You want them all in one place so that they can be uploaded in one go to your fitness tracking site. That lets you see what your HR, power and cadence all where on that specific hill for example.
I used to have a Fitbit that used my phone for GPS and it was awful and drained the batteries on both devices. I guess the idea of having 5G is that you don’t actually take your phone with you, one less thing to have to force into your pockets.
SteevyT@beehaw.org 18 hours ago
From experience with FitBit that kind of GPS usage absolutely eats phone battery. Also, phones are not the most accurate things with GPS. I would have weird meandering paths and cut corners everywhere since it piggybacked off the phone. And this was nearly ideal, dead flat, open area, I can’t imagine how wonky it would have gone with bridges and tunnels and such.
The Garmin on the other hand is so absurdly accurate that I can tell where in the lane I rode even under bridges and through short tunnels, and it will keep that accuracy going literally all day without any battery concerns. I really only need about 16 continuous hours of battery at the most for the riding I do right now, although my wife has been trying to talk me into trying bike packing where a couple days of battery might be useful.
Phone service, I kind of agree can be tethered from a phone (actually, thats exactly how my bike computer does it for live tracking and emergency alerts if I crash). I’m not that fussed about my phone’s weight, so I just stick the phone in a jersey pocket and kinda forget it’s there. The human body makes for a decent enough shock absorber that the vibrations that kill phone cameras on handle bars don’t really get to your phone in a pocket.
some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org 17 hours ago
Thanks for clarifying.