Originally Posted by
Looigi
All good points. However, Glympse doesn't record tracks or data, but only shows your position (and speed if you enable it) in real time, so accuracy isn't that crucial, which may be why phone battery drain isn't that bad on the Galaxy. By comparison, if I use the phone to stream music, the battery goes down much quicker, and that's with wired earbuds. Less than 20% battery usage for a 4 hr ride is adequate for my purposes.
Glympse is basically recording tracks/data but at a low data rate.
Glympse is using the GPS to determine location and it needs to determine location more than once to get the speed. It hopefully has some interest in being fairly accurate.
Android (as far as I understand) allows apps to turn the GPS on and off and Glympse is likely (very reasonably) taking advantage of that.
What it probably does is turn on the GPS every 15 minutes for a few minutes (or less). That might be good enough for reporting your position.
The tracking that the Garmins do provides the Glympse tracking as well as the detailed track recording.
(Just to be clear, I'm not saying Glympse is bad. It just doesn't do the same thing as the Garmins. If Glympse does what you need, you clearly don't need a garmin! I'm just talking about how they work. Not talking about which is better.)