I can't remember which industry luminary said it, but the comment was that we used the term "personal computer" decades too soon. Very true.

I'm in the tech business and I monitor the industry trends for disruptive technologies. It's pretty apparent to me that the smartphone/personal network technologies that are emerging with the smartphone as the "personal network server" are going to become very disruptive to a lot of companies. One of those that I'm interested to see how they adapt (if they do) are the Personal Navigation Device (PND) companies like Garmin and others. Every year, the smartphones take pretty substantial bites out of their market space. In Garmin's case, where they are focused on things like Health and Fitness markets, smartphones with network appliances like sensors and things like the RFLKT+ are taking serious bites out of their sports specific GPS devices. Then with the advent of things like the Apple Watch, their running and fitness products are under assault as well. The only way out of it is innovation, and I just don't know what that will be but hopefully they do since I like Garmin as a company.

I was pretty disappointed as I've been looking at this Edge 1000 I have at home as I compare it to the iPhone/Rflkt+/Cyclemeter combo. With the exception of lack of mapping support on the RFLKT+, I think the UI and the ability to customize the display as well as it's small size are just really big advantages for the personal network/smartphone approach. Garmin will need to really up it's UI game so that a user has a lot more creative latitude in selection a lot more than just the number of fields on a given screen. They are also going to need to find a way to not need the phone for connectivity or something. They have no performance advantage in sensors and the performance of sensor to head unit is pretty much identical to the smartphone world.

At this point the difference in functionality between the stand alone GPS units are the smartphone competitors are not significant anymore. The smartphone competitors have matured to the point where they lead in some key feature areas too. Going back even two years ago, there was a substantial advantage to the GPS based devices, that is not true any longer and differentiation for a standalone GPS device is largely gone to the point where, at best, it's "taste great/less filling" until you consider cost where the GPS units are at a significant disadvantage.

J.