or stock report. This has happened to me already. It's a poor user experience to have to put down whatever I'm holding in my other hand so I can fiddle with my watch to get it into the mode it should have stayed in from the last time I glanced at it.
When I contacted Runmeter (Abvio) support about this feature, they seemed unaware of the ability to lock the screen so it may not even be documented or even exposed in the WatchOS 2.0 API currently available to third party developers. Considering the sad state of the workout app, Apple has dropped the ball on this one for anyone doing running, walking, skiing or cross-fit wearing long sleeves and who wants anything more than the ability to take a badly cropped screenshot of their results.
I disagree that AW cannot (eventually) replace a Garmin. I logged close to 700 miles without a problem and only when I started wearing long sleeves did I encounter this "watch going off in the weeds" syndrome. It took me over a week to figure out it was my shirt sleeve swiping my AW on my behalf. I believe Apple will either improve their workout app or allow developers access to the API to lock the screen or both. Then they will have a serious fitness device as I doubt the inertial and GPS sensors in a Garmin are any more sophisticated than those in AW. The difference is the software and for AW, software updates can be pulled down over the air.
iPods and iPhones suffered from similar "infancy" issues at the time of their introduction but they were later fixed. Remember copy/paste being missing from iPhone? Now it's there. Remember being unable to create groups of icons? Now you can create groups within groups. Remember being unable to run a third party keyboard or an ad blocker in iOS? Those features are now available (though Ad blocking is admittedly in its infancy).
That the AW is not as good at being a workout watch than the Garmin has little to do with the relative prices of the two devices, or whether one is high-end or low-end. The Garmin is a dedicated device that has only one purpose, to monitor runs. It's not so surprising that it does that one job well.
I think where the Apple Watch excels is for people like me, who was never interested enough in fitness to buy a dedicated fitness tracker. But having bought the Apple Watch for other purposes (in my case notifications), I find I like its activity tracking, and it has helped me get more active.
I must agree that the built in activity reminders are a boon to most users. This is where AW shines. It has brought fitness awareness to the average person. The main reason I don't like activity is I'm already active and don't need the reminders. The notifications take over my Apple Watch screen when I would much rather glance down and see my time,distance and pace. I do believe the AW will evolve to replace the garmin just as it evolved to replace Garmin and Tomtom dedicated nav units in cars. It's only a matter of time.
In the attached screenshots, I compare the Garmin default screen (first image) with the more informative Runmeter default screen (second image) and the workout default screen(third image). Runmeter also offers roughly a dozen other views on Apple Watch and still more on its companion iPhone app. Both Runmeter and Garmin auto-upload run data, including GPS, pace, splits and elevation to their respective web sites so they are viewable in an ordinary web browser. Note I did not purchase the Garmin heart monitor as I await the time Apple exposes the heart rate API to third party running apps and for practice runs in short sleeves, the Apple Watch works well enough. If I like, I can run workout on my Apple Watch and Runmeter on my iPhone, though setting goal distance in workout requires I hit "+" on the touchscreen 100 times to set the distance for a mere 10 mile run! I would have to do this 262 times for a marathon. I don't think so. Imagine standing at the starting line when I'm supposed to be thinking about which wave I should start with I'm hitting "+" 262 times (fourth image).
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