Garmin vs shearwater

[Pavao]

You ever read the Garmin Edge forums? My experience is not that unusual.

Ever read ANY product which does not have any problems?

 

[L13]

Fair play.

You're right that there is a workaround and other commenters above are correct that other companies have similar policies. My beef is with this quote from the subsurface website "Based on a specific request from Garmin, we will not be able to support BLE downloads on any platform." Subsurface Divelog It's petty to make (I think) the most expensive dive computers then deliberately inconvenience the customer with silly workarounds. (Workarounds that probably only exist thanks to EU law, so a tip of the hat to me pro-consumer friends across the Atlantic.)

Now I have three options:
1. Import all Garmin dives into subsurface using the csv list, which will shed a bunch of detail but will be quick for me.
2. Import Garmin dives one at a time into subsurface using the .fit conversion which only sheds a bit of detail that isn't too onerous to manually reenter -- a fine solution if I had done this every few dives over the years, but a huge pain if I move all the dives over now.
3. Accept that I didn't keep up with my log and let Garmin store the only copy forever.

Frankly, my plan was #3 until they started introducing/expanding subscriptions all over the ecosystem. Now I wish that I regularly transferred to subsurface from day 1 so that I can more conveniently walk if they take the paywall game too far. I'll just start porting them over a few at a time when I have nothing better to do. It's an annoying and inconvenient chore, but you're absolutely right in stating that "It's really not that difficult."

You forgot option 4. Use the USB cable. That is what I do and it works perfectly on windows and linux (I haven't personally tested it on apple).

 

[brsnow]

You ever read the Garmin Edge forums? My experience is not that unusual.

You ever read the teric issues or replacement thread on here? Internet is an interesting place.

 

[Belzelbub]

Fair play.

You're right that there is a workaround and other commenters above are correct that other companies have similar policies. My beef is with this quote from the subsurface website "Based on a specific request from Garmin, we will not be able to support BLE downloads on any platform." Subsurface Divelog It's petty to make (I think) the most expensive dive computers then deliberately inconvenience the customer with silly workarounds. (Workarounds that probably only exist thanks to EU law, so a tip of the hat to me pro-consumer friends across the Atlantic.)

Yeah, I get it. However, I'm not sure I agree with the reason for the workaround. I'd have to dig through the forums to find the quote, probably from a thread where the MK1 was first introduced. As I recall Dirk, or one of the other Subsurface developers stated that Garmin was actually pretty cooperative with getting them info for being able to download from the watch. They did stipulate that they did not want other apps to use the BLE protocol.

However, if Garmin really wanted to prevent downloading to other apps, they could have done it pretty easily. The fact that they allow export via Connect tells me they are OK with that info being elsewhere.

Yes, BLE is an easier method, but the method I use is really not difficult at all.