Garmin Trivia and MORE Spotification via VA3M

It’s a slow news day. I’ll improvise and include a few things that have been waiting to find a story to be added to.

As well as some new premium VivoMove finishes, Garmin and Spotify have finally pieced together all the bits that need piecing together to enable a Spotify CIQ app to work via a touchscreen. Yay.

But first some VivoMove images.

Moving swiftly on and back to the subject that brought you here.

It was interesting to see that there are nearly 84,000 downloads/installs of Garmin’s SPOTIFY app which I assume will be almost entirely accounted for by Fenix5  models and the Forerunner 645 Music. That’s a lot of downloads since SPOTIFY for CIQ was launched in October 2018 initially for the Fenix 5 Plus devices but then also to the Forerunner 645 Music within the space of a month.

Now that Spotify works on the Vivoactive 3 Music (VA3M) as well it will be interesting to both see how high those installs rise to and to test this all out on the LTE version for ‘proper’ streaming….if it works…which I don’t think it does (yet).

Garmin’s VA3M in many ways competes with the Apple Watch and I think I’m right in saying that even Apple is not quite there yet when it comes to ‘proper’ live streaming with Spotify.

Anyway, I could show you a picture of a VA3M with Spotify but you’ve probably already seen the same spoon-fed media  images so I will try to avoid being boring and repetitive as I know you are a clever and enquiring lot and need a little more mental stimulation for your gadgetry.

Let’s widen things up a bit.

It’s not just the official SPOTIFY app that adds the functionality. CIQ contains more apps that augment your SPOTIFY experience such as the G-PLAYLIST shown in this video and which has 60,000 downloads…not bad.

It’s also interesting to see how Garmin classify their relationship with SPOTIFY and, indeed, SPOTIFY are classified as a STRATEGIC RELATIONSHIP in music. No big surprise there and no big surprise that DEEZER and iHEARTRADIO are also formally classified as ‘strategic’ on garmin.com

So, let’s widen things up even more

Q: What else does Garmin classify as STRATEGIC?

Well, for MUSIC HEADPHONES they include AFTERSHOKZ, JAYBIRD SPORT, PLANTRONICS and SKULLCANDY so if you want to be sure which headphones will most likely work best then choose one of those. I’ll stick with my Jabra Elite 65t, thank you very much (I used them today)…but that’s another story relating to >1 mile of swimming and two hours of running. Q: Does anything else count as strategic?

Yup. The FITNESS sphere also includes the following strategic partners of STRAVA, SHIMANO, TRAINERROAD, THE SUFFERFEST, TRAINING PEAKS and TRAILFORKS.

Sometimes it’s as interesting to see what’s not in the list as well as what is in the list.

I will let you ponder that.