iPhone SE (2016) battery swap

Nearly two years ago I bought a used iPhone SE 2016 with a Punkcase to use as a mapping GPS, as outlined previously. Throughout this time the battery has reported >90% health but  the usable life seemed to have become short. So much so that I felt it useless to take on my Yorkshire Wolds Way trip. An hours run, with a photo was all it could manage. 

Once again I considered Garmin dedicated devices and supposed IP68 Android phones.  They all seemed too costly and even then not ideal solutions.  What I wanted was a practical battery life on the iPhone. So swap the battery! 

On eBay the batteries are £16 from what look to be fair suppliers. Anyone offering a capacity twice the original couldn't be genuine as budget phone batteries haven't improved that much. Replacebase fitted the bill and the battery arrived in a day or do. 

A key advantage of the 1st edition of the iPhone SE is that it can be opened with a small screwdriver and a plastic pry. No glue is involved, hence not water resistant! I followed a YouTube video and found the job fairly straightforward.  The hardest point was softening an adhesive strip under the old battery which hadn't done the quick detach trick. At this point it might be fair to point out that I  am dextrous and have a good stock of tools. If that description doesn't fit you, then perhaps best to use a phone repair shop...

A few weeks after the swap I'm pleased to report that it was well worth doing.  The SE isn't known to have great stamina so I didn't expect miracles,  but the working life has improved considerably.  It's hard to quote an objective figure as power consumption depends on the duration of screen illumination,  probably daylight intensity and if photos were taken. 

How the old battery showed 91% and was so poor in use is a mystery to me, although there's lots online to suggest that the figure can be faked.

New GPS phone

Just over 6 years ago I wrote a series of entries about using a budget smartphone with Viewranger as a mapping GPS tool. I bought a fair few tiles of offline maps for UK, Spain and Tenerife and found it to be a great tool. My waterproofing was a freezer bag and as I try to avoid being out in foul weather this worked well, although on occasion I moved  the phone inside my waterproof jacket. 

I had no need to change system as it was self contained and with adequate power and space. An 8GB SD card seemed to be practically limitless. Unfortunately Viewranger were bought up by Outdooractive and so the app and tiles became obsolete in February 2022. There is plentiful online debate about the problems with the Outdooractive app, much of which I disagree with. However it does need more resources and the closure of the Viewranger server means that fresh tiles can't be bought. My old Alcatel phone GPS works fine as is but can't have fresh maps if I travel to a new area. The Android 4.4 operating system means that it won't run the OS app either. I tried an old spare Moto phone with opensource OruxMaps but once again, the processor wasn't able to cope. 

So I was back to considering Garmin hardware, opensource maps, IP68 sealed Android phones and so on. The nominally waterproof smartphones appear to fall into two categories. First are top of the range phones from major brands at a price that I wouldn't want to fall out of a pocket. Second are Chinese Android brands which have fair specifications but very mixed reviews. I almost committed to a Ulefone Armor 10X Pro at around £160 but the price was a bit more than I wanted and there are those dubious reviews....

Eventually I settled on a iPhone SE (2016) with 32GB storage from BackMarket for £65. The phone is low spec by today's standards but with a 4 inch screen it's little larger than the Alcatel and actually a fair bit more powerful. Importantly it can run iOS15 which is fairly contemporary, it will not run the recently (September 2022) released iOS16. Due to the massive sales of the iPhone SE/5S there are a range of supposedly waterproof cases available and I went for a Punkcase Extreme for around £20.

I still have free access to Outdooractive Pro+ so that's my current offline map provider but hopefully this phone will give me more flexibility of provider in the future, including the mapping that comes when you buy a paper OS map.

The 'refurbished' phone is in great condition and has reportedly 91% battery health. This was my biggest concern about a used phone, would it need a new battery straight away and would that be any good anyway?  After a few runs and hikes it appears that I can leave Outdooractive tracking for at least 5 hours and that it lasts for longer without live recording. The GPS shows a lock promptly even without tracking so it must be live when the phone is sleeping. As before I don't have a lock on the phone but it must be activated by two presses on the home button. This seems to be baked into iOS and I can't find a way to wake from sleep with the top button which is less than ideal.

The camera is usable and takes fairly good pictures although the HDR mode is rather to saturated for my taste. This might mean that I can save the weight of a camera but taking pictures uses a fair bit of battery life. I suppose this is mostly due to extra screen backlight usage.

Review of Alcatel Pop D1 for navigation: 0. History

The day that President Clinton announced that the civilian GPS signal would not be limited by selective availability I ordered a Garmin 12XL.

Image from Smithsonian Institution

In common with many civilian users the previous potential inaccuracy made the concept of GPS very poor value to me. I could use a map well so I didn't see much point in spending a  few hundred pounds for rough data. Without SA though a 12 channel device such as this could achieve real world 10m accuracy which is enough to indicate, for example, which side of a farm a path arises from.

In reality, the navigation facilities of the 12XL made it hard to pre-programme routes due to a limitation of 20 waypoints per route. Mapping software was also costly pre-2000 and it wasn't feasible for me to carry a laptop to review maps on a trip. Thus I tended to use the 12XL as a logger and input a few key waypoints where I anticipated problems. Of course, I also referred to it to get a grid reference when I needed a little encouragement. I also found that I could usually relate it to a map bought overseas either via an official datum/reference system or by a combination of trial and error and use of an unofficial reference formula inputted to the 'user grid'.

Three years ago I moved to using a Holux logger which despite my reservations has been a good workhorse, although recovering the data isn't intuitive. As a pure logger this has no utility in navigation. I also consider that the storage format is excessively 'lossy' resulting in poor detail of recorded tracks.

From the review by DC Rainmaker

Finally, I often run with a Garmin 110, another less-than-cutting-edge piece of kit, which has shown itself to be reliable in all weathers. It can be an aid to navigation by revealing distance travelled which is helpful, where permitted, in orienteering events. It is more reliable than my pacing over rough terrain, that's for sure.

Lost data

After work I nipped down to Millhouses Park to try a short 'fast' run as recommended by the physio. She thinks that I need to make a little more power. This is an old route and so I hoped to see how much slower I was than a year or so ago. I thought it went fairly well and didn't struggle too much on the uphill back home.

Unfortunately the FIT file recorded on the watch is absolute rubbish. The locations are not very near here, the altitude is fiction and the pace what better than I could manage. The heart rate might be about right though! I've looked at the file as a cvs file after converting it (FIT repair tool) and I really can't see how it can be tidying. There aren't any obvious glitches. It's just wrong...

I wonder this has something to do with it. Maybe the ephemeris data is corrupt? It can't be 'real time' data error as the old satellite is offline.

From itnews

I'll just to have note that I did my best and try again in a week or so. The issue now is whether the watch is at all trust worth. I'll have to take the HOLUX out next time and that was a bit reluctant a few months ago in Spain.