Garmin Forerunner 305
Friday, December 21st, 2007For my birthday back in October I received a Garmin Forerunner 305. The Forerunner is a GPS training device. It’s targeted at runners, cyclists, and other outdoor enthusiasts. It allows me to continually monitor distance, pace, elevation, and heart-rate information all “at a glance”. It’s really awesome, and pretty geeky.
I’ve found the Forerunner to be extremely freeing. It allows me to try new routes without having to worry about exactly how far I have been or when I might need to think about turning around. No more sweaty trips in my car attempting to figure out how far I’ve been. The pace information also helps keep me honest when it comes to training. I have a tendency to relax a bit too much.
Garmin ships an application called the “Training Center” along with the Forerunner which serves as a management console of sorts, and training log. The “Training Center” is not nearly as cool as the device itself; in fact it’s a bit underwhelming. However, it does support OS X, which is cool.
If the “Training Center” does not meet your needs then you can also make use of Garmin’s online tool Motion Based (for a small fee of course). I’ve played with Motion Based a bit, but have not yet found it compelling enough to actually pay for. It seems to me that Motion Based could be so much better than it is. Hopefully Garmin is looking at significantly retooling it.
Garmin is also making some strides related to development tool support for their products. Thus making it easier for 3rd party application developers to access device data and get it into other tools. Tonight I spent some time playing around with the Garmin Communicator Plugin, which allows you to interact with a Garmin device via javascript in your browser. It’s freakin’ awesome. I wish I had more time to play 