Regular readers know that I’ve been a long-term fan of Garmin watches. It’s my belief that the best Garmin watches are the gold standard for active outdoorsy-types looking for a connected fitness watch. The battery life lasts ages, they’re tough as nails, and packed with features.
The incredible Garmin Connect app is subscription-free and contains outstanding tools like Garmin Coach and Training Readiness Scores, tools that other brands (looking at you, Fitbit) ask a premium price for even after you’ve bought the device. Garmins are expensive watches, but I believe most of them represent pretty good value.
GPS World is a business-to-business magazine, and most of our readers are engineers, surveyors and other professionals specializing in geospatial technologies. In general, we do not cover consumer applications. Nevertheless, it is important to remember that, while GPS was designed and built, and is managed, by the U.S. military (from 1973 to 2020 by the U.S. Air Force, since then by the U.S. Space Force), more than 99.9% of its users are not members of the U.S. military, nor surveyors, but consumers. They benefit from GPS — and the three other GNSS, namely Russia’s GLONASS, China’s BeiDou and Europe’s Galileo — in many ways and are unaware of most of them, such as the fact that GNSS receivers provide essential timing for radio and television broadcasts, cellphone communications and financial transactions.
The vast majority of consumers access GNSS via their smartphones. We are all familiar with the myriad smartphone applications that rely on GNSS for positioning and navigation — from Google Maps and Apple Maps to Waze and social media platforms such as Instagram. Additionally, weather apps, such as the Apple Weather app, and parking apps utilize GNSS to enhance user experience and functionality. Nearly all smartphones today use at least three of the GNSS constellations — GPS, GLONASS and Galileo — and some use all four. (The use of BeiDou in the United States is a controversial topic that we will explore soon.)
For most people, smartphones have replaced such previously separate electronic devices as calculators, digital cameras and car navigators. (A freestanding GNSS-based car navigation device is still useful, however, when you travel in areas with spotty or nonexistent cell phone coverage, because it relies on maps stored on the device, so it does not require an Internet connection. That is why I still carry a nearly 20-year-old Garmin nüvi in my car.)
For a few years, there were even handheld televisions. (My 1989 Casio TV-400 LCD Pocket Color handheld VHF-UHF TV has a 4 cm x 3 cm LCD screen. It is analog, however, so it stopped working when U.S. television broadcasts switched to digital in 2009.) Now, many people watch news, shows and movies on their phones.
They’re so stuffed with features and cool functionalities, in fact, that many features go unadvertised and mostly unnoticed by Garmin enthusiasts, even those that have had a watch for years. Only recently, I learned that a Garmin watch I reviewed, scored highly, and now wear regularly actually has a Find My Phone function I never knew about. As someone who loses things all the time, this has been a godsend.
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