When a product is better than the description

When I was a kid I liked wrist watches from Casio. I had one with a calculator, one with an address database, one with an infrared remote control and one with an altimeter. But for the last 25 years I didn’t wear one. I don’t like to wrap anything around my wrist. And since I carry a phone, I have a way to find out what time it is.
When friends and neighbors started wearing fitness trackers, I thought I don’t need that. When I went running, I did it for my personal fitness, not to compare to somebody else. And I can care about my fitness without a device telling me to walk some more before going to bed. When my wive wanted to gift me a step counter for my birthday a couple of years ago, my response was: thanks, but no thanks. I have no use for a step counter.
Some times I brought my phone when I went running to record the GPS track just to try. Some co-workers upload all their activity to Strava, and claim “if it’s not on Strava, it didn’t happen”. Not so for me.
Since I started carrying my ultra light paraglider for run and fly, I took the phone with me more often. In the backpack it disturbs less than in the shirt. The main reason for carrying the phone was to be able to call for help in an emergency. And when I brought the phone with me anyway, I could just as well run the tracker app on it. But unfortunately it didn’t work very reliably. When the screen was off, it stopped tracking, and when the screen was on, it often registered fingers that weren’t there. So it happened often that it stopped tracking after a while, or deleted the track entirely. Sometimes I had a ton of apps open after running and I didn’t know what else happened to my phone. But still, with the few tracks that recorded at least the uphill running part, I could see my progress on that segment. That turned out to be more interesting than I anticipated.
So when my wife recently wanted ideas for my birthday, I told her “a cheap wristwatch with GPS tracker, that works without a crappy lock-in smartphone app”. My absolute nightmare is to have a closed source device that tracks my every move, where I have no control over the data it collects. Worst of all, it would become useless when the manufacturer decided to stop maintaining the app. I don’t want devices with planned obsolescence. Of course I had to do the research myself. On the product page they only mentioned their iOS and Android apps, which are of no use to me. I noticed a while ago, that there are some packages in the debian repo for Garmin Forerunner devices. Further research brought me to quite complicated methods to get the data from these watches. But then I found a page that stated that when you plug in the watch with its USB cable to a computer, it mounts a filesystem and you can just copy the activity files. If it is really that easy, then I really don’t understand all the fuss. Everything seemed to indicate that all Forerunner watches come with a USB cable for charging the device that also acts as a data cable. It is beyond me why they don’t mention that explicitly on the product page. So, for my purposes a relatively cheap Forerunner 30 or 35 should be just fine.
And so I got one for my birthday from my wive. It even has a heart rate sensor that I wouldn’t need. And indeed, just plugging it in with the USB cable, I can grab the fit files and either upload it directly to Strava, or convert it to a more common format using gpsbabel.