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Auto-pause is rubbish

So I learned yesterday that auto-pause feature for hiking is utter rubbish. The Fenix 7 seems incapable of detecting movement, or at least is extremely slow at responding to changes in movement, which is surprising given how good the GPS accuracy is with Multi-Band GNSS enabled. When I was stopped to take a photo on my walk the watch would eventually detect that I wasn't moving and turn the GPS would then turn off. Only for me to discover 100 or so metres along the trail that the activity was still paused, and Strava just puts straight lines between points where the GPS has been switched off. So I’ve gone back to having auto-pause switched off for walking/running and just manually stop/start and only use auto-pause for cycling now.

Maybe Garmin should consider another mode where the GPS remains on but the watch automatically deletes data points in the same location so that you don’t lose any distance.

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0 5770955 over 3 years ago

I agree it's really bad. It's pausing all the time, would rather see that it would miss pauses and would trigger it only when more than 30-60s or so on a similar place. Because a lot of times when reach top forgot to pause it or if I manually pause it forgot to resume when going down. It would be nice to notify you or auto resume.

0 2964348 3 months ago

Thank you for calling it, what it is. It is beyond me, why companies like Garmin are not able to make auto-pause work properly. And I cannot believe how many people accept that, because it is so "difficult". It is the oldest problem of control engineering, as every single sensor is not accurate. It has been solved in millions of technical devices. Do you really think it would be accepted that a car drives off the road, because the GPS signal is noisy?

I was hiking for 12 years using the Samsung Health app. It has only one button for hiking, it is called auto-pause. It worked extremely well 99% of the time. Very rarely it lost the GPS signal. I had the mobile in my backpack. At some time I wanted to "upgrade" and got the Garmin Etrex Solar. I could not believe how bad this device is. For weeks I tried to get auto-pause work until I realized that it does not work, at all. To be fair, the solar module is excellent, and for that I was very disappointed to have to drop the device.

I got a Polar watch, which is nice overall, but guess what, auto-pause does not work. It is completely useless. It works somehow in the open, but as soon as you enter the lightest forest, it is over. It pauses and restarts many times per minute, and when you finally really pause, it does the same in very random fashion. Nobody expects it to work perfectly, but the company has to know that it does not work, and still sells this feature...

And btw, I have been developing complex software systems for decades. Please, do not believe for a second that this is a difficult problem.