One of the things about the Garmin 1030 (and the 820) is they do have an app marketplace. This is actually pretty cool because it let’s you do some great integration. Right now I can’t get my Garmin to work with my iPhone. They actually require that you do a full iPhone reset to try to make this work.
Has Garmin lost their minds, this is a lot of work to recover a setting for a single connection over Bluetooth is pretty ridiculous. So what’s the alternative?
Well the first is that Garmin seems to require pairing to make anything work, but it turns out that if you use the Garmin Express on the Mac for instance, you can bypass this and setup wifi via the PC or Mac. Then, whenever your Garmin is in wifi range it will do automatic updates and things. And you won’t get notifications while on your bike ride, but at least the rides will upload automatically.
You can also select what they call IQ Connect applications. There seem to be quite a few that are useful:
- XERT makes an FTP calculator, it uses math to figure out what your project FTP should be. Turns out Garmin has it’s own native FTP calculator which they show at the end of the ride, but DC Rainmaker finds that it is usually an under estimate. You want to make XERT a large dial on your display and then you can see what happens as you sprint away.
- Training Peaks. I haven’t tried yet, but hopefully this will download workouts directly into the Garmin so you can use it.
