I’m on a vacation at Park City Utah, and I have a new app for my iPhone called Navionics. It lets you see where all the ski trails are, and search for them, as well as track your own trail.
It’s got great features, but is a shining example of how inaccurate phones are for tracking purposes. The “pins” are GPS Insight, and the little yellow “O”s are my Garmin Edge 705. The red line which goes off the mountain then back at the top of the lift is the iPhone based tracking device. I did not go over the side of the mountain, trust me…
GPS Insight vs. Cell Phone Tracking
It’s a nice app nonetheless – here are a few screen shots:
Ski trails on Navionics
List of trails you can choose to see in NAVIONICS
Highlighting a single trail in NAVIONICS
But when you take the inaccurate iPhone “track” which NAVIONICS provides out of the map, you can see that GPS Insight (light blue) and the Garmin 705 (red) are both very accurate. The GPS Insight EZ-1000 was set for 1 minute updates, and the Garmin is about 10 seconds between points. The big difference is the EZ-1000 transmits its location every minute, and with the Garmin (meant for bike riding), you need to upload the data when you get back to a PC.
GPS Insight vs. Garmin to track snowboarding
The speeds even match up pretty closely:
snowboard speed using GPS
Note that this view (from the Garmin website) shows both speed AND elevation (so you can see I went on the long run 4 times, & smaller runs 5 times through the day):
GPS Tracking snowboard activity & speed
That was enough to kill my newbie snowboarder legs, so I’m taking today off & have plenty of time to write about it…
Rob.