I wonder what the actual impact of GPS is on the battery, especially if you consider that without builtin GPS you need to enable wifi/bluetooth for the smartphone connection and that will also use some power.
I never really tested this, apart from noticing that even if I accidentally leave the camera in GPS mode 1, it will drain the battery only very slowly. Maybe it loses 5% per day, but even if it were 10%, I'd happily take that. All of my DSLRs (7DII, 6DII, 5DIV) almost always survive the day on a single battery, no matter what I do with them. So with the more power-hungry mirrorless cameras I'd probably need two batteries per day most of the time, but that should then also leave enough power for GPS, I'd hope.
That sounds like a better explanation to me. But compared to the DSLRs, the mirrorless cameras got smaller (maybe sometimes even too small, at least for my hands), so perhaps they could sacrifice some of that to properly integrate GPS again? If they do not want to do that everywhere, then at least in one of their bodies (maybe the R5?), so that they can still offer something that is as small as possible (R8, maybe R6) and something that is a bit larger (and more expensive) but also more capable.
I briefly considered buying the R3, since it is not that much heavier than my 5DIV (about 200g), but the integrated battery grip makes it too cumbersome to carry my usual way (capture clip on the hip belt of my backpack, or within the backpack behind a side access door, for which it might be bit too large (which is then also a problem with external solutions like the GP-E2)).
This is what I did before buying my first 7DII. But it has all the drawbacks of any "second device" solution, and now you also need synchronized clocks or the points will not be accurate. My GPS logger back then had a small display, so I could take a photo of its clock to calculate the offset, but I was so happy when I didn't need to do that anymore with the 7DII, I don't want to go back to that.
External loggers cost around 100-200€. But for the comfort of built-in GPS I'd also pay 500€.
Great, I'd be interested to read that
What battery improvements do you think are necessary? Perhaps they just need some more modern (GPS) technology: I bought a cheap (~100€) smartwatch this year. The whole thing just weighs 30g and has a 270mAh battery (so around 1Wh, assuming this is some standard ~3,8V battery). It can record GPS tracks for more than 20h using less than 10% of the LP-E6's capacity. Why should it take a camera more than that to geotag some photos?
