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Thank you for the new courses feature, but...

Former Member over 13 years ago

The new courses edit feature is great. The problem is, at least where I live (Israel), the map coverage provided by Microsoft is poor - that's probably an understatement.
See below, for example, a screenshot of the largest metropolitan area in Israel - Tel Aviv. The only mapped roads are highways, and even those don't properly align with the actual aerial photography.

Echoing the sentiment others have already made in this forum: You made a poor choice, from a user perspective, when teaming with Microsoft as maps/GIS provider. Google has a superior product, and also OpenStreetMap

There are alternatives to this service, of course. My personal favorite is GPSies, which I'll, unfortunately, have to keep using. You can can learn a thing or too from that site.

0 Former Member over 13 years ago

i completely second that....i have 0 coverage in my area (Chile South America). when i read about the courses feature i said well that will not work for many people. For me right now it's useless i can not do anything to create a route without streets!!!..let's dream about Garmin going back to google maps!!! or choose to go with openstreetmap

0 stevekn over 13 years ago

Did a run in Brunei a couple of years ago, although not brilliant coverage google maps showed me where I had been, and I could have plotted a route from it.

Bing... no chance.

As I live in London, the normal bing maps are ok, but get away from such metropolis' and Bing is very poor.

Connect give us the choice then monitor which one we use!

0 garminfit over 13 years ago

Garmin is to lazy to go back to gmaps.

0 Former Member over 13 years ago

... give us the choice then monitor which one we use!

But - you do have a choice. Use Google Chrome with the Gfix plugin and Google maps are back, except in the Player.

0 Former Member over 13 years ago

Also there are a few Greasemonkey scripts for Firefox that replace the Bing maps with Google maps. Quite nifty! Find them here: http://userscripts.org/scripts/search?q=garmin+connect&submit=

Enjoy!

0 Former Member over 13 years ago

Garmin is to lazy to go back to gmaps.

It's probably not laziness: I think it took some work to move to Bing maps. And Garmin isn't dumb. If Garmin's product managers and developers have any bit of sense they'd know beforehand that Bing's map coverage is less than stellar.
It's probably something else: It's either greed (i.e. MS paying Garmin to use it's service) or some part of a strategic alliance between the two.

I just hope it's a limited-time exclusive, and that some day in the foreseeable future Garmin will integrate back other, better, services.