Mixing GPS with Sport Training : Introduction

By Bruce Gain, published on May 11, 2007
Source: Tom's Guide US | Keywords: mixing, gps, with, sport, training

Contents

4. Packed With Features, But Are They Easy To Use?

1. Introduction

The local college in the town where I grew up once hosted a lecture in the early 1980s given by an editor from "Omni" magazine. At the time, "Omni" was considered the journal of record for science fiction and non-fiction coverage of science and technology with a very futuristic bent.

I was in my early teens, and was captivated by what the "Omni" editor had to say about the possibilities of technology and how it could meld with culture. He described encountering in the street, just before the lecture, a young woman wearing shorts and sunglasses, who went past him on roller skates. She skated in sync with the music she was listening to from large and heavy radio earphones wrapped over the top of her head and ears. "She is the future," the editor said (or something like that, as I recall).

Flash forward 25 years later. As I go for a run, I wear the following electronic gear: an MP3 player and a Blackberry strapped to my waist. For the purpose of this review, I also have Garman and Timex sport GPS devices strapped to my wrist. While running along the beach on the Brittany coast in France, I think about the "Omni" editor's now antiquated vision of the future over two decades ago, and just how much consumer technology has changed since then. Indeed, I think that it is only a matter of time before the functions of the GPS sport devices, Blackberry and MP3 player will be embedded in a single component.

For this review, however, my immediate concern was less about convergence. I wanted to find and test electronics gear that could gauge my speed, distance traveled and heart rate as I jogged or cycled. Prior to the review, I could only estimate how long I ran or bicycled.

I thought devices that could fulfill this task would be in ready supply. However, after scouring the Internet, I was surprised to find only two readily available products for this application: the Garmin Forerunner 305 and the Timex Bodylink. The two devices also turned out to offer rather different approaches in terms of style and ease of use.

After surveying the features of the two devices in this review, a critique follows in which I detail how important it is for vendors to get the interfaces right.