new Garmin 6 firmware goodies on the way

The Garmin Fenix 6 series is about to have some new firmware additions. They are ‘expected’ features but worth noting here in any case.

First up we have the addition of last year’s GRIT and FLOW metrics that we saw when the Edge 530 was launched. I never talked about those features too much as they fall squarely into the realms of MTB riders. Essentially they measure DIFFICULTY and SPEED MAINTENANCE. Those metrics came alongside jump count, jump distance, hangtime, jump speed and jump location recorded in the FIT file – however, these jump metrics don’t seem to be making their way to the Fenix 6…yet (I guess they will). I only ever used them all once and that was when I inadvertently chose an MTB profile when riding in Surrey where, funnily enough, I did manage to get quite a bit of ‘air time’ on the bumpy Surrey roads.

If you are a good enough technical rider to properly trigger these metrics then…chapeau.

Next up are more tinkerings with the UX – aka User eXperience. Essentially this means ‘making it work better and more sensibly‘. I’m hoping that it was my moaning over the last two years that “Garmin’s UI (User Interface) was rubbish” that has finally pushed Garmin into action. More likely it was DCR joining in the fray!!! albeit a little later. These UX/UI changes follow on from earlier changes such as the much-welcomed widget glances which I like.

My Fenix 6 and a power meter seem to have vanished so I can’t post a picture here…sorry. (Vanished = permanently borrowed by a ‘friend’ 😉 )

Source: partially here

Breaking Update – These Changes have been pulled. Strange. See below

Garmin 6 Beta Features pulled