Get Up – A Book Encouraging Us to Stand and Move More.

Get Up – A Book Encouraging Us to Stand and Move More.

Byrichard

What do snails have to do with chairs, I wondered as I listened to a book speaking about our addiction to sitting and chairs. It turns out that snails and other animals are programmed to move, walk, slither or other in an individual way. He started, by discussing sleeping in class, and having chalk thrown at him. Movement is an integral part of our lives and apparently, and as we have seen, children move a lot more than adults.


I have barely started the book Get Up but I’m writing about it because I find it amusing. There is a typically British sense of humour in the book. It also feels like you’re reading a story, despite it being a factual book, It’s the type of book that you can enjoy relaxing to. Such books are entertaining to listen to. Style is important with audiobooks, because it makes the difference between books within a few days or a few months. Books should be pleasant to listen to.


I set myself the goal, this year, of reading 25 books. So far I have read 24 and I am on track to reaching my goal. The aim was to read an average of one book every two weeks. I see someone else who has read one hundred this year. Two books a week. I know, reading, and standing up are a strange combination, but due to audible and other services you can read, without sitting comfortably. In so doing you can read at moments, or in places that are not associated with reading. During a run for example, or while you’re cooking.


A few months ago I was contributing to a read and review project and I found it interesting until I found that I could simply use my audible subscription to get plenty of books, lending libraries, and specifically Kindle Unlimited. I didn’t mind reading books to give a review until I saw how much was being charged per book. At this point I thought this was far too much.


One reason for this is that I often got PDFs and PDFs are a pain to read because you have to log what page you’re at if you don’t want to lose your page. The second is that I had to do the work of contacting an author, getting them to send the book and then read it within a short time, losing the freedom to read what I wanted, when I wanted.


I would consider dumping Waze for the same reason. A game where you are encouraged to drive to earn points is not worth playing. I prefer for walking, running and other activities to be gameified.


Bookcrossing and A November Walk

Bookcrossing and A November Walk

Byrichard

Today I went for a slight variant and came across a book dating back to 1930 so of course I picked it up. I like the look and feel of old books. I also like that they carry history. The book is 91, almost 92 years old and it has been passed on from generation to generation for almost six generations. I looked in the book and at first I just ignored the scribbles at the front of the book, not thinking much of it. Now that I looked closer I noticed the BCID so I looked up bookcrossing.com and logged that I found the book.


Now that I know about this project I feel that I should add books that I own to that database, for people to find and share them. One book has 601 hops, and the next only 198. That is how many times books have been passed on from person to person.


I see that the project is still new but it will soon reach two million members (bookcrossers) and approaching 14 million books. It is present in 132 countries, and what is impressive is that this is only since April 2021, so the site is still new. Registering a book is quick and easy. Note the ISBN, Double check the info, write a comment, create the book, and then add the BCID to the inner cover and a new book is logged. It takes seconds.


I believe that this is a great project because if you think that the use case for cars, is bad, due to how much time they spend sitting around, then imagine how bad it is for books. They spend years, even decades on shelves collecting dust, without being read more than once. With a website like Bookcrossing those dormant books are given the opportunity to travel, to be read, to be discussed and to be shared, over and over again. A book is no longer read by one person but dozens, or even hundreds. It works like a library, but the library is the world, and everyone can be a curator.


I could now create an entry for The Unbearable Lightness of Being and other favourite books of mine, and over time I could follow as they are shared, commented on, and as their locations move either west or east, south, or north. It would show how interconnected the world is.


I will participate in this project. I like the opportunities that I think it opens up.

A Flawed Approach To Ending A Pandemic

A Flawed Approach To Ending A Pandemic

Byrichard

Switzerland is currently following a flawed approach to ending a pandemic, because rather than taking a pro-active approach to preventing outbreaks in various communities across Switzerland they are doing the opposite. They are ignoring the problem until it flares up enough that they can no longer pretend to see it. Today the number of cases has reached 6000 a day for the whole of Switzerland.


A rational and moral government, within a healthy democracy, as we have seen in pandemics since the SARS crisis and others, have done everything to contain the threat, but also to prevent it from spreading. They have done everything they could to contain the threat, and to keep people safe.


During this pandemic it feels as though countries have failed to have the foresight to keep people safe, but also the political strength to resist populism. This pandemic feels as if it is as much about populism, news as entertainment, as it is about a pandemic that could be controlled, if only governments could stand up to pressure groups. In a healthy democracy, and I’m speaking about the issues across Europe, England and other countries, we see that politicians let the virus spread, without seeming to fear that they will lose power, and this seems absurd.


I would expect politicians, in healthy democracies, with healthy media landscapes, to do everything that they can to ensure that their citizens are safe, and that their economies return to normal. By normal I don’t mean with masks, distancing, and covid passes. I mean that the virus is eradicated, and that life is back to the pre-pandemic normal.


For now it feels as though we are stuck in this pandemic for seasons, or even years more.


An event sent an e-mail today, about needing volunteers for an event in January but I don’t see how it will be able to go ahead when we have gone from 1000 cases, to 2000, to 3000 and now to 6000 within a few weeks. Politicians in Switzerland refuse to commit to vaccinating people beneath a certain age, and refuse to acknowledge the trends that we see in other countries. They are benefiting from people’s habit of not reading international news like some of us do.


If I thought the Swiss government was trying to end I would still not be traveling, and I would still be using the pandemic as a reason not to travel, but as things stand, and with the current Swiss attitude, we stand no chance of the pandemic ending for a while, so we might as well take liberties that would be absurd under a different government.


Liberties like road trips.


We need a change of leadership in Switzerland, to include people who use science, and have the courage to stand up against interest groups, to ensure that Switzerland may exit the pandemic sooner, rather than later.


Garmin Instinct Solar Run, With A Mask, And A Walk.

Garmin Instinct Solar Run, With A Mask, And A Walk.

Byrichard

I tracked the run and walk with the Garmin Instinct Solar. It is very easy to use while wearing gloves. You can stop the activity, change sport, start the activity, do the second sport, and then stop the tracking of the second sport, without taking off your gloves. Now that we’re in the cold part of Autumn this is useful. On the flipside anytime the clouds hide the sun this watch is unable to recharge itself. Despite this the battery life is still good. When fully charged it displays 27 days, but it loses around two or three days of charge per day with a tracked activity. This is still excellent. The Apple watch needs to be charged every single day. It is a watch that you can wear in the classic style of wearing a watch, i.e. keep it on for days or weeks at a time.


Today I tried running two kilometres and a walk home. In the process I found that wearing an FFP2 mask did not hinder my breathing in the least. I only ran for two kilometres because I want to keep from pushing my knees too far. I don’t like finishing a run, barely able to walk. I have made that mistake, and I will avoid making it, if I can.


Running with the mask didn’t hinder my breathing at all. I could breath in, and I could breath out, and I never felt that it was getting in the way. This is due to two reasons. The first is that we’re over 20 months into this pandemic and we’re used to how masks feel and behave. The second reason is simply that it is cold. Wearing a mask provides a bubble of heated air, to prevent us from breathing cold air, or feeling cold air on our faces. I was also worried that if I took off the mask my face would feel cold. This means that I wore the mask for at least an hour. Nothing by some standards, but not bad, in the middle of the countryside with few or no people around.

Apple Car Play and Roaming

Apple Car Play and Roaming

Byrichard

Several years ago I needed to download TomTom and I needed the latest map updates if I wanted to drive from Switzerland to England or from Switzerland to France, or to Spain. Thanks to roaming I now have a much broader choice.


TomTom was good in another era, when we had to pay roaming fees. We downloaded the relevant maps. We set off, and the GPS would guide us from A to B and that was that. I tried doing the same with Waze, hoping that the entire map would be downloaded when I set off, only to find that eventually I went off of the downloaded map and I had no more information due to a switch from Spanish to French roaming on a Swiss contract. I made it home, but it showed the limitation of roaming at the time.


Recently I drove from Switzerland to Spain, using roaming, but this time with 30 gigs of data on the current contract. I used just 200 megabytes, according to my recollection, with no issues. This was with Waze. Waze and Google maps are the same today, so I could just cut the middle app, and go straight for the behemoth. I can also play and experiment with Apple maps. They have had time to fix teething problems.


The issue that I have had with both TomTom and Waze is at night. Neither of these apps automatically switches to night mode. I couldn’t find that option. Driving at night, with a map in daylight mode is inconvenient. This is a good reason not to use both of the traditional apps, and move towards Apple Maps and Google Maps. Both have plenty of settings to make navigation less distracting.


I want to support TomTom Go because it is 12 CHF per year, and it’s European, but I can’t find a way to pay them directly, rather than going through Apple so I may drop them when the contract runs out. As to Waze, I lost interest the moment it was bought by Google, since it meant that we were helping a wealthy behemoth, rather than a small startup.


I have been playing with GPS since I was a child, but initially I was using hiking GPSs with no proper display. I then played with car GPS before moving on to mobile phones, and since a few weeks I have been playing with in-built GPS. I find the in-built GPS experience is easy, and I like that the passenger, I haven’t had a passenger, since we’re in a pandemic, can set up the routing options from the comfort of the phone. Concurrently, I can set off the nav system from my home, and then walk down, plug in the phone, and then use it for navigation, from A to B.


Back in the day I sometimes printed out instructions, to navigate… things have really changed since then. When you’re used to GPS apps navigation is simple. Now to play with two new apps, and see how they compare to the two apps I have prioritised, until now.

Zero Minutes Per Week on Facebook

Zero Minutes Per Week on Facebook

Byrichard

I noticed that Facebook has a way of letting you know how badly you are addicted to their website. In the process I learned that I spent zero minutes on their website this week, and one minute last week. I do not spend time on their website because it fails to provide me with a community that I want to interact with on a daily basis. There are a number of reasons for this but the key reason is that they spent so much effort trying to make the timeline more addictive that they made it repulsive.


Irrelevant Content from Algorithms


The timeline is repulsive because it shows too many adverts, whether for groups, for products, for promoted posts and more. These are irrelevant, and if shown at too high a rate they become toxic. They also stop you from seeing the content that you want to engage with, i.e. posts by friends. Facebook has become a network of strangers talking to strangers, and noise. We see others, but we are not seen. If that is toxic to me, imagine the impact on others. Instagram, too, has this flaw.


Questionable Morals


The second reason is to do with Facebook’s reputation for enabling, or at least not removing extremist content for months or even seasons. They sometimes seem to remove it once it is no longer needed, rather than when it causes the most damage.


FOMO and trolling


The two strongest push factors were FOMO and trolling. Facebook had a way of reminding us that not everyone is self isolating during this pandemic, or of reminding us that not everyone is in solitude. When you are not conversing with people, you are only seeing an idealised representation of their lives, then you begin to feel down about your own life. It makes you wish the pandemic would end, so that you could resume socialising, meeting people, and maybe even having something, other than social media, to come home to.


The second one was virulent trolling. In normal times you would put up with communities where you are being trolled because you can still plan activities in the physical world. During a pandemic however, if you get trolled you have no reason to put up with it, and a survival strategy is to leave the community. Eventually I took a serious break from twitter that has lasted for almost the entire pandemic.


Not A Social Media Detox


What I am writing about is not a social media detox. My aim is not to take a break from social media. My aim was to take a break from, and cut ties with a community that is toxic, both through the ways it pushes rubbish into your timelines, but also by the toxic people that interact on the platform. When you are flamed twice within the space of days, and when you are tired of scrolling through irrelevant content, you eventually decide that the Return on Investment, ROI, as a user, is less than it is worth to keep using a service.


I have had the same realisation with Instagram, which is part of the same problematic social network. Meta. Everything Meta touches, becomes unhealthy for users to use, and now they want to go into the metaverse. I will not use AR and VR via such a company. They do not have the required moral standards for me to trust them with something immersive.


One of the drawbacks to dumping Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and other products, is that you become disconnected from the social networks that have the biggest monopoly. If you do not use these networks you are socially excluded. Too many products are built off of Facebook’s user login system now. You lose access to some apps, web services, and to some communities. During a pandemic this contributes to the sense of isolation.


I Don’t Miss Either


I don’t miss either Facebook or Instagram because they stopped being about a network of friends years ago. They became more and more of a waste of time, and more of a way to see how I wish my life was different. That would be positive, if we were all on the same life path, but we are not, especially during the pandemic. The standard model life that we saw on Facebook and Instagram stopped being real. It became an unhealthy illusion. It also led to a sense of isolation. That sense of isolation is why a Facebook and Instagram break was needed. You don’t long for a different life every day. You can more easily live in the moment.


Very Few Interactions


One thing that hurt, when I used Facebook, but also Instagram, was seeing other people get twenty or more likes, and getting conversations started via their content. Seeing that I was being ignored was painful, but it also led me to another thought. If I am being ignored on FB and IG, where I am giving them my attention, and content for free, then I might as well give over that time to my blog, and at least this way I achieve something positive. It gets very little attention, but it is “me time” as you would see many people say. It is time that I devote to thinking, and writing. In effect I am practicing mindfulness.


A Lifestyle, Not An Addiction


For years I have argued that social media and social networks should be about a lifestyle rather than an addiction. Google and Twitter, although flawed, in some ways, do not treat us like addicts. They treat us like individuals, and the same is true of Wordpress.com. We are a community of writers and commenters, who write, and occassionally people read what we have written. Sometimes they even comment. The goal isn’t to have a conversation. The aim is to read about someone else’s experiences. The web should be a healthy place, to talk online, while waiting for another opportunity to meet offline, as it was in 2006-2007.


Blogging One Hundred And Fifty-Two Days In A Row

Blogging One Hundred And Fifty-Two Days In A Row

Byrichard

Blogging one hundred and fifty-two days in a row is an interesting challenge. It encourages you to think of something daily, for months in a row. It also forces you to have the discipline to sit and attempt to write for one or two hours a day, whether inspiration is there or not. Often it isn’t. Add to this that most blog posts get zero views and you have a reason to stop and give up.


You don’t. One of the reasons to write a blog post a day is to train yourself to be disciplined, like with studying a new language, or a new skill. You sit down, you procrastinate, you look for ideas and inspirations. You start to write, and eventually, you’re left with a blog post.


Writing, video editing, web development, camera work, climbing, and plenty of things take consistent practice to improve. It is only by constant practice that we improve our skills, or get into bad habits, whichever comes first. Initially, I wanted to try journalling and I tried a few apps but eventually, I got tired of writing, what I felt was, useless drivel.


By writing a blog post I made the challenge harder because whatever I write can be read. Luckily, when you’re learning, people latch onto individual works, rather than the entire blog. I can get away with most of the writing being uninteresting. The challenge is to improve my writing and to find something more inspiring to write about. I need to find something that is niche enough for me to be one of the few writers, but broad enough to attract an audience.


An article about Genre theory did that, another about Suunto and climbing, and other articles had that unique relevance to attract readers. These articles are rare, because it is hard to write something unique during a pandemic when we are still self-isolating.


If and when the pandemic ends, and if I am still not too old to do things, then these blog posts will become interesting again, and I will have more writing practice. For now I am trying to find inspiration during pandemic self-isolation where from Monday to Sunday and from January to December nothing changes.


Writing a blog post a day forces me to have a spontaneous conversation with you, despite no conversations taking place in person for days, or even weeks in a row. Being single and solitary, during a pandemic, is a unique experience, that those that we hear, do not understand. If they did understand this they would do everything they could to get back to COVID-zero. I would then have no reason to write blog posts. I would be socialising, rather than self-isolating.


So what have I learned after 152 days of blogging? That the pandemic allows us to pick up habits that we would lose interest in if we were in a normal cycle of life. I still like to blog, and to read blogs. I am going to keep this habit up for as long as possible. I look forward to when we will be living more interesting lives, once the pandemic is over.

KDrive – A Viable alternative to Google One and iCloud

KDrive – A Viable alternative to Google One and iCloud

Byrichard

KDrive peaks my interest because instead of cost over 100 dollars per year it costs around 64 if you buy directly from their website rather than The Apple App Store, but also because once you send your photos up to the cloud, you can get them down more easily.


With Google One you can store all of your images to the cloud quite easily but because apps like Picasa and others no longer exist, you cannot get them back without spending hours downloading them manually. iCloud is not quite as bad but they are still not ideal. You can upload images to their service, but if you do so, your image gallery must be on a drive with enough storage to take the gallery offline. On mobile phones and laptops this is complicated. In effect your images are stuck until you buy a higher capacity laptop or phone. I know an HD would also work but the issue is that when your image gallery is on another drive you have to keep it plugged in, or sync regularly for it to be efficient.


Simple Synchronisation


With KDrive you have a folder that is synched automatically from your device to the cloud, and from the cloud to another device. If you decide to move your images from one device to another you can do so by requesting that the images are downloaded, and eventually they will be synced. This is a key selling point.


Google One


With Google One you have two terabytes, which are shared between photos, file folders, e-mail and more. They are however, separated. You can access all of the files that you uploaded as files, but you cannot access all of your photos and download them easily. In the past I tried to download images from Google Drive and I found that I was blocked by how many hours it takes to download zip file after zip file for days at a time. This is not a good solution despite being cheaper than iCloud.


iCloud and Price


Aside from the size of the HD you need on your mac laptop or iOS device to download your galleries you also need to pay 120 CHF per year, in perpetuity. With Apple device you pay a premium for the phone, for the laptop but then you pay a premium for the apps, for the services and more. Apple wants 120 CHF per year to keep your data safe, when drives of that capacity are going down in price every single year. I object to paying a tax of sorts, every year, when I have already payed a premium for the products.


KDrive


KDrive, by Infomaniak, based in Switzerland has a number of advantages. The first is that the company is local, so it feels good to support a local effort rather than the giants. The second reason is that their price point is half as much as their competition, especially if you commit to two or three years. The third selling point is that all the files are accessible as if they were already on your local machine. This means that within a short period of time you can recover the files you want to recover, or backup the files that you want to backup.


Features


In the settings you have photo backup, and within this you can enable automatic backup but what makes this one different is that you can choose where to save the images, including which folder. It also creates directory by month and year. This makes it easy for you to find images when you are looking for them.. I like that you can select to upload photos, videos, screenshots and even delete photos once they are backed up, although this is in beta.


I like these features because I don’t want to backup videos because they’re heavy and take time to load, but also because they are not relevant to my photos. I prefer to take care of them separately. No other service offers the option to exclude videos.


Another great feature is that you can choose whether to sync your photos from “now” or all. That is useful. If you’re on a trip and you just want to backup recent pictures then that’s a useful feature. If you have all the time in the world, and enough battery life, then you can sync your entire image library. The fact that you can exclude video initially speeds up the process considerably.


For more information about KDrive. The Prices.


And Finally


Google Drive and iCloud complicate rather than simplify your life, when you are dealing with photos. KDrive simplifies it. If you can migrate your photos away from Google Drive and iCloud to a solution that is more user friendly then you can also reduce the amount of space you need on your devices, as you have offloaded them to the cloud, but then the files that were offloaded to the cloud can be synced your local machine seamlessly. As a media asset manager I greatly appreciate this.


KDrive is now a speedy and efficient solution for the sharing of files, with some intelligent features for the backing up of your phones’ photo galleries. I am in the process of doing that now. I hesitated with other services in the past, but to me this is a clear winner.

A Break From Listening To Podcasts

A Break From Listening To Podcasts

Byrichard

For two or three months at least I have taken a break from listening to podcasts. I used to enjoy listening to podcasts every single day. I would listen when I walked, I would listen on the commute. I would listen when I cooked. During this pandemic, I found that I could stand fewer and fewer podcasts.


Some of them frustrated me because they treated Brexit as if it was something fun, so I stopped listening. Other podcasts tried to speak about pandemic solitude, but these were married people who were simply choosing to self isolate to keep their loved ones safe, rather than real solitude, where there is no end in sight.


With other podcasts, I stopped listening because I thought that what the people were talking about was either irrelevant or not very interesting. According to one podcast app, I have listened to 34 days and 14 hours of podcasts since 2016.


One of the reasons I stopped listening to podcasts is that I wanted to make progress with my reading goal, i.e. via Audible, for Goodreads. Podcasts are interesting, and we learn interesting things, but if we set a reading goal via an app like Goodreads, book reading counts, and podcasts do not.


FOMO is another reason. Fear, or knowledge of missing out. For nineteen to twenty months now we have been self-isolating and group activities have been limited. Group hikes, climbs and other activities, that used to be common are rare. Conferences and other events are now online rather than in meat space. Listening to podcasts reminds us of what Last summer, and this summer, I said that we cut out TV series, films, or any content that affects our happiness. Podcasts were messing with my ability to cope with the pandemic, so eventually I eliminated all of them. Somehow I can cope with books, but factual books. Books that are about ideas and projects, rather than relationships.


This pandemic is hard because we know how to end the pandemic, but due to political interests the measures that would bring the pandemic to an end are being skuppered. The pandemic, with the right leadership could be ended within three or four months, with the right leadership. With the wrong leadership we could be in for 8 more years. I belive that Switzerland does have the wrong leadership for a pandemic.


Today the Right leaning party, the party that is to blame for pandemic measures not being brought to fruition, sent propaganda spreading disinformation about the current Conseil Fédéral. The party that is most vocal about the loss of freedoms, is to blind to see that it is the party that is making this pandemic long and protracted.


I want the pandemic to end, and for normal socialising to resume, even for those, like me, who are waiting for the transmission rate to be down to zero cases for two weeks in a row. For now this looks impossible before next spring so it is another Winter of solitary walks and blog writing, when I am not studying. I am a third of the way through a Web dev course. I am making consistent progress every day. Life moves forward, even if we would like some parts to be enhanced.


As I like to say, Same Pandemic, Different day.

The Garmin Instinct Solar And Activity Tracking

The Garmin Instinct Solar And Activity Tracking

Byrichard

For two days I have played with the Garmin Instinct Solar and I already see a niche for it. If I want to be like every other reviewer I will say, “use the expedition mode for up to 127 days or hours of battery life, but I won’t because I think there is another more interesting niche. Activity tracking, without needing to take off the watch for weeks or months at a time. With Suunto, Apple and other devices you need to remove a watch at least every three or four days to recharge it, which means that you have a gap in heartrate and activity data.



With a watch like the Garmin Instinct Solar you can track your days for 25 days in a row without recharging. In summer, in theory you could wear the watch and it would charge as you’re eating lunch or walking on the beach or sitting at a terrasse in the mountains. I really like the idea of going back to watches that we can wear for weeks, without having to take them off.


I tried using the watch in normal mode yesterday, and wore it overnight, and by the next morning it said that it had six hours of power left so I had to charge it. I tried with the morning sun but it didn’t work, so I tried with the mid morning and afternoon sun and that was better. I had to recharge it from a power socket anyway.


26 Days of Tracking


Today I put the watch into normal mode for a run, and then as I walked I tracked hiking, for a little bit, before switching to just counting steps and charging with the Autumn sun. When I got home it was at 25 days of battery life from 26-27 days. Four weeks of battery life, with the Autumn sun.


What makes this solar watch stand out is it’s price. It costs 298 CHF. Compare that to the Casio hr1000 Solar watch that cost up to 1000CHF a few years ago, and the Garmin Pro Fenix solar that costs about 800 CHF.


Power Hungry GPS


The problem with GPS technology is that it uses a lot of power, so for a solar powered watch to work effectively the solar panels would have to be quite a bit bigger. That’s where a solar powered activity tracker is brilliant. The watch can do a lot more, if you want to charge it every day, but if you don’t, then simply keeping track of your steps will be enough, along with heart rate.


Power Modes


You have expedition mode, for 127hrs of battery life, You then have battery saver where the heart rate monitor and phone connection are turned off for 70hrs. You then have jacket around 40hrs I think and normal that is about 30hrs.


Smartwatch: Up to 24 days/54 days with solar*
Battery Saver Watch Mode: Up to 56 days/Unlimited with solar*
GPS: Up to 30 hours/38 hours with solar**
Max Battery GPS Mode: Up to 70 hours/145 hours with solar**
Expedition GPS Activity: Up to 28 days/68 days with solar*

Garmin Instinct® Solar | Outdoor Solar Powered Smartwatch



Better For The Environment


The Apple Watch needs to be charged every day. The Suunto that I have needs to be charged every second activity, especially after over three years of daily use. The Garmin Instinct Solar, in the right mode could go for three or four weeks without needing to charge, and in the middle of summer, could recharge, at least partially, while you are active.


On Activity Trackers


Most activity trackers last from 5 to seven days between charges, when they are new and this depends on whether you have heart rate and o2 monitoring. With the Garmin Instinct you leap up to 68 days over the summer months. In theory you will have no gaps in data, for months at a time. This means that if you’re trying to save on weight, you could travel without the charging cable for weeks at a time.


Should You Get it?


Yes, if you want to track your activities but are not worried about heart rate and using the watch for notifications. It is one of the cheaper solutions, and from that aspect it stands out. It gives you plenty of functionality that you find on higher end devices, without the price. Add to this that plenty of functionality is accessed via Garmin Connect and you have a good reason to get this alternative solution that costs a third of the price.


If you’re replacing a Suunto Spartan Wrist HR because it’s getting a little old then don’t. The battery life on that device is still better or as good, and the screen is easier to read. After a decade or so of using Suunto I find the menus and navigation more intuitive and rational.


My reason for considering switching from Suunto to Garmin is two fold. The first is that suunto is moving over to android, so it no longer has a unique OS, and that it’s move to more colourful displays means that battery life will suffer. They also no longer offer a web interface for the application, so you are forced to use a mobile phone.


I was also curious to play with the Garmin ecosystem. I like to be familiar with these platforms.


And Finally


And finally the best device is the one that can last as long as the activity you do, whether it’s a two hour daily walk, a two day hike or a longer duration journey. Switching from Suunto to Garmin has a learning curvey. The navigation menu is different. Eventually you understand the logic.