Heads up – Massive Sports Tech Holiday Deals List is Live!!! The Garmin Fenix 8 is $250 off (even the Fenix 8 Pro is $100 off!), the Apple Watch Ultra 3 is on sale, the Garmin inReach Mini 2 is $249, the GoPro Hero 13 Black, DJI NEO, and a ton of other brands/deals, including Wahoo, Oura, Whoop, Polar, Samsung, Google, and more than 100 sports tech deals here!
I’m DC RAINMAKER…
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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.
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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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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.
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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!
5
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 2024 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.
Ironically, I’m approaching 45 minutes in a chat with Google customer support regarding a Fitbit Ace LTE issue (under 1 year old but this might be the second replacement).
My experiences with Google customer support have been absolutely shocking. Weird for a company that should be well ahead of the curve in using AI for this kind fo stuff.
Took 2.5 months of back and forth with Google (primarily “We’re investigating and we’ll get back to you”) emails to resolve a warranty issue this year. Nearly as bad as my all time worst experience with Garmin, which took 6 months, including finally getting a warranty replacement….shipped to completely the wrong address.
Both interactions have definitely soured me on their respective companies. Good customer service should not be so hard, but both companies would certainly beg to differ.
Hi Ray
Will you be doing a review of the new Whoop bands. I’m considering a whoop or an Oura but I struggle to buy sports tech nowadays without a DCR review to inform my decision.
Experiance?
My Gen3 Oura ring got to a point where it would not last 2 days & then stopped charging altogether. Support was useless to try & fix the no charge issue (the internet helped me finally fix it). As for the battery, they best they offered me was $50 off a new ring. And I even bought the 2 year extended warranty (I was just past the coverage window). My size 9 ring was getting too small on my finger anyway, so I decided to buy a silicone ring. Then AMEX came out with a $200 credit offer on a new ring, so now I’m waiting for another $50 coupon to come along & I will get a Gen4 for basically $100.
This post is just to say that YMMV on support. My experience was not as friendly as yours.
Someone has to do it, not intended to be pedantic:
*Experience not “Experiance”
Unless he’s put a I and an A in there on purpose for intelligència artificial in Catalan (sorry I don’t have a Mallorquín translation)
Over the years, I’ve had excellent Oura customer service a few times now.😮 It’s kind of surprising to get fast, good service when frustration is generally the norm.
I had a similar, but worse experience with Oura (same battery issue)
The AI chat bot did not find an issue with the ring and instead just listed some useless troubleshooting. It was weirdly difficult to get a message sent to a real person, who DID find an issue and then sent a replacement ring. My problem is how hard it was to defeat the AI chat bot boss battle and get through.
Oura’s AI for food logging is shockingly good as well.
Would you be willing to ask/share the backend tech stack Oura is using for this experience? It would be helpful to those of us in businesses also wanting to improve customer service experiences. Thank you!
Very clever AI assistant. In a heartbeat it recognized, with whom it was talking to.
The famous gadget reviewer was on the line. And that’s why the service was top notch :)
Yeah Ray. same situation for me,only I used the web site not app. but the bot took care of it. Awesome
People complain about AI replacing jobs until they have to deal with customer service…
True. Though almost all of my AI chatbot interactions have really sucked. Obviously, it probably depends less on the technology and more on the restrictions the company has put in place.
Which is pretty much just like customer service with humans. In the vast majority of cases, CS employees usually do want to help people, but are often hamstrung by penny-pinching policies that the company has put in place (or, IT restrictions).
I wonder if it went so smoothly because Oura has a lot of rings to replace ? So it was cost-efficient to setup an AI, instead of having their customer service swamped. I guess a human would be better at weeding out the frivolous claims to get a shiny new ring.
I also had a v4 ring replaced after only 8 months. Same symptoms, same very efficient procedure. Another thing I appreciated with Oura, was that they sent a whole new package, so got an extra charger.
Anybody knows what happens to the warranty (in Europe) when a ring is replaced ?
Fwiw, this was in Europe. In my case, I got a full new ring package as well. New charger, etc…
My experience mirrors Ray’s. I live in New Zealand, which is a tiny market.
This says way more about Oura’s ease of exchanges and their data collection. All the chat bot did was look up your info and see that the battery diagnostics indicated something wrong, and then lookup your ring size and check that it was in stock. A “dumb” webpage could have done the same thing, and for much cheaper on Oura’s end (everyone seems to forget or not know that AI is not free: takes energy and resources to train it and to run it).
If they didn’t require you to constantly send diagnostic data back to them (can you opt out?), the chat bot would have likely been useless at solving this issue. Depending on the training it might have been able to ask you to turn on diagnostics reporting, or have you read the diagnostics and tell it, but it’s still more about Oura being ok with just swapping rings based solely on that diagnostic.
LOL. “… for the first time in the history of the universe, an AI support chatbot was actually good”.
A slight exaggeration perhaps. Universe is big, right? In my mind drawing parallels to “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”. And sitting here laughing.
The Outa support example is an exceptionally successful result from AI, at least for the customer.
Thanks for all the great content.
“The Encyclopaedia Galactica defines an AI chatbot as a LLM apparatus designed to do the work of a man. The marketing division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation defines a robot as “Your Synthetic Pal Who’s Fun To Chat With.”
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy defines the marketing division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation as “a bunch of mindless jerks who’ll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes,” with a footnote to the effect that the editors would welcome applications from anyone interested in taking over the post of robotics correspondent.”
🙃
I had the same experience but repeated four times. Each ring would last slightly over a day before requiring charging. It was generation 3.
Oura’s new Chief Design Director is a former Apple designer so expect more of good things to come. He has spoken a lot about the intensity and pace of how work was done in Apple and how it should be done everywhere but also about the customer experience importance.
I think Oura is on its way to the greatness and also to a 100Bn valuation which means it will IPO in the coming years too.
100Bn valuation? Wearable devices are niche devices. 0 of my friends wear a smartwatch, smartband or smartring. 1 had an Apple Watch, but sold it.
I would be happy of course if people started to wear these devices, but when will that happen?
Man, I wish Garmin was this efficient back when I was having an elevation issue with my Fenix 5S.
I feel like they should have been able to run a search over a bunch of activities and seen that the routes that I normally ran and walked with 15-20 metres of elevation change over 5km had suddenly become routes with elevation change of 1600-1800 metres.
Yeah, maybe ask me to clean the barometric altimeter sensor hole, but the effort involved with their support team – which included me sending video of a testing process that I’d had to activate, and sending them photographs of the result screens from the process seemed a bit much.
Two thoughts:
1) Had I been running Oura, I would have made sure that you were on the VIP list for customer support. All companies should have it for important customers anyway, and knowing your reach… A no-brainer.
2) It’s interesting to know that they can check that it’s something wrong with your ring and that you should get a replacement. Understandable from an economical perspective, but you could wonder why they couldn’t warn you about it before you reached out to them… Probably there is a huge amount of such cases out there.
Agree on the 2nd.
Though, on the first, as evidenced by all the comments here, seems like this is the norm for them. Lots of others have commented with identical experiances.
As anyone else who has worked for Apple will attest, two words loom very large in what’s expected of all work produced: surprise and delight. Looks like that’s being carried over nicely!