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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.
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.
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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.
I’m really interested in what this is going to do in the sports watch market. I think this makes what Suunto has done very interesting. Obviously their current watches aren’t going to benefit from this but next generation Suunto watches are going to benefit from having both excellent sports features and Fitbit functionality.
Fitbit might lock the Fitbit functionality to Fitbit watches? Similar to how Google locks Gcam goodness to Pixel devices.
In some ways they will benefit from it.
– GPay now available in far more countries.
– YouTube Music with offline support is coming.
– Spotify with offline Music/Podcast support is coming.
– According to Google, third party tile support is due in “coming weeks”. Not sure if they mean via update which manufacturers can push out, or via update on Google Play.
Also, Suunto have pushed out a lot of updates to the S7. I think they were the first to pus out the HRM-2 update. We shouldn’t rule out the possibility that this update will also be brought to the S7. We shouldn’t expect it either of course, unless announced by Suunto.
Fitbit might lock the Fitbit functionality to Fitbit watches? Similar to how Google locks Gcam goodness to Pixel devices.
Even if they don’t, what has Fitbit to offer now? A glorified step counter to challenge my coach potato family in fastest run to the fridge?
Their continuous heart rate tracking won’t survive in the world of Snapdragon SoC tied HR sensors and Wear OS battery munchies. Thus I’d imagine the quality of sleep tracking and analysis will take a hit too. As per workout features, Fitbit was fairly pedestrian in that regard and never felt much need to improve. They are light years behind everyone, even Apple in that regard.
Honestly, I don’t see why Google felt the need to grab Fitbit in the first place, apart from probably some sensor R&D, juicy wearable IP, and a wish to kill off a limping competitor while Google themselves are still standing.
Instead of looking from the lens of a hardware acquisition, would stress Google acquired the largest biometric data set in existence. Plenty of value there to a Google, even if in Fall 2019 they weren’t 100% sure what they were going to do with it.
The reasons you listed along with Fitbit brand recognition are reasonable motivations unless they have already decided to leaving the market in the near term. Whether they are worth what was paid for them & can be effectively leveraged is another matter. Alphabet fitness offerings may not be as successful as Apple or Garmin, but they can probably afford to continue on financially for a while.
If nothing else, their investment in wearables doesn’t seem to be limiting potential investment in other areas.
I suspect they will end up on a parallel trajectory with Amazon with the offering being less relevant to the sports & running crowd.
I’d argue a lot, at least a non-tech consumer view.
Use case in point. I have been with Garmin for a long-time and have a 6X Pro, but moved to Wahoo away from Tacx for a variety of reasons.
To then my point, my wife wanted a wearable and we got her a Charge 4. OK it may not be as accurate on some GPS, but from a UI point of view she likes it and the app to me is far better than Garmin. More insights, integrated food intake.
I’ve stopped using my Garmin except anything but recording activities as they don’t provide an integrated view; yes, they have Map My Fitness integrations etc, but as a consumer I don’t want that. I want a singular UI and Garmin is falling behind in this regard (don’t get me started on the cost of the INdex S2 vs the Aria Air too)
>Their continuous heart rate tracking won’t survive in the world of Snapdragon SoC tied HR sensors and Wear OS battery munchies. Thus I’d imagine the quality of sleep tracking and analysis will take a hit too.
The Ticwatch 3 Pro, with the Snapdragon 4100, has great sleep tracking, continuous heartrate tracking, and SpO2 tracking, with almost no battery hit. It uses Tichealth (and I would suspect they’ve worked with Qualcomm closely on optimization), not Google Fit though. That would presumably be more evidence that Wear OS had some major problems. Hopefully the new version is the answer. Presumably, Samsung wouldn’t switch unless they were confident it would be sort of equivalent to their previous generations.
I’m cautiously optimistic about the new update, but we’ll see.
Even though this is going on Fit bit needs to fix their update on all their watches. I just got a Fit bit Sense and I paid a lot of money for it and it won’t sync all the time. I read a lot of people are having troubles with their Fitbits on syncing. Please fix the PROBLEM!!!!!!
Suunto next. I think we’ll see a new watch in the next two weeks.
I’m really looking forward for tht
Unfortunately the new Suunto you speak of was just a slimmed down Baro 9 with blood oxygen.
It might be the case that googles ongoing own chip development find a way to the Wear OS devices, at least there are rumors for that. And also for an own google pixel smart watch.
However, I am looking forward to a DCR review when they come out, especially the Samsung Galaxy Watch 4 could be of interest then. BTW is there a reason why you never reviewed the the version 3 of the Galaxy watch ?
Yeah, I even bought one. And then time just got thin, and it never quite got into the full test rotation before interest wanned.
Also, as a sports watch it kind of sucks :-)
An upstart like Coros can run circles around Samsung and Google.
First Polar M600 and then Suunto 7.
When WearOS actually finds a way to make the battery last 40+ hours with GPS and oHRM running, I will definitely consider a watch from either Suunto or Polar running WearOS.
I was going to write a long winded comment on this thread about how this is Google making another half-assed attempt at reviving Wear OS. Then I found this article on the Verge:
link to theverge.com
Well said.
It’s funny, I read that last night too.
It’s interesting, as it times the article seemed to be implying Wear OS is going away and Tizen is going to replace it. Which, isn’t really the take I got. That said, I did notice the wording tweaks in the presentation when I watched it from “Wear OS” to just “Wear”.
Ultimately, my stance has long been that I don’t think Wear OS will be taken seriously (internal or external to Google) until Google actually develops their own watch for it, and has enough financial or marketing skin in the game to care.
Great. That puts an end to me even considering a Samsung watch in future. I don’t want anything from Google. I consider Google very unreliable, most of their products are worse than what’s available on the market, their whole business model is privacy invading. I quite like Samsung but would be happier if they were able to get rid of Google. If Huawei could do that, why not Samsung. Anyways, I won’t buy any Wear OS products, that’s for sure.
I do hope major improvements happen for other users as I have now given up on my Fitbit completely and will be moving away from the brand due to lack of customer support.