Heads up!!! Here’s your massive holiday sports tech deals list! This includes the Garmin Epix for just $419, the Apple Watch Ultra 2 for just $699, the GoPro Hero 12 Black for $249, (or the brand new Hero 13 or $299!) and plenty more! Go check out the full list of 100+ deals here!
I’m DC RAINMAKER…
Here’s how to save!
Wanna save some cash and support the site? These companies help support the site! With Backcountry.com or Competitive Cyclist with either the coupon code DCRAINMAKER for first time users saving 15% on applicable products.
You can also pick-up tons of gear at REI via these links, which is a long-time supporter as well:
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You can use the above link for any Amazon country and it (should) automatically redirect to your local Amazon site.
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5 Easy Steps To The Site
1
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.
2
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!
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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.
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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!
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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.
Glad to see the progress on Cycling Dynamics, especially with reference to Favero. Given the recent inclusion of Pioneer’s metrics on Wahoo, I’ve been hoping to be able to better leverage the same information from my pedals.
I learned a heck of a lot from your presentation. You did a great job speaking for the consumers, thank you!
Good insight, Ray!
I would be curious how companies will cooperate to solve Running Power issues, when they are competitors and currently they are unable to utilize users feedback…
If integrating Spotify into devices was a milestone, then this is a road to hell…
What you said about new product releases (hack/crap) applies to device functionalities as well. Applied bike profiles in 910XT is a good example. Why can’t we have it in 920XT or Edge520?
Weather is not a reason to skip a training…
Medical devices should be integrated in IFTTT, because it opens a gateway to other great/life saving features/options.
In this field Garmin is very much behind competitors…
Hey DC…..great keynote speech and I got a lot of information on the future of the industry. Keep up the great work.
Good stuff! Glad they finally gave you enough time!
I slightly disagree with you on Garmin Pay infrastructure-wise being ready – at least as far as the East Coast of the US goes. I’ve moved around several times in the past few years and at this point every store everywhere I’ve gone supports NFC payments, and the Garmin list of supported banks also supports every bank I’ve ever seen around here.
However I still completely agree about the feature not needing to be dial-tone yet (and actually think people will realize music isn’t that important either) for one big reason – no cellular.
Until they have the trifecta of music, payments, AND cellular, I have to bring my phone. And if I HAVE to bring my phone for ANY of those 3, there’s no reason my watch needs any of them at all as my phone has all 3 covered.
I realize Apple has that trifecta, but unless I’m mistaken or my thoughts are outdated (still waiting on your Apple Series 4 review), there are some key features of Garmins that as a Half-Ironman looking to go Full-Ironman I still would miss with the Apple watch.
I think the biggest one that even 3rd party apps couldn’t make up would be if the Apple watch can’t connect to other fitness sensors (can it?) Also need the GPS battery life to last me a whole Ironman.
Otherwise watch + phone is still the required minimum when out training for me right now. Would love to ditch the phone, but I see little point to paying for a few phone features that are cool when they aren’t yet enough to ditch the phone.
I still view the real watch race there being between Apple closing the fitness feature gap and Garmin and the like closing the “ditch your phone” gap. And while I think people who already have Garmin features don’t want to give them up, I see a lot of pretty serious athletes in my local clubs getting an Apple watch as their first smart/fitness watch (because it’s more well-known mainstream wise), and not wanting to move to a Garmin and lose the Apple features even though they’re getting podium places in Half-Ironmans.
Thanks again for your coverage and thoughts!
Thank you Ray for sharing this with us, loved the video, as usual very insightful and informational.
Thanks for sharing the slideware. Most insightful. I’m baffled by the music use cases and how they drive usage and purchase.
Out and about running, cycling or elk trekking with headphones and no audio environmental cues / engagement? I can’t understand that one little bit.
I’m very clearly in the minority. Cheers again Ray for the write up and info.
…another view captured from the net…
Thats priceless
Thanks for posting all the old ones…… The most interesting thing for me, is the gaps in 2010 and still basically gaps in 2018 despite all the other stuff, these are still pretty open.
Excellent speech, congratulations.
Very good insights and thoughts. Thanks for sharing.
Thanks, really valuable insights. But you are missi9ng out on a really exiting area for spots technology: Suspension setup for mountain bikes like the ShockWiz and Sussmybike. I have been using one of these and transformed my ride. The bike is more stable and planted but still subtle on the rough stuff. I would recommend it to every mountain biker and in my opinion it’s a far better tool than a power meter, especially for the more gravity focused disciplines. Keep up the good work.
Any news on if more gps devices (like the lezyne mega xl and mega c) will support fe-c to control indoor trainers? Thanks
No, and to be honest I suspect we’ll actually see head units probably skip implementing it going forward. The general feeling I’ve heard from companies is that while head unit adoption of FE-C was important a few years ago to solidly the standard (especially by Garmin), very few people actually use it these days in the world of trainer apps so widely supporting it and the interface generally being better.
Thanks for replying Ray. Your insights are second to none, you are the best.
everything is good with ant+ except one. As I see this is very unfriendly thing. I’d like to go another watch system, but with ant+ I have to stay with garmin. I think Garmin understand this. And Suunto understand that ant+ is important option but can’t add this. What do you think about any chances of suunto with ant+?
From a watch standpoint, it’s really on the individual companies. Suunto used to be part of ANT+, and for whatever reason they decided against including it going forwards a few years back. I suspect we’ll see some ‘new’ companies come into the ANT+ fold in the nearish/medium term.
Realistically, all these companies use the Nordic chipsets that support dual ANT+/BLE. It’s simply a matter of unlocking the license key to do so (it has three modes, BLE-only, ANT+ only, and dual ANT+/BLE).
Ant+ is soooo much better than Bluetooth because it allows you to pair one fitness device to multiple recording devices at the same time! You can pair your power meter and speed/cadence sensors up to a head unit on the bike as well as a watch for backup purposes. (Until a future Bluetooth version allows multi-device pairing…)
I would generally say that any company not doing Ant+ is not targeting the true fitness market, which wants to pair multiple devices for lots of data…
I like the call out for how Stanford screwed up their study. Are there any good studies that got published? Or was everything you saw bad?
Hey Ray,
This morning I was thinking about wireless charging, which the Stryd plunged me intoafter being a long time disbeliever, but they’ve started to open my mind. With so many devices, all with proprietary sockets for charging, Garmins/Suntos/HR straps etc all needing a separate cable, why do you think the sports-tech world is hiding from QI charging so much? Surely it’d make things so much easier with multiple devices? Out of interest, how much space does the internals for QI in a device take up, could that be an issue? I couldn’t find anything.
Where do you see the wireless charging for sports-tech topic?
Wireless charging is tough for wearables. I love the idea, but implementation is tricky.
Take Stryd for example. Less than 10 centimeters to the right of my laptop right now is an Ikea wireless charger that I installed into my makeshift desk. It’s awesome. Except, it’s finicky with Stryd. Sometimes it charges for hours and then doesn’t result in any meaningful battery power.
About 30cm to my left right now is a cool new Hyper wireless charging dock thingy. It too is awesome, one of my favorites. Except Stryd doesn’t charge on it at all.
In the box down to my right of random crap is yet another charging pad, a cheap one for $10 on Amazon. Does Stryd like it? Nope.
Now – this is definitely not to pick on Stryd. In fact, that neglects my point. Last February while travelling I was chatting with Stryd about this challenge, as I had brought that cheap $10 wireless charging mat instead of the Stryd one. Turns out, the coils are too far apart for Stryd. And that’s really true of everything I have, except the default Stryd one. Since those pads are mostly designed for phones, the coils want to be more spread out, to allow more flexible placement. But if you’ve only got a few coils and Stryd is tiny, it makes it tough to charge.
Other wearables will be the same for the most part.
Looking at Apple’s much delayed wireless charging station, it’s rumored to have upwards of 15 coils in it. Which is also why it’s rumored to be so darn delayed, making that work power-wise has been challenging it sounds like.
Now, does this mean I don’t want wireless charging? Nope, not at all – I’d love to see it on a Garmin or what-not. It just means I’m realistic that it’s a long ways away still from being across the board functional. :(
Sounds like the solution might be simple, then. Simply put some indication on the pad of where the coils are, so you can use them as targets for small devices.
What would bother me would be how to recover from disaster. If the connection is completely wireless with no external ports and your watch gets bricked (as has just happened with the Apple Watch and WatchOS 5.1), how do you recover? Seems to me that recovery with a device like a Garmin which plugs into a computer and shows up as a disk would be easier. How do you recover a bricked Apple Watch? Even for mundane tasks, I’ve often grabbed FIT files (or GPX or TCX earlier) from my Garmin’s when something didn’t work right. What do you do when everything is wireless and something goes wrong?
Yeah, things get messy there. But in some ways that goes back to improving software quality to the point where those incidents are so incredibly rare – ala Apple Watch, which uses wireless charging today.
Thanks for the response Ray. Do you see guys like Garmin trying in the lab and failing to make it reliable or are they just passively waiting for the technology to mature?
Scosche is interesting, they sell iPhone wireless chargers, which makes me think they really could be in the position to do that with the R24…but didn’t.
I suspect they’re probably looking at it for specific use cases, but I’d doubt they’re actively working on it across the board.
As for Scosche, I’d guess that given the size is basically the same as a wearable, it’d suffer the same issues.
It kinda goes back to Stryd. While as a geek I think it’s cool they did wireless charging, I’d love to know what the BOM looked like compared to doing what RunScribe did. Perhaps Qi was cheaper, but I doubt it.
Hey Ray, we are in mid-march 2019 and there has been no new major announcements or news on further development and commercialization of Cycling Aero Sensors….either from existing platforms or from new platforms. Curious to know if you have any perspective as to what is happening and if you anticipate major product news in this tech space? Social media has been somewhat muted lately and we still haven’t heard anything from Garmin since their Alphamantis Acquisition going back to July 2017. Interesting that SwissSide has partnered with Team Sky and which was followed up with a Garmin sponsorship announcement. Also, I noticed Velocomp is discounting their Aeropod sensors which suggests to me that they are not getting enormous buyer interest, and perhaps Notio is also struggling to get buyers as I don’t see any real mention of their “Notio Tour” where they were pre-selling units as part of localized product training sessions.