Fitbit Blaze, GPS & Samsung A5

[LJH123]

Hi, I've had my Blaze for less than a week. I've done 3 runs and each time I've started the exercise within the Blaze, its connected to my phone (Samsung Galaxy A5 2017) straight away but then about 1 minute in a red phone symbol with a line appears. I understand this means no GPS, however at the end of the run when I sync the tracker and phone it maps pretty accurately where I've been! Also the tracker vibrates every minute or so throughout the exercise for no apparent reason! Can anyone offer any advice re GPS please and the red phone symbol? I only bought it for GPS and am starting to feel like I wasted my money.

[Rich_Laue · Accepted solution]

The tracker will vibrate everytime GPS is established or lost. Could tgat be the reason?

Are you un the woods with a heavy tree cover? A heavily clouded day? Walking near tall buildings or a treeline should not cause a loss of GPS but could throw the recorded path off.

[LJH123]

Hi Rich,

I did wonder if the vibration was GPS being re-established but the red phone symbol was there throughout. My running route is along the sea front so lots of open space and no tall buildings. It's a route that Runkeeper can map without any GPS problems - although I didn't have that running on my recent runs! Thanks. 

[LJH123]

Hi, I've had my Blaze for less than a week. I've done 3 runs and each time I've started the exercise within the Blaze, its connected to my phone (Samsung Galaxy A5 2017) straight away but then about 1 minute in a red phone symbol with a line appears. I understand this means no GPS, however at the end of the run when I sync the tracker and phone it maps pretty accurately where I've been! Also the tracker vibrates every minute or so throughout the exercise for no apparent reason! Can anyone offer any advice re GPS please and the red phone symbol? I only bought it for GPS and am starting to feel like I wasted my money.

[Rach1802]

I appreciate this is a very old thread and the Blaze is now discontinued (presumably due to its constant issues) but the answer that I have finally received on the above problem, among others, is that the A5 is not a compatible phone so some features will not work fully.

Unfortunately, GPS run tracking seems to be one of them as I have the exact same problem. I have no tall buildings, wi-fi off, phone and watch on same arm, etc. Given that the Blaze uses run data to calculate fitness, rather than heart rate data like my old Charge 2, when it gets it wrong and misses chunks of my run it drops my fitness right down. 

[Rich_Laue]

Do you have location set on high accuracy. .

If you use mobile run. does the resulting map look better? 

Try swiping all unneeded apps out of memory and restarting the phone. Android does a terrible job of releasing memory when an app is closed. 

Support feels a phone will not work until Fitbit proves that it can. With many models that share the same hardware, we feel the list is of phones that have been tested and found to or the app updated to work. In general we feel a phone is compatible until proven not to be. 

BTW

The blaze was discontinued and reppaced by the Versa which could have been named the Blaze 2 because it has most of the features that where requested. but due to no true OS amd limited memory, could not be added to the Blaze .

[Rach1802]

Thank you so much for your reply.

What is mobile run? I track a run using the 'run' feature on my Blaze, making sure it's hooked up to my phone's GPS. It never maintains connection properly though. Support also mentioned using my phone's os to track things as well, rather than the Blaze, but I'm not sure what they mean. And quite frankly I don't want to have spent several hundred pounds on a useless piece of kit!

I am having issues syncing now as well, which is when the lack of compatibility started to be mentioned and they won't replace or refund my fitbit now it doesn't work.

[Rach1802]

I just checked and yes, I have it set to high accuracy. 🙂