Today, I tried both Bioshift and Segment Hunter. I rode about 70 minutes. When I started, my Garmin 820 was fully charged, but by the time I finished, the battery was less than 10%… in fact, “Battery Save” had just kicked in. I’m not sure which app is causing this substantial drain, although I did have this problem with Bioshift when I first used it, and because of this, I abandoned it.
Any thoughts?
We haven’t had this reported much at all. It would be surprising if our relatively simple apps would cause a battery drain. They run quite adequately on a Fenix 3 which has very limited resources.
I’ll play with them a bit and let you know what I find out…
Ok… I disabled Bioshift today, and did an almost 5 hour ride, with no battery issues. Still had tons of battery left. So, I’m thinking my Garmin has a problem with Bioshift. Not sure if this is an Xert problem or a Garmin problem. BTW… I can’t uninstall Bioshift… I get an uninstall error. It’s not a field on any of my screens.
With respect to Hunter, will this only work when there’s a cell signal? For parts of my ride today (and mostly where my segments were!), I had no signal, and no segments. They seemed to come and go. I didn’t spend a lot of time trying to figure out why, but I did notice when I stopped that I had no signal, and no segments.
You only need access to the internet to load the segments. Once loaded, you don’t need it. It will detect the start of the segment from GPS data. If GPS data is weak, start of segments can get missed. Use the lap feature to start segments if they don’t start for you automatically.
Hmm… really weird. I don’t think my GPS signal was bad, because I was still getting routing instructions. Any thoughts on what might be causing the battery drain with Bioshift? I’m on the latest software. I had this problem before, and contacted Garmin about it, and nothing they tried seemed to fix. They thought it was an Xert program problem. It’s not really crucial… I would only use it for training, but I thought it a pretty handy app.
To me it seems strange that you can’t remove it. If you could first remove it and then add it back in and see if that somehow makes a difference. There’s nothing it does differently than our other apps other than the math which isn’t as tricky as, say, WMFTP.
John I found Bioshift was a huge drain on my Edge 520 battery. Just installed Segment Hunter and the MPA app so curious to see how those go.