[Samsung Gear S2] jerome.carney:
I've got the same problem as the rest of you — my Gear S2 is under-reporting my mileage. But the good news is that I've stumbled upon something of a temporary fix. And surprisingly enough, the error doesn't seem to be happening where you would logically think that it would.

Some quick background: last year I switched to using the Nike app on my Gear S watch to track my runs, after years of running with Runkeeper on my iPhone. The first couple of runs I did with the watch, I brought my phone along to have a basis of comparison, and I was happy to note that any difference in GPS readings was negligible. But once I permanently made the switch, I began to realize that it wasn't the iPhone I was missing — on the contrary, it felt liberating to run with just a small device on my wrist, and to finally give my forearm the sun exposure it had been longing for for years — but actually I found myself missing RunKeeper, and specifically it's online web log of all my runs.

To be fair, the Nike online log is in almost every way equal to the interface developed by Runkeeper, so the only real complaint that I had with Nike is that I missed being able to see my current runs in perspective to long-term trends: I literally had years and years of runs logged in Runkeeper, that I didn't want to just run away from (ha!), so I began looking at solutions for importing my Runkeeper data into Nike. As it turned out, there was no easy way to do that, but the reverse scenario — importing GPS tracks from Nike to Runkeeper — was not only possible, but also fairly easy thanks to tools, including web and iPhone apps, that you can find easily enough with a bit of googling — thank you Matt Stuehler! Nowadays it takes me all of 5 seconds to make sure that a run I've just logged on Nike is also logged on Runkeeper.

One advantage, though, that the Runkeeper web interface has over Nike is the ability to edit runs, including map data. Nike will let you edit some details of a run on their phone app, but this does not extend to map data. So when I realized there was an issue with my S2 under-reporting mileage, I turned to Runkeeper to correct the data, and that's where I stumbled upon what it appears to be the very surprising solution to this problem.

But first, one word of advice that I learned in a year of running with my first-gen Gear S, if you want to ensure an accurate log with accurate mileage in Nike: get your GPS fix before you start your run. In the Gear S2 Nike watch app a fix is indicated by a little circle at the top of the map view, the view immediately to the right of the main screen once you've started your run — a red circle indicates a poor fix, orange is intermediate and green means you're good to go. When you first use your watch, or when you first run in a new location, it can take several seconds or even minutes to get a satellite fix. When I flew from the West Coast to the East Coast for Thanksgiving last month, I even had to reboot my watch before I could get a satellite fix. As long as you're able to get a GPS fix, the Gear S2 actually does a good job of charting your location, even though mileage is under-reported.

And this is where the magic happens: once I've logged a run with the Nike app on my Gear S2 and imported it into Runkeeper, I'm just three clicks away from correcting the under-reported mileage. When I first do the import, the log entry in Runkeeper accurately reflects the

in

accurate mileage that was indicated on my watch, along with a map of my run which is as good as any device-generated GPS track I've been able to produce with different phones, and now watches, over the years.

However, once you click on the "edit' button that's stashed away under a little arrow menu above the map in a Runkeeper log entry, the mileage is automatically corrected by Runkeeper, and then all you have to click is the "save" button. As it would appear, the Gear S2 is accurately tracking GPS points, but either Nike or Sampson has dropped the ball on running the calculations afterwards — which seems to be a wonderful discovery meaning that the hardware is just fine, and all we need now is a software fix.

And in the meantime, with just a minimal bit of effort, Runkeeper is able to run to the rescue.