Many faithful MotionBased subscribers have been waiting [patiently] for Garmin Connect, the MB replacement. There has been delay after delay. Here is Garmin’s most recent update, posted by runkk on the MotionBased Forum and the MB Garmin Connect Status Page.

We’re close, but not quite there.

The migration process begins on Wednesday, March 4 when we release the next version of Garmin Connect. At this time, many of you will start to see your MotionBased activities appear on Garmin Connect. The full listing will not be available until the Migration is complete, so do not be alarmed if you don’t see everything right away. The Migration will be complete in late March or early April. At that time, the doors will be open to all of Garmin’s older fitness devices.

Curious about what to expect at Garmin Connect? Whether or not you’ve already tried to login to Garmin Connect with your MotionBased username and password, you are encouraged to do so now.

With the March 4 release of Garmin Connect, you’ll be able to click on the Explore tab and peruse the community list of activities. Most of the activities listed are from Garmin Connect, but since the MotionBased Migration will be underway, you will begin to see some MotionBased activities display in the search results.

A few things to remember:

• Anything uploaded to MotionBased after the migration has completed will not be migrated. You will need to upload those activities to Garmin Connect separately. We will post a date once we feel that most activities have been migrated. We expect that 95% of the activities will make it during the first round of migration.
• If you don’t see an activity, don’t panic. We are migrating activities by number. Activities will be transferred to your account in sequential order of all MotionBased activities.
• Some of your activities may not have migrated because they were either large files or had some data peculiarities. We will run several phases of our migration script to eventually get all of your activities from MotionBased to Garmin Connect. In some rare cases, we may not be able to migrate your activity to Garmin Connect.
• Garmin Connect is using a different methodology to smooth elevation gain/loss compared to MotionBased. As a result, especially for Forerunner devices, the elevation gain/loss numbers will be inflated. We are still working on our smoothing algorithm and intend to run this across all activities at Garmin Connect in the future to more accurately reflect the actual gain/loss.
• Garmin Connect does not support weather at this time. We plan on introducing this feature at Garmin Connect. When we do, it will run against all past, present, and future activities at Garmin Connect.
• Garmin Connect does not support the Analyzer, Saved Reports, Dot Racing, or Viewports features found at MotionBased. We plan on bringing these features to Garmin Connect soon. When we do, they will be much more robust and customizable if applicable.
• Garmin Connect will support the Garmin Outdoor product line in the second half of 2008. In the meantime, we recommend that you continue uploading activities from these devices to MotionBased.
• At this time, Garmin Connect does not have a premium service. All of the features at Garmin Connect are free. We plan to introduce a premium service later in 2009. MotionBased customers with a premium account will be grandfathered into the Garmin Connect premium service for a period of time at no cost.