I have a charge 5 and iPhone 13mini.I bought the charge 5 for three reasons, one was the smaller size and secondly the longer battery life compared to an Apple Watch, but the main reason was the inbuilt gps because I don’t want to always have my phone with me on activities, nor do I want my phone fitbit app to be refreshing in the background when I’m not using it, nor do I want background app refresh turned on on my phone permanently in order to use gps in my walk activities.
so I find the poor inbuilt gps functionality very frustrating and it is annoying that I’ve had to reluctantly turn on background app refresh and set the Fitbit app to location services “always” every time I go for a tracked walk, and then have to remember to turn the settings off again on my phone at the end.
But even more frustrating is that even with the “dynamic” setting in the tracker and going to the trouble of turning on the above two settings on my phone, if the charge 5 has difficulty finding gps for a while it stops trying to connect to GPS at ALL during that activity, and you cannot force it to try again later, without ending the activity and starting a new activity. I am resigned to doing the latter with it now, and adding together 2 or 3 separate walks to give me the one total walk distance. And even then, only bits of it are mapped.
This is annoying because frequently a route might progress through a low gps area such as following under a power line for a while, but emerge again several minutes later when the track comes out of the power line route, but if the notification that gps has turned off has already appeared, then it doesn’t try again during that activity and that walk/run is not mapped. Often when this happens I check my phone gps location on Google maps and it has me placed accurately, but for some reason the Charge 5 tracker has not only given up trying to connect using the inbuilt gps, but also has given up syncing with the app in order to use my phone gps, which is actually working.
Please add the capability to try more frequently to both connect to gps from the tracker gps, AND try more often to sync with the phone gps AND not to give up so quickly!
And also provide a button to manually prompt it to try to connect again after it has turned off the gps for a walk, without having to stop and restart the whole activity.
