log in
register

Smartphones and long rides: The Strategy

  • Creator
    Topic
  • January 23, 2014 at 5:28 pm #20551
    KiwiMike

    There’s a lot of discussion around smartphones vs. Garmins for long rides. In one corner, Garminados waffle about 15hr battery life, waterproofness and size, while in the geek corner Mobilistas tout cheap smartphones with a few extra batteries as the way to go, not doubling up on tech as the Garmin crowd carry mobiles anyway.

    I present proof positive that a smartphone – even one 4 years old – can do the job. This screenshot is 5 1/2hrs into a ‘ride’, recording with Strava and using Viewranger for navigation, at 25% battery left. Critically the Viewranger Trip screen has been on all the time, with the nav arrow and other information displayed – meaning it can do a ride of over 7 hours with the display on permanently. Brightness was turned down, but it was still quite visible. Also the phone was connected to 3UK the whole time, mobile data and WiFi turned off.

    Noting that if you set the screen to auto-off after say 15 seconds, you can wake it to check direction at an intersection, then it will go back to sleep automatically. This will dramatically improve battery life to about 12hrs in this case, as you see below screen power accounts for nearly half battery usage.

    So you have Strava logging, always-on navigation, plus can receive calls/SMS. With the option to turn on mobile data to check email if really needed.

    The phone in this case is a Sony Ericsson Xperia Arc, but for £40-ish you could have a Motorola Defy from eBay, rated IP67 waterproof and pretty shockproof to boot. Stem-mount it on £27-worth of Quadlock and you have a quarter-turn easy on-off solution that is weatherproof and can have its always-on runtime doubled to around 12hrs using £10 worth of extra battery. Or out to 24hrs if you have screen sleep enabled.

    If/when you do need to stop and swap batteries, a Strava TCX/GPX file can be joined using one of a few methods to give that all-important one long ride.

    The 4.4-star rated Viewranger app is free for Android and iOS. You can purchase Viewranger maps for less than half of the Garmin cost and the online route planning tool is genius. £90 gets you all of the UK (£199 from Garmin), or smaller bits are priced applicably less. Or you can download Openstreetmap / Opencyclemap tiles for free *from the app, on the mobile* and use them anywhere in the world. This can be done whilst on the road, no laptop needed – for example, using free Wifi in a café. Did this in Belgium last year- worked flawlessly.

    Hopefully this goes some way to clearing the air and giving people hope that quality, robust on-bike long-ride nav, logging and comms is perfectly do-able for less than £100.

  • Creator
    Topic
Viewing 15 replies - 1 through 15 (of 84 total)
1 2 3 4 5 6
  • Author
    Replies
  • August 19, 2015 at 4:43 am #770247
    0
    Judge dreadful

    I only use the Garmin as a
    I only use the Garmin as a clock, when it’s too dark to see the cheapo cycle computer screen. I use the smartphone with google maps set to navigate, for everything else, I have Stravabollix running to record the route. I regularly go over 12 hours riding, and have only had to use the mobile charger thingy on a handful of occasions. I’ve lost count of the number of times the Garmin has let me down, by being useless for navigation, and having a less than impressive battery life.

    August 19, 2015 at 2:22 am #770245
    0
    DaveQB

    KiwiMike wrote:Scoob_84

    KiwiMike wrote:
    Scoob_84 wrote:

    You can use Garmins 200 and 500’s for navigation. I do this all the time with my 500.

    How well does that work in practice, riding in a totally strange place? That’s a breadcrumb trail with no mapping – and the UK mapping on the 800/810 is £200 vs. free for Viewranger if you download the free Openstreetmap tiles. Also Garmin give no distance- or time-to-turn – just an alert if you go off-course, and no way to easily get back on without guessing and waiting for another alert to say you’re now going the wrong way. The peloton will have beaten me to a pulp with their Lezynes long before I work out which way to go, once lost in Hampshire’s myriad lane maze.

    My aim is to have low-cost stress-free nav where making a mistake or a detour is forgiveable/recoverable. £150 for a 500 with no maps. Or the 800 is £300 with the UK 1:50k maps, which is a great solution – if you have £300. Add another £150 for the 810.

    Although I agree a phone has much better navigation than most Garmins and I have only ever been using my phone as my bike computer since I started cycling 3 years ago, the Garmin 500 I am trying now does decent navigation including distance to next 3 turnsand warnings X meters before the next turns.

    I am finding the key is when making the route (on RideWithGPS) you need to check the way points that are auto made and correct them. I even add an extra way point before a turn I feel I need good notice for to state what the next turn will be. I found that on some roundabouts where the route is going straight through (2nd exit), RideWithGPS would put a left turn at the entry and a left turn at the exit. Very confusing while on the bike. So I have learned to check and change these way points and also change the notice text if it’s not clear. So far so good but still testing.

    May 14, 2014 at 1:13 pm #770243
    0
    parksey

    That stem mount of yours Dave
    That stem mount of yours Dave has convinced me that a Quad Lock is the way forward rather than the Finn, as that’s exactly the solution I’m after. With a waterproof phone you don’t need to worry about a separate “poncho” for it either.

    Just a matter of finding a suitable case to stick the universal adaptor too, not much around for the Z2 yet.

    May 13, 2014 at 8:57 pm #770241
    0
    philtregear

    i use the edge 200 for
    i use the edge 200 for navigation. its great and easy peasy. i cant disagree that smartphones might be ok, i have no need or desire to wish to learn to use such tec. for £90 and out of the box ease of use the garmin is great. my cheap mobile sits in my pocket . both have enough charge for a full days riding and some left over if im out longer. also i could always use the torch on my phone to get me home!!

    May 13, 2014 at 7:48 pm #770239
    0
    dave atkinson

    Mr Will wrote:I use an Edge

    Mr Will wrote:
    I use an Edge 500 for my bike computer and for tracking and my phone (Xperia Z1 compact) for navigation and communications. Both are better at their respective jobs and I have no worries about my phone being dead should I have a problem on a long ride.

    Why should it be a choice between one and the other?

    it doesn’t have to be. but if you’re navigating on your phone then it’s a sight easier to do that if it’s on your bars.

    May 13, 2014 at 7:45 pm #770237
    0
    dave atkinson

    Been playing about with
    Been playing about with mounting the phone on the stem over the past week or so. pics below.

    the stem mount is just a standard o-ring one. the phone mount is a SRAM Quickview adaptor that allows you to mount an older garmin on a quarter turn mount, i dremelled it down so just the quarter turn bit was left

    it’s stuck onto a semi rigid skin with a 3M VHB pad, the same stuff GoPro use for their helmet mounts.

    so far so good. the phone isn’t in any danger of coming out of the skin which is a tight fit, but still has enough flex to give a bit of shock absorption. it also protects the back of the phone from hitting the stem, and means you don’t have to stick a garmin mount directly on to your phone. I was going to get another skin for off-the-bike, but i haven’t bothered yet, it doesn’t stick out much.

    May 9, 2014 at 2:36 pm #770235
    0
    Mr Will

    I use an Edge 500 for my bike
    I use an Edge 500 for my bike computer and for tracking and my phone (Xperia Z1 compact) for navigation and communications. Both are better at their respective jobs and I have no worries about my phone being dead should I have a problem on a long ride.

    Why should it be a choice between one and the other?

    May 9, 2014 at 9:01 am #770233
    0
    SB76

    Dave Atkinson wrote:SB76

    Dave Atkinson wrote:
    SB76 wrote:
    I would expect that a dedicated device would be more accurate but i havent done the testing however what level of accuracy do either cars/cyclists really need.

    i would expect a dedicated gps to be more accurate too, but my experience, and looking at plots off my edge 810 compared to my phone, suggests that they’re not. or if they are, the phone plot is sufficiently good for it not to matter

    I think the key is sufficiently good enough not to matter is the point. We dont need the plots to be inch perfect.

    May 9, 2014 at 8:49 am #770231
    0
    dave atkinson

    SB76 wrote:I would expect

    SB76 wrote:
    I would expect that a dedicated device would be more accurate but i havent done the testing however what level of accuracy do either cars/cyclists really need.

    i would expect a dedicated gps to be more accurate too, but my experience, and looking at plots off my edge 810 compared to my phone, suggests that they’re not. or if they are, the phone plot is sufficiently good for it not to matter

    May 9, 2014 at 8:37 am #770229
    0
    KiwiMike

    5 years ago I’d have been the
    5 years ago I’d have been the first person to agree that stand-alone GPS was the way to go – as a former mobile network operator and manufacturer technology strategist, I have drawers full of now-obsolete GPS receivers, old phones, etc. Testing this stuff used to be my day job.

    Now GPS has gone the way of bike lights. Used to be £200 was the entry point for lights good enough to do 50km/hr on unlit lanes for 2+ hrs. Now it’s £20 or less.

    As Dave / SB76 alluded, the conversation now moves to waterproofness and battery life – although increasingly battery clearly isn’t an issue for the vast majority of rides, and the Quadlock silicone ponchos or case things like p0cpacs mean you can happily take a £500 non-IP-rated phone out on the bars or in a pocket in a thunderstorm and be happy.

    I’d not be surprised if the next iPhone comes IP rated. It used to be IP rating a handset added $100 to the bill and quite a few mm to the dimensions. As with GPS, 8+ MP cameras etc, it’s now almost a hygiene factor.

    May 9, 2014 at 8:12 am #770227
    0
    SB76

    I would expect that a
    I would expect that a dedicated device would be more accurate but i havent done the testing however what level of accuracy do either cars/cyclists really need. I have used my old iphone as a car satnav and to do thta, i bought the tomtom cradle that came with an additional gps radio to boost the poor indoor/car quality gps of an iphone 3GS. I have some the odd strange behaviour using strava on my phone but where that comes from is difficult.

    The key thing is Strava must perform some post processing as the stats for the rides do change between hitting save on the device and the ride being uploaded.

    I believe the phone is suffcient from a GPS perspective so it’s purely about battery life and other things such as waterproofing.

    May 8, 2014 at 6:43 pm #770225
    0
    dave atkinson

    Here’s some screen shots
    Here’s some screen shots overlaid on 1:25k OS mapping, showing:

    1) out and back along the towpath, under tree cover
    2) not coping quite so well on a short tunnel under the aqueduct
    3) looping back to a petrol station to buy some midget gems
    4) pulling over to put my coat on
    5) general good roadholding throughout the plot

    May 8, 2014 at 6:30 pm #770223
    0
    dave atkinson

    giobox wrote:
    I think people

    giobox wrote:

    I think people misunderstand what I’m trying to explain here. Of course you can write a GPS using app that will return good battery life. The point is that a compromise has to, and will be, struck between GPS accuracy and battery life. Techniques such as reducing location polling based on speed of movement etc wll be employed to maximise battery life on a phone. On an iPhone this can be a pretty big, although arguably necessary, compromise at times.

    A device such as a Garmin does not have to worry about running background services for calls, texts, pinging cell towers, managing memory for third party applications, etc, etc, affording the engineers a degree of freedom that simply does not exist on a phone based platform. This is one reason why you can at times see some pretty erratic GPX data out of an iPhone, where the Garmin tracks more cleanly.

    Of course, I haven’t even touched on the iPhone’s lack of an altimeter, but that’s a whole other issue with location accuracy on phones.

    I’m not misunderstanding you. I’m saying:

    1) look at the GPS accuracy on the ride i posted earlier
    2) my Xperia Z1 Compact is good for 8 hours on my bars, using the screen for navigation when necessary, at that GPS accuracy. at least 8 hours.

    where’s the compromise? I can’t see one.

    Not everyone’s trying to do this on an iPhone, and if you do want to use your phone as a GPS then the iPhone would be a good way down my wishlist. not least because it’s not waterproof.

    whether barometric data is available is kind of moot when all the major platforms use topographical data on upload to determine altitude gain. that’s a whole other conversation in itself, really.

    May 8, 2014 at 5:58 pm #770221
    0
    giobox

    Dave Atkinson wrote:Battery

    Dave Atkinson wrote:
    Battery life not an issue on most rides, the z1 compact will manage at least 8 hours the way I use it, without changing any of the settings

    I think people misunderstand what I’m trying to explain here. Of course you can write a GPS using app that will return good battery life. The point is that a compromise has to, and will be, struck between GPS accuracy and battery life. Techniques such as reducing location polling based on speed of movement etc wll be employed to maximise battery life on a phone. On an iPhone this can be a pretty big, although arguably necessary, compromise at times.

    A device such as a Garmin does not have to worry about running background services for calls, texts, pinging cell towers, managing memory for third party applications, etc, etc, affording the engineers a degree of freedom that simply does not exist on a phone based platform. This is one reason why you can at times see some pretty erratic GPX data out of an iPhone, where the Garmin tracks more cleanly.

    Of course, I haven’t even touched on the iPhone’s lack of an altimeter, but that’s a whole other issue with location accuracy on phones.

    May 8, 2014 at 5:46 pm #770219
    0
    dave atkinson

    Battery life not an issue on
    Battery life not an issue on most rides, the z1 compact will manage at least 8 hours the way I use it, without changing any of the settings

  • Author
    Replies
Viewing 15 replies - 1 through 15 (of 84 total)
1 2 3 4 5 6
  • You must be logged in to reply to this topic.