14 days on the Fitbit Sense
I noticed a couple of days ago that the amount of distance the Fitbit Sense and reality were in stark contrast. I also noted several outdated articles that will hang around forever on the Internet that stated I could set a manual stride length (I can’t).
I walked a 5 mile trail. My wife’s Garmin said she walked 5 miles. I got over 6 by the time I got stopped. This was with GPS active, supposedly.
I discovered GPS was connecting and then disconnecting about a minute later. This was causing the stride length to not be estimated correctly and also any distance to be miscalculated greatly. What was odd however was Google Fit was also overestimating and I’d switched the Fit2Fit app to only sync once a day at this point.
Both Fit and the Fitbit were coming up with their own inflated distances on their own.
You know what I love doing in nature? Trying to figure out why my fitness app of choice and watch are not working.
I did manage to catch that the watch was informing me that the GPS had disconnected, and the one article I could find on this indicated that we were looking at a potential issue with permissions. That wasn’t it. I decided to watch my phone for a couple of minutes and discovered that when the screen went off the watch lost GPS. Ah hah.
Permissions were right, however the phone was in power saving mode. That mode, screen off = no apps run. The Fitbit Sense uses the app on the phone to pull connected GPS, both Fitbit Sense and Google Fit were then using some random calculations to figure out how many steps sans GPS that indicated I had a 20% longer stride, which I might, if I weren’t walking up a small mountain.
There’s no indication I can find in the Fitbit app that the GPS disconnected. You get one notification on the watch that GPS has disconnected and it’s attempting to reconnect.
Continue to find that the food logging option is not on par with MyFitnessPal, attempting to add things ends up with a blurry photo every time for some reason, software needs an overhaul as it seems mostly geared to do some tracking and push the premium guided courses, which I’m not particularly interested in.
