As promised, here is an overview of Endomondo for smartwatches. I use the Sony Smartwatch 3, but it can be used on many other smartwatches.
As the Sony watch has an inbuilt GPS, you can use it as a standalone way to track your run, but I tend to pair it with my Phone and use the phones GPS as I always have my phone with me for safety reasons.
To set up Endomondo on a smartwatch you need to use the app on the phone. From there you can change the information that will be shown on your watch. This ranges from time and distance to heart rate and average pace. This information is extremely useful when training to see how you are performing and what distances you are on if you are completing a tempo run. It is also great that you can start and resume your run from your watch without having to dig out your phone which makes it a lot easier to use. You also get a small real time map on you watch so that you can see where you have run, but I am not too sure how useful this really is on such a small screen.
| Screenshots from Smartwatch |
The only issues I have had with this are the following. If you get a GPS connection and put your phone in a bag or pocket, when you come to start the run on your watch it can loose GPS signal for some reason. The way I have sorted this is to start and pause the run straight away before you put the phone away, the GPS signal seems to be fine and you can then restart your run from your watch.
The other issue is when listening to music the music fades when you get an announcement of your time, distance etc at predetermined intervals (which are set through the phone app). Sometimes this music does not go back to full volume. If you pause and resume the run, it seems to put the music back at full volume.
The other issue is when listening to music the music fades when you get an announcement of your time, distance etc at predetermined intervals (which are set through the phone app). Sometimes this music does not go back to full volume. If you pause and resume the run, it seems to put the music back at full volume.
These issues aside, I find Endomondo is an excellent tracking app for a smartwatch. It has all the information that I need and it is customisable to your needs.
As I have mentioned previously, I feel that strava offers better analysing of your runs, but for me Endomondo is the winner when it comes to tracing your run out on the trail.
What do you think? Do you use these apps or any others when tracking your run? Please leave a comment below.
As always, Happy Running!
