Monday, July 28, 2014

More on the Samsung Galaxy S5

I reviewed the Samsung Galaxy S5 from a runner's perspective here. It was more like "first impressions," as I hadn't had a chance to go on a long run with it, just a short 3.3 mile jaunt.

Today I ran 13.7 miles with it, using RunKeeper and Audible while also running the S Health app as a pedometer in the background. Battery drain was quite acceptable, about a loss of 15% over 2 1/4 hours. Obviously that wouldn't last the entire day at that rate, but then again, I wouldn't be having the constant GPS hit for the rest of the day.

One slight downside is that the S5 is slightly larger than my old Galaxy Nexus, and somewhere around mile 11, my left shoulder started to get tired. I switched the phone to my right hand, and not long after, my right shoulder got tired. (I normally hold my phone in my left hand, so even though I'm right-handed, I guess I have more muscle endurance on my left side for this particular context.) It's not a heavier phone, but it's wide enough that it seems to be stretching my grip to its comfortable limit.

The other funny thing is that the S Health pedometer has absolutely no idea what to do with my high cadence/short stride when running. It knows when I'm running versus when I'm walking and helpfully displays the "steps taken" bar chart in different shades of green, but its mileage calculator was way off. By the end of my run, it proudly informed me that I had covered over 20 miles on foot today. Subtracting the 13.7 miles from the run, that would mean that I'd already walked well over 6 miles too. I think the accurate figure would have been about 3/4 of a mile at that point. So the pedometer roughly overstates my on foot mileage by about 50% when I'm running.

No comments:

Post a Comment