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Apple Watch Series 5 First Run Impressions Video Up!

 

[Heads up: My full Apple Watch Series 5 In-Depth Review is up and published! Hit that up over here for all the complete and final details]

This post is just a super quick note that I pushed out a video with my initial impressions on the Apple Watch Series 5. I know that there’s surprisingly little overlap between my readership here on the site and that over on YouTube (despite my apparent verification there, removal, and then undoing of said removal…shrug?). So this post mostly serves as a heads up that if you’re looking for some initial first run data, I’ve got it for ya.

But, I’ve got 14 minutes and 16 seconds until dessert comes out of the oven (brownies, yes, in Amsterdam), and I’ll try and recap whatever I can till the ding happens. Given the serious time constraints we’ll go bullet style (all of this is detailed more deeply in the video):

– Yes, I definitely plan on an in-depth review here on the site, maybe later next week, or early the week after. I talked about the new features, many of which come via WatchOS 6 in my first Series 5 post here. Thus, I don’t plan anything further on the site till my full review. This post is mostly for YouTube since I didn’t do anything previously there.

– The always on display is nice, and works in a fairly similar way to Garmin and Fitbit in this space. The watch face is dimmed when your wrist isn’t raised or actively interacting with it. When you raise your wrist it immediately goes full bright.

– I had no issues seeing it in full sunlight mid-day (summer, technically) yesterday – in either dim or bright mode.

– GPS track accuracy seems roughly the same as my Series 4 unit as of August 2019. Apple has done some stuff there on corner cutting fixes and smoothing, but it still leaves the tell-tale Apple like swooshes around corners and overly smooths the track. Sometimes that works out, sometimes less so.

– I didn’t include the Polar Vantage V GPS track in my video because it was hideously bad. I have no idea what went wrong there, I’ve never seen anything like that before. You can view it in my set if you want though.

– HR accuracy seems less good than Series 4, which is a disappointment. There were some unexpected spikes and dropouts that are very un-Apple like. They did great work in Series 4 on optical HR – making it the best in the industry (a huge leap over Series 3). This is definitely going backwards, and I don’t think I’m alone here (more on that in the next bullet). However, these are unlike anything I see across the industry for mis-tracking. This looks like a bizarre algorithm or power type fail.

image

DesFit is seeing the same thing as well on his HR tracks, thousands of miles away in Colorado. And he even compared concurrently against a Series 4 on WatchOS 6 as well and no issues on that unit. His swooshes are also more impressive, where while riding the Apple Watch is completely ignoring certain turns as seen below:

image

– 8:43 seconds till brownies come out

– Disappointingly, 3rd party apps aren’t able to take advantage of the always-on screen. Thus, apps like Strava don’t actually show you the app while you’re using it. Instead, it shows a slimmed down version of the time. I demonstrate this in the video. This is a huge disappointment for 3rd party apps that were looking forward to an equalizer for more advanced use cases (or just simple ones like doing pushups in a gym).

– Battery life is a step back from Series 4, assuming you leave the defaults on. I put it on at 7:30AM this morning, and it’s now 9PM, and I’m at 25% battery with no GPS activity today, I suspect I’d run out of power shortly after midnight. On Series 3/4, I was getting a solid 2 days, even into the 3rd day.

– Beyond that, it’s basically just an Apple Watch that you know from the Series 4. Most other things are all exactly the same as they were on Series 4.

– The Girl also got one, though she’s mixed on whether she’ll keep it. It was interesting seeing her perspectives as a first time Apple Watch user coming from her Garmin Fenix 5S (non-Plus). She’s rockin’ both right now, but seems to defer to the Fenix 5 for most things. But it’s only Day 1 for her.

Wrap-Up:

Ok, with that – the brownies are buzzing. I’ve gotta go!

Enjoy the video and stay tuned for more. I’ll include any weekend data sets I do within my normal ‘5 Random Things’ post on Monday, as usual.

Thanks for reading..err…watching, and have a good remainder of the weekend! Brownies out!

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92 Comments

  1. Bob

    Samsung claims to have improved HRM in the Active 2. I hope DCR will look into the claim.

  2. Blair

    Good stuff, as always, Ray. Quick question: do you think what your initial test of the HR accuracy suggests would affect resting HR and HRV measuring? Trends seem more important with those metrics than any individual data point….. Yes, I may be trying to talk myself into something.

  3. Elliot

    How were the brownies?

    • Awesome.

      They weren’t anything fancy. They were from a box, the Ghirardelli brownie mix from Costco. It’s been sitting on our shift for…like, a year…maybe two. A really long time. I had a moment where I wanted it last night…and so I struck while the iron was hot!

    • TJ

      When will we be getting a Full In-Depth Review on those Brownies?

  4. Michael Adrian

    I really enjoyed the video and that post provides some nice additional details – thanks for that!

    Is it confirmed, that 3rd party apps will not be able to leverage the capabilities of the always on screen or might it be the case that Strava has to adapt its?

    In the meantime I hope you enjoy your 11 Pro. I‘d assume you don’t need to take the GoPro for Strava photos anymore. For me the ultra wide in general works very well.

    • I haven’t had anyone confirm that it is available to developers. We’re closing in on 40K views of that YouTube video and not a single developer has said it’s a ‘Yes’. A few have however confirmed it’s not there at this time. :-/

      Yeah, I suspect I’ll continue shifting to the iPhone for photos that I might have used the GoPro on in the past. Not everything of course, but a lot.

    • Michael Adrian

      Thanks for the swift response, Ray.

      Tempted to benchmark my Fenix 6S with an AW5. Therefore the girl‘s first impressions were very helpful.

      Finally, all the best for the growing Maker family!

    • Paul S.

      I was very pleased with the quality of the photos I took yesterday at stops during a mountain bike ride. Of course, I was carrying my 11 Pro in my Camelbak, so it didn’t get sweat on the lenses.

      I’ve noticed the same faster drain about the battery life of my 5LTE. Today will probably be the first “normal” day with it, though, since I had some trouble getting it on the Verizon network, so it was being used more than usual. My 11 Pro was also using up more battery than my Xs did, but again today will be the first “normal” day.

      Your eyes are better than mine. I have little trouble seeing the always on screen indoors, but outdoors is a different matter. But once it’s fully on it’s adequately visible in direct sunlight. I also noticed in the 12 hours I used WatchOS 6 on my 3LTE that the arm raise got the screen on faster and more reliably than usual.

  5. Giles E

    Speed isn’t in the analyzer for the Polar V. I have this same problem with the analyzer. Is there an ETA to sorting that out for subscribers to the Analyzer service?

    • I’ll double-check – but our rough rule is that we don’t ‘generate’ data where data doesn’t exist. So if the file (.TCX in this case) doesn’t specify the per-point speed/pace, we won’t actually generate it.

      It’s sorta been our core foundational thing since Day 0 on the Analyzer that we always and only display what’s actually there (good or bad), as once we stray beyond that we get to guesstimates and data massaging.

      Here’s what’s in the XML file for a random data point:

      52.327268334.83639167-1.5247204.8999023437515984Present390

      I don’t see Pace in there, but instead just the lat/long bits so it’s an assumption that pace is simply the speed taken between two points (which we know isn’t always what’s displayed on-wrist as that’s often smoothed by accelerometer data).

      I know, probably a bit more inside baseball than not.

    • Boris

      “It’s sorta been our core foundational thing since Day 0 on the Analyzer that we always and only display what’s actually there (good or bad), as once we stray beyond that we get to guesstimates and data massaging.”

      Yesss, please stick to that foundation – already too much guesstimation out there.

  6. flokon

    “I didn’t include the Polar Vantage V GPS track in my video because it was hideously bad. I have no idea what went wrong there, I’ve never seen something like that before.”

    Been using the Vantage since release. Your track is not that unusual. If I didn’t run with a Stryd, thus couldn’t care less about GPS accuracy, I’d long ditched the VV. The tracks I’m getting from it are off by at least 20m from where I actually run, with lots of zigzags and jaggies.
    What a regular track looks like on my daily route: link to dropbox.com

  7. Sølve Dahl

    Does the HR accuracy increase if you disable the always-on display?

  8. Alex

    Thanks for this preview. Very strange about the HR accuracy. It was one of the best things of the watch. As far as I know, the hardware is the same than the Apple watch series 4 (only with the minor change of the screen). Maybe the issue is related to watch OS 6?

    • Wes

      I would exepct the same thing… Watch OS 6.1 beta is out now so expect a 6.1 final soon which hopefully gets the HR accuracy back.

      Does the AW4 have the same drop in accuracy then with watch os 6? (should be the case I guess if the hardware is really the same as AW5).

    • No, from the testing that DesFit has been sharing with me (running two watches concurrently, one AW4 and one AW5, both on OS6, that only the 5 has issues with HR drops/spikes).

      I’ll be doing a test here in an hour or so as well with that same config.

      In talking with Apple, they say both units have identical sensors and algorithms. Which may be true, but ultimately something is impacting that accuracy well beyond the norm here or a random one-off bug. I think Des is at 5 data sets thus far for example, with side by side data AW4 vs AW5 showing this over and over again.

  9. Henning Svane

    Hi Ray
    Interesting first reactions from the Girl. Any change she also can compare it against F6S. A lot has happen since F5S.
    Looks forward to her reaction in her weekly newsletter, if she is able to make it in the coming week.

    Regards

    Henning

  10. Just got an AW5 myself, this app looks pretty amazing, think it will be the main reason I’m going to keep it vs the Garmin 945. link to workoutdoors.net

    Nothing to do with the app at all, just a happy user who paid for it! Does mapping, shows GPS status, can get rid of the 321 countdown, super customisable even down to the font size when running! zoom in/out with the crown. Just tried an off road 11km run with it earlier and was very easy to use. Albeit the always on screen just showing a digital clock as Ray points out.

    Battery life seems very good to me, I charged it to 98% at 10am this morning, did a 2 hour walk with GPS on, then done an outside run of 1hr 25 mins and I’m on 33%, and that’s with sending maps, routes over to the watch and using it a fair bit!

  11. Miguel

    Ray could you in the upcoming review give some more insights if you can use the Apple Watch as a serious training device. I am for example curious how it is holding up when you want to do some structured works outs, like intervals or progression runs. Also I am curious how stats like Vo2max are comparable to other devices.

    Anyway thanks already for a nice preview!

  12. Greg Hilton

    Oh and you can zoom into the GPS track and see the accuracy back on the iPhone gooutdoors app!!

  13. Sam

    Ray,
    More of an IOS 13 issue but wanted to see if you had this happen. With the update on my IPhone X,
    using Garmin Connect App and paired to Vector 3’s, the Pedals won’t allow Edge 530 to connect to them. I disconnected them from the app and the Edge 530 connected right away. Problem was the Garmin app was constantly trying to connect to the V3’s causing power meter drop out every 10 seconds. I them totally disconnected the V3’s from the app and my Bluetooth settings on my phone. This worked but now I’d need to do this every time I want to update my V3’s or connect them on Garmin Connect? Am I missing a setting? Any help would be much appreciated?

    Thanks,
    Sam

  14. Wilson 87

    I have both series 4 and 5. The battery on 5 is slightly better than 4 with screen off. With screen on it’s probably on par. I recommend setting the cellular to off and disconnecting wifi. I normally have around 60% on series 5 at 10pm after full days use with screen on taking it off the charger at 7am. Haven’t had any dropouts with HR while running or doing strength training. The hr sensor is the best in its class and Garmin and Polar cannot even come close to the accuracy, especially when doing intense gym workouts. I have Fenix 5 and Vantage V which I have now retired and will most likely sell due to extremely poor optical heart rate while doing gym training. Yes maybe for runners apple watch is not ideal due to limited battery life, but apple’s optical heart rate sensor is incredibly reliable and is yet to be dethroned. Just my two cents.

    • Yeah, I’m doing a test today with the Series 5 in non-Always-On display mode, to see how it handled.

      Yesterday with 2xGPS activities (1x47min run, 1x1hr50min ride), the watch died by 7PM.

    • i don’t quite understand why, since i run the same watchOS 6 on watch 5, but since i upgraded the phone to iOS13.1 battery life on watch 5 has improved dramatically and seems now on par to series4
      anyone else has seen this?

  15. That battery life drain is shocking (-75% in 13.5 hours w no GPS use), I surprised it’s not getting more attention. Amplify that by 6-12 months and the watch will die even more quickly.

    I can’t get past their failure to develop this end, in addition to the Sports analytics. No sleep tracking, no recovery estimates, same basic analytics with workouts (missing TRIMP or EPOC or Training Effect or Load). It seems crazy to me.

    And going back to a past watch – I’m still enamored with the Polar Ignite’s capabilities at the price – better screen with their top end HR monitor and exertion and Load tracking in a $229 watch ($206 after your Clever Training discount!) – and with one of the most impressive sleep tracking assessments I’ve seen – I hope Polar is getting a lot of buzz for it.

    The 5 appears to be a bit let down so far.

    • Yeah, with a claimed 18hr battery life, they’re basically on target for their claims. What most media has casually overlooked though is that the reality is that’s a step back for most people compared to S3/S4. Technology should be advancing forward, not back.

    • Ryan

      Just an FYI, it usually takes 3-5 days for the battery life to stabilize on an Apple Watch. My S5 compared to a friends brand new S4 is draining about the same rate which is lower than what my S4 was getting a few weeks ago. My S4 battery drain was much higher the first few days I had it a year ago if I recall correctly. It seems like the Apple Watch takes a long time to do stuff in the background after initial setup. I see a lot of threads every year when a new Apple Watch comes out about worse battery life on the new series and decrease battery life on old series updated to newer watchOS and people report it getting better after several days.

      It’s too early to say, but I’d guess if you continue using the S5 for daily use and look at what the battery life is a week or two from now it’ll be around the same as the typical S4. That being said at best it’s going to get the same battery life as an S4.

  16. Ruben Norwegian

    1: Do you think the always on for 3rd party apps will change?

    2: If you do decide to test 3rd party apps, i recommend Gymatic: It track my reps for me when lifting weights, superfun!

    3: Give the Girl some airpods or powerbeats: I’m telling you: having music&podcast and controls on your wrist helps the early-baby-phase :)

    • 1) I suspect so, it would only make sense.

      2) Thanks, noted!

      3) Yeah, she’s not a big music while running/working out type person. Though, we’ll see what P3 is like and if that requires earphones!

  17. I’m assuming you put the Photos watchface on your wife’s Apple Watch right away. If not, I recommend. Also, having little kids and a wife with an Apple Watch, you should definitely give Walkie Talkie a try. For example, say the whole crew is out on the town, and perhaps she’s a block away with two kids and you have P3. Walkie Talkie can be easier, faster, and more fun than digging your phone out of a pocket and tapping out a text or calling.

  18. Monkswhiskers

    Was it the sapphire display you used? I can only just about see my S4 SSteel screen in bright sunshine at an angle as it is more reflective so it wouldn’t bode well for a dimmer version of the screen.

  19. Pete MacLeod

    Thanks for all the posts and reviews Ray. I just picked up an Apple Watch 5 so I can carry just a single device while riding. Today I did a MTB ride in dense New England woods to see how it’d work compared to my Edge 820. You can view the ride on Strava here link to strava.com and my Garmin 820 file here link to connect.garmin.com They are pretty close with the AW giving me a few more feet of climbing and an extra .4 miles.

  20. HR accuracy is key for me especially within the returns window, so tried out a Zwift race (sadly my P1 pedal batteries died and my PC crashed!!) for 28 mins. Glad to say no zeros for me on this ride!

    Purple is Apple Watch, green/blue is Tickr recorded onto an 830 Edge.

    link to analyze.dcrainmaker.com

    • Looks pretty good. I presume you didn’t try and re-align the two based on another reference (since use GPS time, and the Edge 530/830 indoors will tend to drift more than I usually see).

    • ah no I didn’t, and wasn’t aware that I could!! I also noticed that your drop outs were after 40mins ish, so a real shame my PC crashed as doubt I’ll get another chance as I go into hospital Thursday, although I could perhaps do an easy z2 hour ride tomorrow for more data!

      How do I re-align, can I tell your tool to use “real” time vs GPS time?

    • So if I put a 25sec offset onto the Garmin trace, it looks even better! Is this “valid” to do such an offset??

    • I’ll use a secondary data point to validate the offset. For example if I have power meters or cadence or something else, I’ll do it there. So in my case I know that the Edge is way off, so I’m re-aligning that to the Apple TV Zwift HR strap, which is spot-on time-wise. And then the Apple Watches don’t lose time either.

      (And sorry for not sending over instructions – the full ‘manual’ is here: link to dcrainmaker.com)

    • ok plan then is to pair AW to Powertap P1 pedals over Bluetooth, and the Edge 830 to the same pedals over ANT+ and do another indoor ride and see if I get any dropouts!

    • You won’t be able to pair the AW to a power meter directly (other apps can do it indirectly). So you’ll want to use time-based validation for the AW piece specifically.

    • Ok, I’m being dumb :) So I will have my AW running *just* monitoring HR, then my 830 doing an “inside” ride paired to the P1 pedals, Kickr v1 and HR strap.

      So I have 2 FIT files, which I upload to your tool, I can’t see a way to have it validate the offset from a secondary point as neither of the 2 FIT files have the “same” data? Do I need to upload the Zwift FIT file as 3rd source as that would have the HR strap info so I could see how that compares to the 830 reading the same HR data??

      Sorry for being dumb, only had the one coffee. Perhaps I’ll just take the 830 outside, get a GPS lock, delete that “ride” and then it’ll be fine, right?

  21. Gerry Douglas

    Does the series 5 and IOS 13, offer integration with Strava and TrainingPeaks?

  22. So another test (and another sodding Zwift crash, that’ll be my next job then!)

    Also added the zwift file and found I had to offset the Edge 830 by 2 seconds to get the power peaks to match, then removed the Zwift file from displaying HR to show this graph.

    The drop at the end from the Tickr could be down to the fact I got off the bike and pushed my treadmill back a bit with my left hand that was wearing the watch.

    But that’s my 2nd indoor ride, 1 hike and 2 runs without seeing the “drop” which is interesting!! have you tried the Girls AW on one wrist and yours on the other?

  23. Mikael Koskinen

    Regarding the battery life. I’m kind of starting to think that the problem is the new WatchOS, not the AW5. I upgraded my AW4 to the WatchOS 6 last weekend and I’ve been having problems getting through the day since without the battery hitting critical levels.

    I normally do about 1 hour of running each day without taking my iPhone with me. I usually listen podcasts and Audible when running and I use Workoutdoors to track the run. Previously, when I went to bed at evening, the watch had about 30% of the battery left. After the update, it’s around 10%. Two times this week I’ve had to charge the watch during the day. I never had to do that with the previous version of the OS. I do wonder if the worse battery life is related to the new noise functionality.

    Another new problem is that HealthFit doesn’t do automatic sync anymore. This is related to the changes in iOS 13. The issue is discussed on HealthFit’s Facebook page.

    So, not that happy with the update: Battery life is worse than before and it’s not possible to automatically sync my runs anymore.

  24. Robert

    How oh how to get my Edge 1030 to connect with my AW cellular as it does with my iPhone so I can leave the phone at home and still utilize Garmin notifications, LiveTrack, incident detection, etc.

  25. Alan Mushnick

    I wonder if the heart rate accuracy is a true Hardware issue, or is it related to Watch OS 6?
    Could you think about retesting an Apple Watch 4 upgraded to OS 6?

    THANKS RAY!!

    • Jan W.

      See above comment from Ray: “No, from the testing that DesFit has been sharing with me (running two watches concurrently, one AW4 and one AW5, both on OS6, that only the 5 has issues with HR drops/spikes).”

      I’m still holding off on the upgrade for a while though. Nothing in the new OS seems useful to me so I’ll wait to make sure any issues are ironed out.

    • Blaine Boxwell

      I have an AW4 on OS6.
      HR – I started experiencing HR random spike/ drop off since I upgraded the OS. Image attached shows yesterday’s easy run using native workout app. Interesting observation: I use the app Zones during warmup & recovery. Yesterday I noticed the HR spike while I was sitting on my foam roller- it spiked & held at 97% or so. I paused the app, resumed it and the HR dropped back to the expected range.

      Battery life- watch audio seems to continue to run in the background after stopping the app. I restart watch after using watch based audio to stave off battery drain. On watch OS5 I noticed that iPhone audio would affect watch battery charge if you didn’t force close the iPhone audio app, but that seems to have been resolved on IOS13/watch OS6

  26. John

    I’ve had battery problems with the Series 5. The first one wouldn’t last even 18 hours on if I turned everything off, didn’t use workouts, listen to anything. This, when my Series 3 would show about 70% at 11pm after being recharged at 7am (so I could get almost 2 days if necessary).

    I’m on the second series 5 under WatchOS 6 and we’ll see how it goes. My bet is there is a significant software component that’s the problem and we’ll see if they fix that in WatchOS 6.1. As of now, my guidance would be to advise caution if battery performance matters to you.

    • It doesn’t seem to affect all series 5s, I’m sat here at 21;47 on 52% battery with all day display on and taken off the charger about 930am. Is yours cellular?

    • Michael

      Any update on this? My AW5 has absolutely awful battery (lost 50% in 40 min run). Thinking of exchanging just in case it’s a hardware issue.

    • Is yours a cellular model Michael? My non cellular s5 is currently on 74%.

    • Michael

      Yes, cellular (stainless steel) series 5. I went on a 40min outdoor run and finished at 53%. No music streaming or LTE usage. I chatted with AppleCare and they ran diagnostics suggesting all was well, but still said it may be worthwhile to exchange, just in case.

  27. Chad

    Thank you so much for this review, from 9/21! On 10/1, WatchOS 6.0.1 was releases which has apparently fixed the battery life issues on Apple Watch 5. Not sure if this is true? Also curious is the update fixed the heartrate issues?

  28. Chad

    Sorry, meant WatchOS 6.1 beta. Many are reporting the battery life and display brightness are fixed with 6.1. Nobody saying anything about the HR sensor spikes yet.

  29. Raphael

    Hello,
    I have an AW5 LTE 44mm for more than 2 weeks.
    I have noticed a very poor GPS accuracy when LTE is ON. I get big glitches on my tracks and the distance becomes inaccurate …
    It seems better when LTE is OFF.
    My watch has been replaced by Apple, but the second one has exactly the same behavior.
    Have you noticed that in your test ?

  30. dcrainbaker

    Can I use apple watch series 5 with my garmin HRM RUN monitor

  31. Tim J

    Ray- Looking at AW5 series. Which case material do you recommend? Aluminum, titanium or stainless steel?
    Do you think the material affects gps signal? I’m looking for a sapphire glass for durability? Also, I’ve seen some AW series 4 still available out there.
    Is it worth it to save some money and just go with a series 4? Only Aluminum available in series 4.

    Thanks!!

    Respectfully- Tim J

  32. Gavin

    Love the shirt!

  33. David McGregor

    Hi Ray, thanks for getting this information out so early. It saved me buying the Apple Watch 5 for the always on display and instead keeping my 4 (for the HRM and battery life).

    What I really want is the HRM from the Apple Watch 4 put into the body of the Garmin Vivomove Style with graphite band, with functions to cycle, run and do weights. I don’t think the Style series does cycling at all though.

  34. Finnish follower

    How about an in-depth review? Any idea when it should be online? I’d like to read that before getting a new AW5.. And btw I really enjoy your reviews and your way to write! big thanks for you!

  35. Blair

    Can anyone report back on battery life and HR accuracy with 6.1? Thanks.

  36. Tomislav Kolec

    Greeting,
    I’m using an iPhone XS MAX.
    Which watch would you recommend buying Garmin Fenix 5X Plus or Apple Watch 5?
    Why thank you?

  37. Rob Moles

    Supposedly Apple has made some quick updates to improve HR accuracy and battery life. Is this correct or is it just marketing noise?

  38. Gabrieil

    Should we still expect the review or the time has gone?

    I’m mostly interested in the watch as my activity and recovery tracker (I have a Garmin for sport) but found my old Apple Watch much more convenient on the day to day…

    So would you say that the new worse HR pretty much makes the Apple Watch 4 more desirable to track HR during the day and HRV?

    Thanks and keep up the good work!

  39. Chris Thomson

    GPS inaccuracy with AW5 cellular version and iOS6.1

    The GPS seems to be getting worse if that’s possible! My old AW3 was accurate enough for my running, but the AW5 is appalling and on runs I do regularly both under and over measures the distance and often has large added loops included I never followed, plus a few smoothed out corners.

    I can still get a AW4 cellular – should I go back to that (I sold my AW3) and dump the AW5? I don’t want to run with my iPhone so the cellular version allows me to be contactable.

    • Raphael

      I still have the same problems of ugly tracking when LTE is ON.
      No problem with LTE OFF.
      No problem with HR.
      I don’t understand why this GPS issue is not widely shared.
      Nobody run with an AW5 LTE?

    • beppo

      are you using apple’s activity app or how do you track?
      since watchOS 6.1 i find GPS tracking acceptable using Train2PEAK. (see attached a u-turn on out and back road) using S5 with LTE active

    • Chris Thomson

      Not using LTE is not an option as the Emergency SOS alert won’t work if I have an accident or fall whilst out running or cycling.
      There needs to be a solution with LTE enabled.

    • Chris Thomson

      beppo that looks much better than my tracks – I’m using Strava before and after 6.1 but will try the Apple Workout App instead or another App like yours. Thanks.

  40. Raphael

    It’s the same with all apps
    Some days it’s acceptable, dome days it’s terrible

  41. Frank Varisco

    It seems that the HR ‘inaccuracy’ may be taken care of by a software update? I know that they are pushing the ECG app as ‘life saving.’

  42. Tom Pelix

    I seem to easily get two days of use from Apple Watch 5. Even with two hours of GPS tracking I end up with nearly 50% in the evening. How is your experience?