The beautiful Apple Watch spokesperson Christy Turlington-Burns has been running a blog on Apple.com for the past three weeks, detailing how the Apple Watch has helped her train for the London Marathon.
It’s mostly puff stuff, but her latest entry has one interesting tidbit: the Apple Watch can apparently track many of your fitness levels even without an iPhone in range. She goes into more detail about how.
While promoting her charity, Every Mother Counts, former Vogue model Turlington-Burns has been training and blogging about the Apple Watch.
Most of this has been pretty obvious marketing, but there has been one revelation that is interesting in Week Three of her blog:
“After you run with Apple Watch and your iPhone a few times, the Workout app knows more about your stride,” she wrote. “So you can run on a treadmill or outside without your phone and still get a really accurate workout summary.”
That’s an interesting detail. Although the Apple Watch requires an iPhone in Bluetooth range to operate, you can still leave it behind when you go for a run, without worrying about the Watch not tracking your activity. That means the Apple Watch is a self-sufficient fitness tracker.
As a sometimes jogger, that’s exciting to me. I’d love it if the Apple Watch had a self-sufficient cellular connection, so I could follow custom-plotted run routes while jogging without dragging my iPhone along. But this is a pretty good consolation prize.
Source: Apple
Via: MacObserver
John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
19 responses to “Joggers don’t need an iPhone to track runs with Apple Watch, says Christy Turlington”
Without gps run tracking is useless, it provides very basic and erratic results. Running with an Apple Watch without an iPhone make sense only for HRM. Non casual runners prefer not to carry useless weight, so mostly they use gps watches.
That’s not quite true. For instance, if I run in a location I am aware of, I can easily find out the length of the course. And I am also aware of NO runner–casual or otherwise–that likes to carry useless weight. This is why most runners will only carry things that they think are relevant to the run.
The only problem with that is there’s no GPS tracking without the iPhone and no route information. I can live with that but I’d rather have a Suunto or Fenix fitness device instead. AppleWatch seems to be a nice bit of kit, but I’m now leaning towards dedicated fitness devices that aren’t dependent upon any other devices except a chest strap used for heart-rate monitoring.
Just an update for the article John, the iPhone doesn’t have to be in bluetooth range to operate with the phone – it can be in bluetooth range OR on the same Wi-Fi network to work together. So even if you’re not in bluetooth range, if you’re on the same Wi-Fi network, you’re watch will still work with your phone.
GPS is not as necessary to be fair, it’s the tracking of your activity that’s most important for HealthKit data. This is welcome news for all the iPhone 6 Plus owners.
But…the GPS is used to properly track your activity.
No that’s for your position, not your activity.
“Activity” is a very general word. When running the GPS information allows you to get a lot of useful data about your activity. It allows you to get reasonably accurate distance, pace, and elevation information which you can graph against your heart rate etc.
Without GPS you’re going to get less information and what you do get will be less accurate.
What you’re looking for is probably not what an Apple Watch is meant for (at the moment). Maybe in a few generations. For now you’re probably better of with the most expensive Fitbit tracker going on what you want in a tracker.
Well yes, that’s my point really, the Apple Watch(or other smartwatch without GPS) is not a good running tracker when it’s not paired with a smartphone.
For tracking my daily run it will certainly suffice. It all depends on what you’re looking for, if you need in depth analysis you will always need a dedicated specialty device, next gen apple watches won’t give that either.
It’s not really “specialty”, we’re talking about the type of information that the vast majority of people who track their runs already get. I’m glad this will certainly suffice for you, even though we have no idea how well it will perform yet. I only responded because you seemed to not understand the role of GPS in activity tracking in your initial comment, no further comment from me.
I don’t think you have any idea if I do or don’t understand the role of GPS, we never really discussed the ins and outs of GPS and GLONASS, or Galileo that’s being build. You do show you have not read up on activity tracking info of the Apple Watch that is already available and activity tracking in general or else you wouldn’t have such a hang-up on GPS tracking. The Withings Pulse O2 for example already tracks the distance you run without GPS, so I expect something very similar, and accurate as the watch apparently learns your stride as mentioned.
So can i use the apple watch to track DISTANCES RAN WITHOUT IPHONE?
That is her indication. It seems to “learn” your stride and then use some combination of internal sensors to determine distance. Because it is likely that the map application could do a pre-determined course, it might be possible to even track your aprox position? Who Knows…….oh I guess we will in about 4 weeks.
Beautiful? I don’t see it, she’s nothing special to look at.
What a boring comment. I hope you’re as handsome as you are insightful.
She was a fashion model, and has a slim build and somewhat androgynous face useful for that kind of marketing. She is not supposed to be ‘sexy’.
Im a bit disappointed that the apple watch has no GPS.
Im pretty sure it would come in the future generations. But for now,
as a frequent jogger and a lover of nature, my only suggestions for runners is
to use the runners belt (the one that hugs your waist so it doesn’t bounce and be annoying in a long run and heaps light) to bring your iPhone for detailed tracking results.
i heavily rely on the Nike + running app for detailed tracking, now that the apple
watch is out, i can simply just glance on the watch without taking my phone out
of my belt. Although there are a lot of alternatives there like a gps watch or fitbit devices which are cheaper than the apple watch, i still want to use it (apple watch) for other stuff like reading my messages without taking my iPhone out for simple or less meaningful messages.