It is possible to calculate the distance with the steps

SlaSh

@dimitrios-kanellopoulos hmm, almost every brand in fitness and sports are having distance based on the steps, maybe not so accurate but we can tolerate 10%~ of inaccuracy.

Dimitrios Kanellopoulos

@slashas I know but if someone does something does not justify the reason for others to do something.

Most everyday steps are not straight walking (all the more for a drunken sailor). Seriously, most of them are smaller, undirected steps. To make a distance out of them is nonsense. You can do jump rope and you have done 0 distance but 1000 steps.

So steps are not distance! No matter what you do it won’t show any better accuracy in the whole people sampling than 35%.

However, as a friend said another appoach would be:

The point is this; its not an accurate measurement of anything, so why not call it whatever and just be clear to what it really is. Movement. A lot of people would be happy to say “oh I washed the house last night, was equivalent to walking 2,5km. Cleaning down the house is hard work” or whatever. KM is something people can relate to. Steps tell you pretty much nothing, other than that 10000 is more than 9000

So imho Polar does this good by showing activity instead of Distance or Steps.

What do you think?

NicolasP

Other brands do it so Suunto has no choice to enrol as well.
Customers coming from activity trackers like Fitbit (target fot the S3F?) are used to that kind of data.
For me it’s useless mainly because of lack of accuracy.

Dimitrios Kanellopoulos

@nicolasp well it does have the choice and it has made it already ithink about some years now

NicolasP

@dimitrios-kanellopoulos yes you’re right. And I hope they won’t change their mind.
there are plenty of offers on the market for people who really want this.

Jose Luis

@dimitrios-kanellopoulos I think your explanation of why not incorporate this type of data is correct.

Thanks.

SlaSh

@dimitrios-kanellopoulos so I have to ask then what’s the point to have steps which are very inaccurate?Suunto watch counting steps even when I am typing with keyboard or driving the car, ps don’t say that is hard to measure sorry for saying that but Garmin nailed it, if I sit no extra steps are counted same story with the car, so it is possible and to measure km is possible as you for example in Garmin can add step length and it is relying on it. I have did test walk outdoor without GPS and without, 5km walk was 300m longer without GPS so I would say quite accurate. Suunto counting active calories when you move when you are not in sport and that inaccurate step counting affects active calories a lot. So once step counting is improved we can have accurate active calories and think about distance after

P.S. I really want to avoid multiple devices usage for fitness and sport, main thing to have one source and destination for data view.

Jani Kaikkonen

@slashas very good point. I also have noticed, that the steps count is more or less useless, as the watch can measure a couple of hundred steps while I’m sleeping.

NicolasP

@slashas thanks for your explanation and I think you are right when it’s about a walk.
But when you’re at home it’s different as your step length isn’t as long as when walking outside so the distance calculated will be wrong in this case.

SlaSh

@nicolasp then we should disable steps/inactive/active calories counting not in sport as well as suunto measures way too much of them there are no device in the market which is 100% correct, once we will have AI in our wearables then we might have 99% correct data for daily activity, until we need to accept some discrepencies.