#APPLE WATCH SERIES 3 GPS REVIEW SERIES#
What the Apple Watch Series 3 does allow you to do that a dedicated fitness tracker doesn’t is to stay connected to the world without your phone, thanks to its cellular capability. However, if I sped up suddenly it would jump off the scale again, or stop giving a reading entirely for long sections. The heart rate tended to settle down after the first mile or so, when it was usually very high, and from then on it would be reasonably accurate – within 5bpm of a chest strap – on steady runs at least. While it’s not a problem that only Apple suffers – and you can solve the issue by pairing the watch with a chest strap – it does throw the calorie readings out of whack, not to mention giving you quite the scare when you glance down to see your heart rate is apparently 200bpm when you’re taking it easy. I also found that the heart rate readings jumped all over the place when I ran, especially when I stepped up the pace. All GPS trackers have this issue to some extent, but I found it more pronounced on the Apple Watch. If you’ve been zigzagging through city streets your run can be shortened considerably because the route recorded will have you cutting corners and ploughing straight through buildings rather than running around them. You can see on the route map given in the Activity app after the run how much smoothing the Apple Watch has done. It really grinds my gears, but I am a very stat-obsessed runner. How much of a bother this is will vary from person to person. It can be as much as 500m out after 10K of running (sometimes much less, of course – this was the worst discrepancy I experienced). One pretty big issue I had with the Apple Watch 3 was that I didn't find it’s GPS readings to be as accurate as on running watches. My favourite is iSmoothRun, which lets you create structured workouts to follow on the watch, as well as showing more in-depth running data fields like cadence and a ghost pace to race against. Most of these just give the basic stats on your run as you go, but you can find apps that mimic the abilities of dedicated running watches. Indeed there’s pretty much every popular app you can think of, which is the Apple Watch’s great strength.
You can work around this with another app, RunGap, but it’s a faff.įortunately, there is a dedicated Strava app for the watch, and a Nike+ Run Club app, and a Runkeeper app. The native Workout app does a decent job of presenting the key stats – time, distance, current and average pace, heart rate, elevation and calories – but, crucially, won’t upload your workout to Strava or any other running app you might use. The first decision you have to make as an Apple Watch-owning runner is which app you’re going to use. Using The Apple Watch Series 3 For Running For my money, it’s the best everyday tracking system around. The rings system is an excellent approach that’s well designed to motivate and engage. I tended to ignore these, because my burning desire to see all three rings filled needed no extra impetus. This could be an alert in the morning saying that you’d normally have made more progress on your rings by that time, or a message at the end of the day giving the details of what activity you’d still need to do to fill the rings. Make sure you do – there’s nothing worse than smashing your Move and Exercise goals out of the park with a big run, then missing out on all three rings because you sat at your desk for the rest of the day.Īpple has now added smart coaching features to the rings system, where you’ll get various notifications to help you fill them. You’ll get reminders to stand and move ten minutes before the end of an hour when you’ve been sedentary. The Exercise goal, in contrast, is fixed at 30 minutes and the Stand target at 12 hours. You can set this to whatever target you like, with 500 calories the default, and the watch will suggest adjustments to your target at the start of each week depending on what you managed the previous week. The Move goal represents active calories, so not the ones you burn by simply sitting.
0 kommentar(er)
