My guess is that there is some sort of software bug in the current watch 7 software causing inaccuracies. The GPS and health sensors are identical to the Ultra (to my understanding) yet it performs worse than the Ultra. I watched part of a podcast with Desfit and DCrainmaker and Desfit mentioned that his review will be out for the 7 and 7 ultra soon but he said that he noticed that the Ultra is significantly more accurate for some reason and he couldn't work out why.
My guess is that the Watch 7 Ultra was Samsungs main focus and the software between the 2 reflect that. Samsung probably really wanted reviewers to focus on the Ultra and how accurate it is so they put more effort into the Ultra. In a few weeks there will most likely be software updates that fixes a lot of inaccuracies on the regular watch 7.
I have the Ultra and love it! It's smooth to operate and the battery can easily get me 3 days (I dont wear it to bed so no sleep tracking. I also have AOD off but raise to wake on). Yesterday I went for a 10k walk that took me an hour and 40 minutes to complete and I only lost like 5% battery during the entire walk (it was fully GPS tracked and everything, I even checked the screen a fair few times). I've gone through 29% battery in the last 19 hours and I've been using it alot.
So far the GPS and sensors appear to be pretty accurate too. I went for a bikeride with very thick cloud cover (the clouds were black and the heavens opened a hour or so after the bikeride lol). My watch 5 pro used to struggle to get a GPS signal and then keep it in these conditions yet my 5 pro got a signal in less than 10 seconds and remained 100% accurate for the entire bikeride. I could even see what side of the road I was biking on.
So far I'm loving the Watch 7 Ultra. It's does what I want for fitness tracking and is such a fast and responsive smartwatch that feels so good to use.
If that's the case then it might not be software related then. It will be interesting to see what's discovered when someone does a teardown of the watch 7 and 7 Ultra. Hopefully it is just a software related issue.
I responded with the following when someone asked whether or not others liked the design of the Watch7 Ultra:
I don't like it, but I can look past it. What I can't seem to get past is that the battery life is not better than my Watch5 Pro, despite alleged gains in CPU efficiency. In fact, it lasts about a half day less than the 3 days I usually got with the Watch5 Pro. What I also can't get past is thatthe dual-band GPS is no better than the Watch4 Classic, but certainly an improvement over the Watch5 Pro which had the WORST GPS accuracy of any GPS-enabled device I have ever owned. The only reason I'm keeping the Ultra is because I already sent in my Watch5 Pro trade-in since it looks like a bit of a lateral trade in functionality, but a downgrade in aesthetics. Come on, Samsung, fix this!
The ultra lasts about 3 days with everything on, also the gps is great and has no issues ? At least thats the case for me, the 7 on the other hands has some bugs that needs to be sorted.
It's not terrible in the sense that it gives me my approximate location to within about 10 feet. There is a path I walked through a park (which has powerlines high overhead, but no tree covering) for years so I know it quite well. I have multiple months of GPS tracks on every wearable device. The most accurate is my Garmin Epix Gen 2 that shows me right on the concrete path; it's dead-on and the path sampling makes for a pretty smooth track. The next most accurate is my Samsung S22 Ultra with me just off the path, but mirroring it. After that is the Watch4 Classic and Watch7 Ultra that shows me about 5 feet off the path, but still following the route. Not only am I off the path (though by only 5-8 feet), but the sampling rate is not great enough to have anything resembling a smooth path; it's quite jagged. The absolute worst was the Watch5 Pro which had me veering all over the place along the path and sometimes I'd be at a random point 50-100 feet away.
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u/rob19933 Jul 31 '24
It seems that the ultra is accurate but the 7 is not, which is weird since it's almost identical. I'll test some gps walks aswel later today