Subject: RE: Activity tracking review series Thanks! Trying to be fair with them, great to hear it's received well.
In terms of covering all of the points and doing so free of charge, Endurance Tracker is very strong as evidenced in their score. As a single data store, Garmin Connect and Suunto's Movescount are also very strong, but neither have the coaching or training planning features that really drive their usefulness. I think the best of the class are those that somehow take your data and *help* you train, guiding you through best practices, and forcing athletes to consider planning and execution as an the most important facet of training. Without those tools or visualization, it's just a bunch of meaningless data. In that regard, Strava has 'made' something with the data, but it's more for competition, and less for training -sort of a 'look at what i did' thing rather than a 'help me get where i want to go' thing.
I'd like to see more of these pop up with different competitive features, I see these all as converging towards open source, and I'd like to help herd it that direction. It's frustrating to me that coaches have to pay so much to be slave to software, and that athletes get burdened with the same costs as they are passed on. The coaches should be earning the money, not covering costs, and athletes who operate without a coach shouldn't be denied tools to help them train because of that. |