Ant+ on Samsung tablets (for Zwift)

[drossall]

Santa bought me a Galaxy Tab A7 Lite (SM-T220) to replace the Galaxy Tab S2 that I’ve been using successfully with Zwift (and for many other things) for some time. It’s meant as an upgrade, but not so it seems. It's looking as though Ant+ support on newer Samsung tablets is patchy at best. Does anyone know anything?

I need Ant+ for my older PowerTap wheel power sensor. I’ve seen information about attaching an Ant+ dongle, but the Anself device that I had to hand doesn’t seem to pick up the PowerTap wheel (whereas the S2 did, once I installed the relevant Ant+ apps).

I’ve tried the Ant Tester app and it seems happy that I’ve got everything, though I’m not clear whether it tests the dongle. I suppose it could be an issue that I’m having to use a USB Micro to C adaptor to connect the cable?

And a future issue is what to do on longer rides, when I need to connect power to the tablet as well.

[L CC]

I bought one of these to do Zwift on the rower and swiftly sent it back. It just wasn't up to the job- frame rate was appalling. I ended up with an iPad instead. It was double the money but the Android options were even more expensive.
I do everything on Bluetooth rather than Ant+ so I'm not sure how much difference that makes.

[Lightning Phil]

Bluetooth is far better than Ant+ . Ant+ is not designed for high data transmission rates.

[drossall]

By chance these posts came in on the day when I was testing a solution, which worked well.

It does seem to be the case that Ant+ support in Android, and in Samsung tablets in particular, is weakening. That's unfortunate because, in spite of Phil's comment, Ant+ is pretty widespread in sports (and particularly cycling) sensors. With no Ant+ support, even a dongle won't work. Power meters are expensive, and I consider myself very fortunate to have my wheel one, even though it's ten years old. So leaving Ant+ was never an option that I considered. And I use my Android tablet heavily for other reasons, so I didn't really want to go iPad.

However, there are a couple of bridge options available. I went for the CABLE bridge. I gather you can also use a Viiiiva HRM as a bridge, though I know nothing about that product. The CABLE bridge does need an iPad (or iPhone) for the configuration app, but that's not an issue because my wife has those - easy to borrow for one-off configuration, though she might not be keen for regular Zwifting!

The frame rate on the A7 is at least as good as on the S2. Maybe it's not great, but it's good enough for me. And Santa was never going to double his budget, nor would I want him to. So I'm happy

[L CC]

If it works for you, it works

[drossall]

To be fair, I've had the chance to try it on a few rides now. It's not great with large bunches. I've been doing the Tour de Zwift and, at the start, the riders all flash on and off once or twice a second, so to speak. When they are "off", I'm riding with a load of bikes that have no-one sitting on them. Weird, although not as bad as a couple of years ago when large bunches just stopped the thing working at all.

Luckily I tend to get dropped by the lead riders reasonably quickly, leaving a bunch of a size that it can handle