Touche. Almost all of these I can concede a smartwatch might do better. I do just want to mention that: Garmin has offline maps of your whole region (eg NA) and the ability to provide directions. Obviously not as good as RT traffic data, but also offline has been helpful occasionally. My garmin can control podcasts as well. Remote shutter is unfortunately a limit of phone APIs, I tried making an app for this. My garmin has synced well to 3rd party apps, and I can't think of many reasons I'd want 3rd party fitness apps like AllTrails on it?
More relevant to my original point, however, is none of these things you mentioned require a beefy processor – they could all easily be implemented in a context like Garmin.
That's fair, a lot of these features do not require a beefy processor. I think the value lies in the AW being a full-featured platform. Its processor is overkill for the lightest use-cases like remote shutter, but for others it's nice having a smartphone-like experience.
Case in point: Maps are full featured, it's not just about traffic, it's also about points of interest, supporting different modalities (crucially, public transit), and generally feeling like the full maps experience.
Like any other platform, 3rd party apps are nice for niches that the manufacturers do not serve, or do not serve well. For example, lifting apps make it super easy to log sets, reps, rest, etc; useful data the core experience does not offer.
As mentioned earlier, I think there's room for both. I'm actually not opposed to sporting a Garmin for endurance sports, where battery life is king :)
Actually my Garmin does do points of interest, and supports either driving, walking or cycling directions, all fully offline. For two entire continents! All on device.
I concede that the experience looks a bit less polished than the nice UI of an Apple Watch, but it’s genuinely impressive the level of features in this thing.
The only one I miss is voice recognition, where it would be nice to just say “navigate home” and have it go. And I’m not sure if that’s possible on the weak processors
Yeah. It's surely rough around the edges UX wise, but people consistently underestimate what you can do with such a low powered processor. If Garmin hired UI designers & worked on getting more companies to make apps for it, it could easily be the best smartwatch.
Garmin will also log weight training bouts and auto-detect reps and sets. You can program the entire bout into the phone app and track it as you go with the watch.
More relevant to my original point, however, is none of these things you mentioned require a beefy processor – they could all easily be implemented in a context like Garmin.