Tips to resolve Connected GPS issues.

[Calcobrena]

Alright, so there's several topics about people having a problem with this.  And I did, too.  For about two weeks. Even thought about returning mine as well, like many of you had to.  And I had no idea why this was happening.  

Some of you thought it was the way you had your Bluetooth Audio set up

Well, most people know that smart watches are essentially garbage.  Gimmicks like getting calls and texts on a watch.  Ridiculous.  The only thing remotely useful is the occasional reminder.  It almost feels like adding these phone features to watches was to cater to hipster doofus iPhone users and bratty teenagers.

So, many of you who got a Versa, probably just outright disabled all the notifications.  Turns out, blocking notifications with your phone causes connectivity problems with your phone.  You might have thought it was your headphones because they connect perfectly and maybe it can't handle both connections at the same time.  Or maybe you thought you had to set the Bluetooth Audio setting on the Versa to ON or OFF.  

But you can run both your headphones and your Connected GPS and not lose connection at all if you just make sure you enable Notifications.  If you don't want to be pestered because smart watch notifications are generally garbage, just disable the individual notification features that you don't want.

I have not had a single sync problem or connected GPS problem since I've done this.  And I was getting them over and over and restarting my phone and watch all the time just to get a sync.

Hopefully, this works for others. 🙂

Moderator Edit: Format + Clarified Subject.

[MarcoGFitbit]

Hello @Calcobrena, I hope you're doing well, it's nice to see you around. 

I appreciate you have taken the time to provide your feedback and insight about this situation. Thank you for detailing the steps you took in order to fix this issue on your side, I'm sure these steps will be very helpful to other members in the Community facing the same situation. 

If there's anything else you might want to add or if there's anything else I can do for you, please feel free to reply! 

[Calcobrena]

That was really all I had to do to fix this for me.  I never gave much thought about how Fitbit tries to maintain it's sync but if you use your phone's app settings to block Versa notifications because you just wanted a fitness watch, you will cause sync problems.  And yeah, it can still work, but it seems to interfere with maintaining a connection.  It might even be blocking the KEEP ALIVE and ALWAYS CONNECTED features.  Someone from Fitbit development would have to comment on that.  Either way, I enabled all the connections and then used the Fitbit APP itself to disable things I don't want to see pop up on my watch like text messages.  I did leave the REMINDER notification on, though.

So, the watch won't actually bother me with notifications, but keeping this feature enabled has given me 100% connectivity for entire runs.  And I between 40 and 50 miles a week (44 scheduled this week).  So, I have a pretty decent sized sample set. 🙂

I'll also add that tracking has also been very accurate for me.  I have a stride of about 104cm.  My run this morning kept me connected and had a calculated stride of 103.6.

Before this, I was disconnecting very often, connecting only a couple minutes for an entire run.  It made it so inaccurate that my stride would get calculated in the high 70s and low 80s.  And at 5'9" that was so far from being correct. 

Now that it works, I've been pretty ecstatic. 🙂