Morning walk with iPhone 6

Posted on by Ian C.

I’ve been planning to upgrade my iPhone 4S for a while, and yesterday I got lucky and was able to reserve a new iPhone 6 for in-store pickup. The main reason for upgrade is for a better camera – more and more, my phone is the only camera I carry, and the 4S struggles especially in low light. I’ve also noticed a significant drop in battery life on my 2-1/2 year old 4S; and iOS 8 slowed it down horribly!
I wondered for a while whether to get the iPhone 6, or 6 Plus, but the Plus seemed too big to use sensibly when out walking, and anyway it’s even less available so I couldn’t get one with in-store pickup.

So this morning’s walk was my first with the iPhone 6; as often I set off around 6:30am when it’s still quite dark so a good test for the new phone’s low light abilities. So the first picture is around 7am with the first hints of light in the distant clouds; quite happy with that, lower noise than the 4S … a few minutes later I took a picture in “armadillo trail” which is a walkway through some tree filled wetland so quite dark. There’s a spot along that walkway that I tried to photograph yesterday with the 4S, it simply gave a black image – but today the iPhone 6 does quite a reasonable job considering how dark it still is:

As the sun continues to rise, taking pictures gets much easier for the phone (it wasn’t anything like this bright, but all these pictures are unedited straight from the iPhone 6 camera):

 

As I approach home again, I can see the sun beginning to appear behind the trees, and finally by 7:20am, the sun is up (the finalpicture is at full iPhone 6 resolution if you click it, showing quite good detail in the leaves, but noise in the darker walkway and grass):

 

Overall, these pictures are a big improvement from the 4S; the new phone is also lighter even though it’s bigger, and many times faster! Touch ID is great too and of course battery life is improved (this one hour walk with GPS logging the route, used only 5% of the battery). And talking of logging my walk, I used a new App called runtime, which worked well and recorded a distance that matches Google Maps to within 5%:

Walking faster

Posted on by Ian C.

Another noticeable change as my “sciatica” eases, is an increase in walking speed. I’ve sometimes used the App MotionX GPS to record my morning (or other) walks – it uses the iPhone GPS to track position over time, and computes distance and speed.

Back in late July when I began going for a morning walk, it recorded 2.45 miles in 53 minutes, so averaging 2.8mph:

That basic loop is still the walk I most frequently do today, but to keep to my 45-50 minute goal time, I now have to walk a loop as far as the arrow.

For comparison, from August 21st is a record of my walk back from the HOA fitness club – it’s too far to walk each way and do fitness, but it nicely shows my improved walking speed covering a similar 2.4 miles in less than 37 minutes, averaging 3.9mph!

I’ve not really increased speed any more since then, but today was my final Physical Therapy visit as it looks like I’ve gained and learned all I can. I have a set of “homework” exercise that I will need to do regularly “forever”, so that the pain of July / August never returns. And I’d like to keep up my daily walk, because aside from the health benefits, it’s quite interesting to watch the sunrise – we will see what happens when Florida “winter” comes …