Heads up!!! Here’s your massive Cyber Monday sports tech deals list! This includes the Garmin Forerunner 965 for just $499, Garmin Epix for $429, the Apple Watch Ultra 2 for just $619, the GoPro Hero 12 Black for $299, (or Hero 13 bundle for $339!) and plenty more! Go check out the full list of 100+ deals here!
I’m DC RAINMAKER…
I swim, bike and run. Then, I come here and write about my adventures. It’s as simple as that. Most of the time. If you’re new around these parts, here’s the long version of my story.
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You can use the above link for any Amazon country and it (should) automatically redirect to your local Amazon site.Want to compare the features of each product, down to the nitty-gritty? No problem, the product comparison data is constantly updated with new products and new features added to old products!
Wanna create comparison chart graphs just like I do for GPS, heart rate, power meters and more? No problem, here's the platform I use - you can too!
Think my written reviews are deep? You should check out my videos. I take things to a whole new level of interactive depth!
Smart Trainers Buyers Guide: Looking at a smart trainer this winter? I cover all the units to buy (and avoid) for indoor training. The good, the bad, and the ugly.
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Check out my weekly podcast - with DesFit, which is packed with both gadget and non-gadget goodness!
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FAQ’s
I have built an extensive list of my most frequently asked questions. Below are the most popular.
- Do you have a privacy policy posted?
- Why haven’t you yet released a review for XYZ product you mentioned months ago?
- Will you test our product before release?
- Are you willing to review or test beta products?
- Which trainer should I buy?
- Which GPS watch should I buy?
- I’m headed to Paris – what do you recommend for training or sightseeing?
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- What kind of camera do you use?
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In Depth Product Reviews
You probably stumbled upon here looking for a review of a sports gadget. If you’re trying to decide which unit to buy – check out my in-depth reviews section. Some reviews are over 60 pages long when printed out, with hundreds of photos! I aim to leave no stone unturned.
Read My Sports Gadget Recommendations.
Here’s my most recent GPS watch guide here, and cycling GPS computers here. Plus there are smart trainers here, all in these guides cover almost every category of sports gadgets out there. Looking for the equipment I use day-to-day? I also just put together my complete ‘Gear I Use’ equipment list, from swim to bike to run and everything in between (plus a few extra things). And to compliment that, here’s The Girl’s (my wife’s) list. Enjoy, and thanks for stopping by!
Have some fun in the travel section.
I travel a fair bit, both for work and for fun. Here’s a bunch of random trip reports and daily trip-logs that I’ve put together and posted. I’ve sorted it all by world geography, in an attempt to make it easy to figure out where I’ve been.
My Photography Gear: The Cameras/Drones/Action Cams I Use Daily
The most common question I receive outside of the “what’s the best GPS watch for me” variant, are photography-esq based. So in efforts to combat the amount of emails I need to sort through on a daily basis, I’ve complied this “My Photography Gear” post for your curious minds (including drones & action cams!)! It’s a nice break from the day-to-day sports-tech talk, and I hope you get something out of it!
The Swim/Bike/Run Gear I Use List
Many readers stumble into my website in search of information on the latest and greatest sports tech products. But at the end of the day, you might just be wondering “What does Ray use when not testing new products?”. So here is the most up to date list of products I like and fit the bill for me and my training needs best! DC Rainmaker 2023 swim, bike, run, and general gear list. But wait, are you a female and feel like these things might not apply to you? If that’s the case (but certainly not saying my choices aren’t good for women), and you just want to see a different gear junkies “picks”, check out The Girl’s Gear Guide too.
Not sure about the that type of smart jacket. The guy is barely visible in the dark!! And the light is not for visibility but for self indication. A good gps watch can do probably more just on your wrist, while wearing a highly visible running jacket.
I guess the Samsung Galaxy Gear 2 was just too late to get into the “Week in review”. Interesting to see Samsung bringing out a watch with optical heart rate monitor and accelerometer/gyrometer. It it did just have a GPS, it would have it all – it really looks like everything is converging to one product here, with Garmin also going in the smart watch direction with BT4 notifications …. My feeling is that Garmin is going to get it tough here … And that Garmin needs to get an optical heart rate monitor going soon.
link to theguardian.com
Saw some pictures of the Gear 2 as well and spotted that heart rate sensor on the inside of the watch.
Very exciting to hear about this low power GPS chip. Might we see this in sports watches later this year? Of certain brands? Or do they all pretty much use broadcom?
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In researching these watches – love doing that on your site Ray! but it sometimes makes my head spin ;) – anyway.
Some of the things I’d like to avoid is having to charge the watch all the time, as well as plugging it into a laptop/desktop to download data and upload it to the web and being stuck in just one environment or having to export / import manually all the time.
I’m wishing for more true multi-sport activity watches. Going beyond the essential three. It tracks your day and then you can be out snowshoeing, cross country skiing, hiking, kayaking, paddleboarding, windsurfing, kite surfing … It is not that these activities are a race, but they can be a good workout if you put a little effort in, they get your heart going and you never know how fast you are going.
So, it would be nice to be able to glance at your wrist and see your current speed, heart rate, distance traveled and current time. All on one single screen without having to use your other hand to flip through one or two screens. Because you’re either wearing (winter) gloves and can’t operate the watch buttons or you need your hands on the bar so you can’t press buttons at all.
So I guess I’m waiting for my holy grail multi-sport watch:
– pretty darn waterproof and a bit rugged, not some flimsy wrist band situation that will disintegrate with the first impact of a branch, boom, … (spoiled by Casio G-shock)
– daily activity tracking – if these functions are in cheap activity trackers, why not have them in sports watches as well ?
– support for more than one custom apps / custom sports
– data screen customizable with 4 fields (hr, speed, distance, time)
– low power gps
– long battery life of several weeks with minimized gps use
– bluetooth 4
– ant+
– untethered smartphone / tablet app data collection
– 3rd party app support
Bike stand link doesn’t seem to work.
Looking at the error message, it’s staying there are too many concurrent connections to his server. Opps, my bad.
Sorry about that, the server had some issues. Should be all fixed now :D
Loving the 3rd on your internet trawl – the Banyak film with runners answering questions mid-run. Surprisingly addictive by the end.
As for software updates, it was at first frustrating Friday PM setting up the new version of Garmin connect on my iPhone just to have the app crash every time I tried starting a livetrack on my Forerunner 220. But then I grabbed my s3 to see what they did on Android and was pleasantly surprised that first quarter of 2014 is “NOW” for people waiting for the Android version of connect to work with Forerunners. Good blog. And is my wrist starting to itch under my Force?
My connect also crashed when I started a livetrack for my 620.
Just reinstalled it and it seems to be working fine…
Hey Ray, is there such a thing as a “season” for announcements?
I’d like to know if there’s a time where I can be reasonably sure that all the new stuff has been announced, so I can make an informed purchase decision. Or is it all just kind of a scattershot type of deal?
Roughly speaking:
First week of January – CES announcements
Feb-April, usually ending around the Boston Marathon: Spring/Summer Fitness announcements
(Last call is 1st week of May)
End of Aug/Mid-September – Eurobike for Cycling announcements
September-October – Running-related projects running late for the holidays
That’s roughly the schedules. In general, if you don’t hear of something by the first week of May, the next ‘stop’ on the announcements train is really mid-August ahead of Eurobike and the fall running season. And if you don’t hear of an announcement by Halloween, it’s too late for the holidays, and won’t happen till CES in January.
Of course, there are random conferences/conventions that sometimes companies get suckered into going to, and then they use that to announce a product. For example, Polar with ISPO and the V650 back a few weeks ago. Companies like to announce products at expo’s because executives believe it gets them widespread press. In reality though, the more I talk with folks in the industry, the more they’ll note that actually that hurts more than helps – especially tech products. There’s just too many products to cover that most get half-ass coverage. Versus just launching on a random March Tuesday, the (tech press) world’s your oyster.
Here’s the rough major fitness focused events each year:
Early January: CES – Consumer Electronics Show (Vegas)
Late January: ISPO – European Heath and Fitness Show (Munich)
Late January: Outdoor Retailer Winter – Very few announcements there (Salt Lake City)
Mid February: MWC – Mobile World Congress, mobile and some health (Barcelona)
Early August: Outdoor Retailer Summer – Very few announcements, tons of NDA stuff (Salt Lake City)
Late August: Eurobike – Cycling show (Town I can’t spell in Germany)
Mid September: Interbike – Cycling show (Las Vegas)
There’s also a few other events like the IHRSA and what-not, but most of the sports tech companies don’t announce there, they just go and show old stuff.
Wow, thanks a lot for the detailed response. Really appreciate it!
For those in Europe interested in the Garmin Fenix, Amazon.co.uk also dropped its price to £250 (from £348 last week). Use the link in the right sidebar to use DC as referrer :-)
Have you had problems uploading your garmin data to garmin connect via wahoo fitness (on your iPad) since garmin updated to garmin express? I can’t get my data to load to my garmin connect profile anymore. :(
Yes, when attempting to upload an activity from the Wahoo Fitness app on iPhone to Garmin Connect, there is the following error message:
A server error occurred while uploading workout data.
The workaround of emailing yourself the TCX or GPX file from the Wahoo app, then manually uploading that to Garmin Connect also does not work:
An error occurred with your upload. Please try again.
I can confirm this.
Just had another spin on my Kurt Kinetic Road Machine and when I tried to upload it (from KK app on my iPhone) to Garmin Connect it fails.
“An error occurred with your upload. Please try again.”
Is the message I get.
And this happened couple of times in row now.
Any news about this?
Hope they will fix it soon.
Yeah, Wahoo and pretty much everyone else broke on Thursday. Garmin changed a few things, which in turn broke most programmers. I’ve been playing a fair bit of shuttle diplomacy over the past few days, and I think the majority of app-devs that broke are on the bus to getting access to the new API (hopefully tomorrow). They had to agree to what looked like a fairly standard API terms agreement first.
Once they get access to the API, then they’ll need to update their own apps, then publish to the various app stores, which, could take some time.
Garmin states it was unintentional, though, I’m honestly not sold on that one. Testing just one single app would have told them it broke everyone (which it did). Sigh.
Yeah, I’m working on a cycling website and it broke my code also. It’s pretty obvious garmin knew it was going to break everyone’s integration.
Looking at the new garmin connect login page, it looks like they will have a garmin auth api?
It is good to hear that the app devs should be getting access pretty quickly.
I have a feeling this may be a bit of intentionally “unintentional” – and a way to shake out the traffic from unsupported apps. If developers are still maintaining their apps, they will quickly sort it out.
It is a real pain right now to have to manually upload my runs from iSmoothRun… and I have no good way to get data into ConnectStats on my iPad. I had gotten used to being PC free for the sync/analysis of my data.
Regarding Garmin Express, looks like I can’t upload weight data from Forerunner 910XT anymore. I can collect it from Tanita, but can’t upload… Rolled back to Ant agent and I still can upload data. The question – for how long?
@DC Rainmaker, I saw you already have modern Garmin Connect view. Is Fitness section still there? Or there’s no point to stick to Ant agent as Garmin planning to remove it? Thanks.
I’m still on the old Garmin Connect, at least until tomorrow.
When modern garmin connect will be available for garmin fenix 2 users? thanks
The current plan is once all the kinks get worked out. Right now, honestly, it’s kinda broken most of the times. And I usually end up back in classic edition to get anything done.
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