If you are not happy with Garmin Connect please read

Sad state of affairs!

I read with dismay the lack of support from fellow Garmin users to the scurge that is Garmin s/ware. Do these people actually work for Garmin???

Yes, the 405 is a fine unit in a dandy package but absolutely no use without being able to analyse the data. My £2.99 Casio will give me the time!! I have logged calls, placed requests on the Forum. All to no avail. Garmin DO NOT LISTEN. That is the Golden Rule of business broken!!!

So, who has noticed that Garmin is stealing your data? Yes, anyone had their device for over one year and then looked to compare times from year to year over the same event/course. Well, news for you .... it is impossible. Go into player and try running an event from over one year ago and display your event with time as the base. Nadda!! Garmin have stolen your time based data!!! Data theft is a major crime as I recall.

So, want to make an impact on Watchdog? Go after the theft of data and see if Garmin will listen.

I await with much interest to see what you can get done. I want my data back.

I vote YES ......

DJBSTEELE: I suggest you take a look at the Terms of Service link at the bottom of the website - specifically the Liability section. Garmin is under no obligation to keep your data or maintain it free from corruption. You use this website at your own risk. This is a fairly typical policy of online services - if you think otherwise, sorry to say you are fooling yourself.

If there is critical training data you wish to keep, you should definitely have a copy stored locally on your computer and that should be backed up along with your other personal documents. Better safe than sorry.

DJBSTEELE,

Please note that I have responded to you in another thread. Garmin has not stolen your data. Garmin will not steal your data. I appreciate your refraining from making further comments such as these.

If something happens and data is lost or skewed we will look into it as soon as we are alerted to the problem. If you received service that you do not feel was on par with expectations, I apologize. The problem has been remedied.

kk

Hi KK,

thank you for looking at the actual data on this. As you will see from another post I do not like barraging you or the forum but I got absolutely nowhere using the Garmin Phone Support. Yes, you have "fixed" the events that I posted but all of the other 12+ month data needs remedied too. The problem will keep occurring at the end of the 12th month post the event. Please advise the steps to remedy (workaround) and when Garmin will put in the proper fix.

Thank you,

JB

If you've got a problem with Garmin Connect, then just go elsewhere...like MapMyRide/MapMyRun, runsaturday, TrainingPeaks, or one of the many other services out there that might meet your needs better? It's simple. .

That would be great except I still want to access my trails that were on motionbased but now can only be accessed here.... sure I could try and export them all and then upload them elsewhere but I had a life and so here I check back now and then hoping in vain for garmin connect to become usable.

I think the lack of response here is due more to most user already being frustrated enough to give up or to only check back every now and than on the off chance a miracle has occurred and things have changed for the better..... Might as well try and find shade in the shaddow of a large herd of air born swine.

The main disappointment - or consumer-related issue is the migration from Motionbased. It may have made sense from a technical perspective to move us over here without all of our data migrated, but not from a consumer standpoint. It's been 4-5 months since we cut over, and I still can't see all my data in one spot.

The main focus of Garmin should have been to get the migration done and over with. I like the fact that they keep adding features to the site, but to put off the migration for months is a bad decision, especially when you consider that some of us were paying members of Motionbased.

GarminConnect is nice. The UI is a step up from Motionbased, but the data tracking and analysis took a true step back. They ought to consult with some focus groups of cyclists such as myself, runners, motorcyclists, etc to see how they would like to use the site.

The other problem is not GarminConnect-related, but an overall documentation problem with Garmin. These devices are extremely powerful and feature-rich, but Garmin really doesn't give you good instructions on how to use it. Even something as simple as a You-Tube video showing how to draw a route in MapSource and use it on the device would be helpful. Or a series of How-To articles with pictures posted on the website. I'll bet they'd sell a bit more of these fitness devices if people really understood what they did. I'll bet that only 5% of their fitness users know how to use the Course features on the Edge and Forerunner devices.

There are some training videos for various units. http://www8.garmin.com/learningcenter/training/index.html

Fitness-specific ones:

FR 405 http://www8.garmin.com/learningcenter/training/forerunner405/
FR 60 http://www8.garmin.com/learningcenter/training/fr60/index.html
Edge 705 http://www8.garmin.com/learningcenter/training/edge705/index.html

Would be nice to see some more, but it's a start.

April

Yes it is definitely terrible but I guess Garmin really does not care. They are VERY clueless. There are so many things they consistently mess-up:
1/ They took MotionBased (an awesome web solution where they even made money with the premium subsricption) and killed it. They took their Garmin Connect (Old code, no clue how to develop) and said they would make it as good as MotionBased. Why take the worse and try to make it as good as the best they had instead of taking the best and making it even better??? At the same time, they complain about loss of income and layoff people. The solution was easy: fire the whole garmin connect (cut cost) and replace with MotionBased: increase both revenues and customers satisfaction. Bottom line, this is an excellent example of what not to do to be teach in an MBA program. (It had to be political: the manager in charge of GC knew his job was on the line so he killed the other product)
2/ Have you ever been using GC when they update it? It is a joke!!! Any web programming company (even a mom&pop shop), develop a second website (first + update + new), keep the original web-site unchanged, debug the second one. When it is "ready", they open it up as a new link from the old site (with a beta site mention - still do not mess with the original site), then when finally all the issues of the beta have been resolved, they replace the old one by the new. GC is much smarter: they dump a whole bunch of new code on their site and it crashes for days at a time. Last time, I could not upload my runs for over a week!!!!
Bottom line, yes, you are right, it is horrible but bottom line it will not change until all the upper management is changed, then all the clueless programmers are replaced..... good luck...
The easiest way is to find another solution on the web and move our data there. Anybody knows anything? I heard that Sporttracks was an outstanding product, unfortunately for me, it only runs on a PC (I have a MAC). I am in the process of installing Parallel on my MAC so I can see if I can run it within Parallel. Any other ideas? Recommendations?

You could try Ascent for the Mac.