@Egika I get your point and yes that makes sense, I’m just not sure if they took it far enough to solve the problem. Making sure erroneous data isn’t in the users experience is a worthwhile effort, however giving them reasonable proxies (something is better than nothing) might be more worthwhile.
Moreover, the only time that you would use these battery modes would presumably be longer efforts where less GPS accuracy doesn’t matter as much, as in all day hikes at a slow rate …but those activities if in mountains would be scenarios in which having a little error that accumulates over hours for ascent values would be preferred to 0m elevation gain reported which over a day is likely to be more ‘wrong’ than the error-ridden ascent value. In either case one can correct these in Strava or Runalyze or other 3rd party sites after the fact so I’m not concerned with the after the fact, just the day-of utility of the measure. There could also be something to 5 second or 10 second full power rate versus 1 sec low power rate if power setting is more impactful to vertical accuracy than rate of connection, although having not had a watch that had those I don’t know if those had any better (if more coarse) ascent values possible.
Those are just my thoughts on it, I bought the watch as a running/hiking watch so I guess I should have done more research before purchase when the longer duration battery settings come with such heavy caveats…
