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Originally Posted by Alan T
I don't have a polar gps, but I am going to assume they are as good or close in quality to garmin gps watches. With that assumption, they would likely always be more reliable than the phone gps. I have heard some of the phone gps issues lies in poor quality of the gps itself, but also the phones in some cases use phone tower triangulation to try to determine location with a much lower level of accuracy but with increased speed. That is fine for many applications, but not really running apps. I have heard some people say that to increase your phone accuracy with runkeeper (and similar apps) you can try turning the cell off, which then should force it to gps only mode.. but I do not know if that is truthful or just a rumor.
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Hmmmm...a couple of points here.
1. I've read that turning off wi-fi and putting the phone in an arm band helps. Doing that has eliminated the crazy "thinks I'm on the next street over for a few seconds" stuff that I used to see. I might try turning off cellular too.
2. All of my runs are near my house. It's a rather large development that makes it easy to run loops without dealing with traffic. It's a relatively new development and the cell tower coverage around here isn't that great. I suppose that could be part of my problem.
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Either way, I would assume you are better off using your watch if you have one. Is there any reason you want to use the iphone instead of the watch? I just use my garmin watch and then sync up my activity to runkeeper/strava/etc afterwards. I assume the polar watch can do the same?
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Yes, I can sync up Polar, but I really like the apps (Polar Beat and RunKeeper in particular) that tell me my time, distance, speed, heart rate, etc. at intervals that I define without having to look down at the watch and push buttons. (Time, distance, speed, and heart rate are all on different displays.) But it would be nice if the information those apps gave me was actually accurate.
I suppose my next steps would be to try turning off cellular and also trying it in a different part of town.
The other thing that seems to ring true about the cell tower thing for me is that there seem to be parts of my runs where Runkeeper and the watch are pretty much identical, and other parts where they move apart from each other fairly dramatically--and now that you mention it, those areas *do* seem to be at the same spots in the neighborhood...