Ionic GPS Inaccuracies

[MP4]

Hi, 

I'm a new Fitbit user, bought an Ionic on Monday and I'm having some issues with the GPS. Went on a couple of runs (at a track) and the gps seemed to be completely out both on the distance travelled and pace per kilometre.

I'm a long time strava user so yesterday I went for a run with both the Fitbit Ionic going and the strava on my iPhone running at the same time. Here are the results:

Strava - 7.9km   @ 4:15/km

Fitbit - 7.2km     @ 4:34/km

The difference of 0.7km is quite big and the difference in pace is also worrying. I waited till both had connected to gps before starting the run and I run in London where gps signal should be good. 

Is my Fitbit Ionic GPS not working correctly? Any help/advice would be appreciated. 

Thanks

Matt

Moderator Edit: Updated Subject for Clarity

[samgillespie]

@bmw54 I agree with you I am more of a fun runner, parkrun, 10k and half marathon I am training for a marathon later this year.  I was hoping to use the ionic to help me keep my mile splits constant and try to improve them. Sadly the ionic always makes the first mile longer similar to a lot of the feedback on here. I do like the fact the ionic is waterproof which helps when I go kayaking and I love the Fitbit app which has all my historical data loaded, I just would like something closer to my blaze & iPhone combination. To be fair my ionic did much better today at parkrun but it’s still not what I was hoping for 

[samgillespie]

Sadly as I have worked in technology companies before my assumption is that there is a limited resource at Fitbit to investigate these issues, they are in business to make a profit else there is no point in being in business. There is no money to be made in fixing current products the main opportunity for Fitbit is to develop new products 

[MattyW]

Alas I think you're probably right, however I can't help thinking that the
problem should be easy to fix, at least as far as my understanding of the
problem goes. If they have reasonable GPS accuracy, and I know that's a big
"if", and they have the correct time, then speed and distance shouldn't
really require an Einstein

[byankster]

---

wrote:

I suspect there are so few negative reviews because competitive runners do not use Fitbit products. At starting lines of races everywhere I enter, from local 5Ks to the Boston marathon, I never see fitbits on the wrists of racers. Most people reviewing the Fitbit aren't giving them the kind of tests we are.

So why do I persist in using Fitbit? Dunno, but if the Run app isn't corrected by spring's race season I'll be moving to garmin. And of course that matters little to Fitbit, they have my money.

---

I think there are more Fitbit products (maybe not Ionic) sold than Garmin, but, just because I have no life I checked out the community forums at Garmin.  First thing I noticed its no were near as active as Fitbit's community forum. Maybe that is a good thing since most post are people having problems with their products. However, there are complaints being discussed on the forums. Also, their top of the line watch is $150 more than the Ionic.    Garmin doesn't have a Spotify app (the one thing keeping me from getting an Ionic).  

[BahGahWah]

Fitbit Ionic 4.73km.tcx import for same activity 4.9kmDon't know for sure, however attached images are from the same run using the same data recorded by the ionic.  This is what makes me think it is how the ionic is calculating the distance.

The same data is giving different distances 4.7 vs 4.9 on a 5km course.  The plot using the 3rd party site is more accurate.

I crudely measured the difference in the 1st km marker and it is 50m to 60m.

[Denodan]

I got the Samsung gear sport. A much better watch and got mine cheaper than even the gramin and its better i feel. 

The screen on the garmins are horrible compared to even the ionic.

The vivo active 3 is horrible, the case is plastic.

I think with garmin your payjng for the name.

Your better off with the ape watch or samsung and using 3rd party apps.

[MattyW]

It does retain your stride length unless you tell it not to - and that's a
problem if you do your next run at a different pace, like a lot of us do.
To me it seems very mysterious if it's got a GPS signal that it doesn't
just use it. Also, it seems slow at updating the step count in general -
if I'm walking along it doesn't just count each step but does a few at a
time. Even more noticeable in the Today app. It updates the total steps
much more quickly than the hourly steps. I suspect the running app doesn't
access the step count regularly enough, so it says I'm really slow for a
few yards. Perhaps it's not accessing the GPS often enough either.

[Denodan]

The garmin watches unless you buy their top range the fenix are **ahem**.

The construction is plastic but on the vivo active 3 the glass is gorilla glass 3 like ionic, but watch is still plastic, the colour screen is horrible and limited colours.

They seem to be no good at designing a touch screen as the later models gone back to using buttons.

The vivo active had touch screen but dumped it with later models.

The ionc screen is miles better than any garmin watch and frankly going from ionic to garmin your going to hate the screen.

You guys will never find the dead accurate fitness watch ever and every one has issues.

Was looking around and the only 2 tgat stood out but not even fitness watches was the apple watch and samsung gear sport.

After watching many reviews and reading the samsung gear was listed up there with apple to be among the better and along with the fenix 3 which costs more.

But evrn then they still have issues.

Cycling the ionic is the better watch than even the fenix 3 and i cycle and dont run.

The ionic cycling is very comparable to my bike gps.

But if your a running the watch to get is garmin as first and formost were and still are made for serious runners before anything else.

Not the best cycling watch i feel a d this is where the ionic does the better job.

General fitness tracking and keeping an eye on stats fitbit, apple, samsung.

There is no watch to fit all situations.

I would say if your really into running the to buy the fitbit ionic you made a serious mistake.

Just for everyday use its fine and a dam good cycling watch.

[BahGahWah]

Just completed a measured / organised 10km run, and the performance appears more accurate.

Ionic measured 9.99km, which feels accurate.  The person I ran with measured 10.1km on an iPhone, previous runs over the same course I have measured 10.1 to 10.2.

The dashboard is not letting me download the .TCX file to compare the plot.

App reports my running stride as 118 (seams to automatically change between 117 and 118cm).  8310 steps x 118cm gives a distance of 9.8km.

So approx. 0.1km deviation over 10km vs 0.3km over 5km.

This run and yesterdays run where at similar pace, with very little activity in between.  So maybe it was easier for it lock distance to stride as the difference was less.

Maybe it is the start of the run where distance is lost and then stabilises, so averaging over the longer distance reduces out the issues.

[SantiR]

Hello everyone! I hope you are all doing well! Thanks for your continued participation on this thread and for sharing your opinions, feedback, and experience with the Fitbit Community.

I'm happy to say that I have an update regarding this topic! 

Yesterday, the new firmware update for Ionic begun to roll out. The progressive roll out should be available for all Ionic users within a few weeks! This update includes an improvement in the way your distance gets tracked when you're running with GPS. 

Feel free to update its firmware as soon as you get the update. Please check this post for more details about this.

Thanks for your patience. Keep me posted! 

[Galacticness]

Yep!  I've learned to dislike the purchase of the iconic too..  The ammount of time trying to troubleshoot problems eats up valuable exercise time and planning.  So regretting the change to fitbit.  If it's not sorted through it's teething problems soon.. I will be jumping ship and returning to my tried and trusted previous brand...

[groberge]

Glad to hear there's an update available.  Better status updates would have been nice but I'm excited to try it once I get it updated. 

[Smackems]

Great news.. Excited for the update.  

[emmahyde98]

Hi,

I am thinking about buying a fitbit iconic and was wondering if they have updated/fixed this issue? Is this still happening for you?

Emma 

[MattyW]

I think most of us are still waiting for the operating system update, so
I'd at least wait a week or two, just to see what the verdict is.

[groberge]

Yeah, I'm still waiting also.

I'm sure once we start getting the update, we'll hear very quickly on this forum whether it's been fixed or not.

There will either be much jubilation or much more aggravation.

[bmw54]

---

@emmahyde98wrote:

Hi,

I am thinking about buying a fitbit iconic and was wondering if they have updated/fixed this issue? Is this still happening for you?

Emma 

---

As the others said, we're still waiting. 

But in the meantime I've stopped using the Run app when I run. Instead I use the Bike app; it seems to use pure GPS; pace and distance are much improved. 

After syncing to my phone I convert the exercise from Bike to Run; this gives me the mile split times.

[Tex52]

Just wondering if there’s a fix for GPS accuracy? I bought one Friday and all my runs so far are 20-25% off using known distance. If there isn’t any fix I’ll be returning it.

[Tex52]

Why is a device with a GPS using steps to calculate distance? This makes no sense?

[Giampi71]

This morning I had a run and wore both my Ionic (left wrist) and my Polar M600 (right wrist). In addition I carried my Pixel with Runtastic.

I got the following: 

- Ionic: 7.79 km, AVG HR: 143, Max HR: 167

- Polar: 7.76 km, AVG HR: 143, Max HR: 161

- Pixel: 7.69 km.

So the difference between the 2 watches is only 30 meters meaning 0.4%. 

I also compared the traces with DC Rainmaker analyzer and found that both Fitbit and Polar sometimes go off track in different points but overall Fitbit trace looked better.

The test was still with the old firmware (.16). I received the new update .25 a couple of hours later.

Overall really happy about he Ionic