RideWithGPS

The problem is, who determines "bona-fide"? "Misinformation" and "disinformation" have turned into facts that someone disagrees with. These "terms" are too often used to sway opinion and kill discourse. By design.
 
Given that this is a RWGPS thread, maybe some actual information regarding battery usage of the app while riding would be useful to see if it lives down to the definition of 'eating' battery.

Here are 2 data points from me:
1) logged my morning commute today with RWGPS. Usual RWGPS settings, screen turns off quickly, but is set to wake at a touch or wave of the hand. I woke the screen about a dozen times on the ride. 42°F temperature. Phone dropped 2% in 40 minutes. So 3%(~140mA)/hour which is not much different than if it was just in my pocket and not logging the ride.

2) navigated the ride home: All cues(over 50 cues) turned on, spoken audio and visual; Screen on 100%; streamed audio book to my Aftershokz, location sharing on to my family, went off course a couple times, took several photos- so basically worst case scenario. Total battery drain was roughly 14%/hour.

I guess you can call that eating battery although attributing it to RWGPS is dubious. 58 minutes of RWGPS screen time+ 1minute background use in a 2 hour window accounted for 3% of the battery usage in that time. 1 minute of camera use drained as much battery as 1 hour of using the gps subsystem. Amazon Music accounted for a third of the battery drain in that timeframe.

As a rule, it's not gps tracking that eats a phone battery. It's all the other functions it can perform at the same time. A GPS computer doesn't have the same abilities/drawback for better and for worse.
 
15%-20% per hour agrees with what I've seen myself and with others. Did you start the ride at 100%? If you're commuting, and your phone is 95%-100% at the start of the ride, you charge it during the day, and have the same ride home, it's not going to be a problem.

On the other hand, my Garmin 840 uses around 10%-15% or so per hour following a RWGPS loaded course. It is processing a lot more data than a typical phone setup, though.
 
Im using my computer for navigation and the screen is permanently on.
It only lost about 20% in four hours.
Its a simple monocolour lcd and very readable even in bright sunlight.

I might...pulls pained face...have to load the app to get more settings, time to boot up my old burner phone using wifi, absolutely nothing on it.
 
Chargeride said:
Im using my computer for navigation and the screen is permanently on.
It only lost about 20% in four hours.
Its a simple monocolour lcd and very readable even in bright sunlight.

I might...pulls pained face...have to load the app to get more settings, time to boot up my old burner phone using wifi, absolutely nothing on it.
Click to expand...
I've just watched your latest video Charge (thank you!) You were confronted with the "find my van" issue, which is a typical navigation problem. You could have of course dropped a pin in Google Maps but that's the thing we all forget doing :) I recommended you ran Komoot (without the route) on your inexpensive phone; the phone could be kept in your pocket with the screen off and only pulled out to see where you are. Now, I would recommend to Record the ride as well (with the recording discarded post ride). I think Komoot draws the line of the track already ridden, so it is easy to determine the position of the van by just looking at the Komoot map. Perhaps you could give it a try?

Now, another unrelated thing. If someone is on the ride for, say, 4 hours gross then a phone can be safely used (I'm not discussing the possibility of damaging the phone camera here). Where the phone is unacceptable is a long summer ride. My requirement for the navigation/recording device is 12 hours at least. Even my first Wahoo ELEMNT Roam 1 had the battery life of 17 hours. The longest trip of mine was over 26 hours gross. It required me to recharge the device on the overnight stay. You might ask "why didn't you switch the device off for the stay?" It is because a GPS bike computer treats a ride as finished when the device is off for two hours.

I wouldn't have experienced any issue had I a Wahoo ACE or a Garmin 1040/1050 on that ride (but it was several years ago when these devices even didn't exist!) These big devices have as big battery as they even allow handling ultramarathons, and allow using several battery saving techniques if necessary.
 
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