I'm a longtime user of hand-held GPS units for hiking and back-packing. Since before the time of wireless connectivity and social sports portals, these units have had USB cables and downloadable files--and fortunately still do. Garmin provides the BaseCamp software, which is just a local viewer for the files--admittedly, it doesn't have very good maps. But it has always had GPX export and seeing your tracks in Google Earth is way more compelling. So you get your own data on your own machine, and not on someone else's servers.
And this has been one of the reasons I haven't gone to smart-watches (the other is accuracy in terrain). You have to have the app on your phone and pair them together. Even if that workflow is still possible (as demonstrated by the article, it is a fall-back), the default is to require cloud processing. I don't want my tracks stored somewhere else, and even less so if there's a chance of accidentally sharing them publicly. I guess I don't get the sports stats (heart-rate, etc), but that's a small price to pay.
And this has been one of the reasons I haven't gone to smart-watches (the other is accuracy in terrain). You have to have the app on your phone and pair them together. Even if that workflow is still possible (as demonstrated by the article, it is a fall-back), the default is to require cloud processing. I don't want my tracks stored somewhere else, and even less so if there's a chance of accidentally sharing them publicly. I guess I don't get the sports stats (heart-rate, etc), but that's a small price to pay.