Sunday 8k

2009nov15_8k

Any snow and ice that was on the streets is gone again and +4C with little wind is quite ideal for running. 8.10km in 54 minutes makes for a leisurely 6:46min/km pace.

9k jog

I haven't completely forgot to exercise, but the lack of daylight and cold temperatures make it, at least mentally, a bit harder to get out there and run.

9k_2009oct14

8k run

8krun

An easy jog home from work. The Garmin has an auto-lap feature which takes lap-times each kilometer.

This time the N95 trace (yellow) seems less jumpy, but there's still a difference compared to the Garmin:

detail1 detail2

Garmin: 8.28 km in 50 min 50 s, 633 kcal
N95: 8.35 km in 50 min 55 s, 731 kcal

A second GPS test

drumso_run

A secodn GPS test, this time with the 405cx on my left wrist and the N95 in my right hand. I had hoped this would expose the N95 antenna and improve its performance. Not so. The red trace (405cx) still looks much better while the yellow one (N95) jumps wiggles and snakes around. The summaries are:

N95: 8.30km in 53 min 13 s, 727 kCal
405cx: 7.92 km in 53 min 31 s, 627 kCal

If you zoom in, the N95 has me walking on water. To be fair the 405cx also looks a bit lost at the beginning of the run (far right), but it does get the street-crossing spot on (middle-right in the pic).

walk_on_water

Then for a straight bit along 'Nokia avenue':

wiggly

That's not pretty. I guess you could argue that on the way out (top) the street has tall houses on both sides, so the N95 (yellow) has a hard time finding satellites, while on the way home (bottom) it's more open and both GPSs perform roughly the same.

Here's part of the route in more open terrain. That seems to confirm that the N95 needs wide open spaces to do well.

drumso

For the record, my N95 8GB runs V 15.0.015 firmware (which I've several times unsuccessfully tried to update with Nokia PC-Suite 🙁 ) and I'm using Nokia Sports Tracker v2.06 (S60 3.1). Today I had GPS-filtering turned off in sports tracker.

Somewhat surprising results! I would have thought GPS-positioning is a plain-vanilla technology by now and every company does it with equivalent hardware and software. Apparently not, or the N95 antenna is really inefficient, or I'm doing something wrong...