Alison Angier Diary

Hi!! Yes I know it has been quite a few weeks in between blogging but life can be so busy sometimes. Well what have we been up to?? Quite a lot and then there was Christmas. I won’t bore you with everything that has happened. But I will tell you a little bit about a new gadget that I have had the chance to do a review on.

As you know, I like to get some sort of feedback about my running, and I found the Nike+ iPod sensor to be a great aid and motivator for my running. Anyhow, I managed to get my hands on the brand new Nokia N82 Sports Tracker pack. I wondered how it would compare, so my friend Jeni and I went for a run yesterday loaded up with gadgets. Jeni had her Garmin Forerunner 305 and I was carrying both the Nokia N82 and my trusty Nano and Nike+ kit.

On first sight the N82 looks like quite a lot of modern business mobile phones, plain, chromy and slightly bigger than I would have expected, but it looks like phones have started to get bigger again lately. I remember when they first came out, they looked like bricks. This is not quite a brick but it’s bigger than I thought it would be.

When I first turned it on, it took a while to find the Sports Tracker application. I’m not familiar with the S60 operating system the newer Nokias use, and I found it fairly complicated to use after being spoilt rotten by my easy-to-use iPhone. David sorted it and after a few minutes we were up and running. Well that’s not quite true as it’s a 3G phone and we didn’t have a 3G sim and at first it didn’t work. After an email by David we found out that it would work. So that’s how we finally got started.

It locked on to the satellite signal in about 2 minutes. Although, this is a little awkward to wait for compared with just getting up and going with the Nike+, it is comparable with other GPS based equipment and took around the same time as the Garmin. Starting the workout was very simple with a single keypress.

The Nokia N82 was clearly the most bulky and heaviest of the three options, but if you are likely to be carrying a phone with you anyway then it has the simplicity of only carrying one gadget instead of two. I don’t normally take a phone, so it seemed a little awkward for me. Also, I didn’t have an armband for holding it, like I have for the iPod, although I am sure you can get them to fit. I ended up trying several approaches, in my jacket pocket it irritated me by jumping up and down and in my back pocket it pulled my trousers down! I ended up carrying it, but if I were to buy one, I would probably hunt for a suitable armband. As a phone, it is a little on the heavy side, 117g comapred to a Nokia 6310i at 100g. Not quite as heavy as the iPhone though at 135g.

The screen is quite big and easy to read and there is a wide set of choices of screen to display during the workout, so it should be possible to pick one that suits. They vary from screens that are orientated on speed, pace and distance to those that show the route taken.

At the end of the run, stopping the Nike+ and Garmin was a simple button press. Stopping the Sport Tracker involved bringing up the option menu, and picking “stop workout” from the list. Not really suited for getting that split-second accurate timing at the end of your time-trial! I also didn’t spot anyway of pausing your workout, which I tend to do if tying a lace or am having trouble crossing a busy road. If your phone rang during a run would it affect the workout information? That I don’t know as it never happened to me. That was an afterthought just now. Also I think it would be quite awkward to get out of an armband to answer if you were on a run.

In terms of accuracy it was quite impressive, agreeing with the Garmin to within a few yards on distance. The Nike+ needs calibrating to your gait, which I haven’t done since my groin injury last year, and it was noticably different (although within acceptable levels).

There is also a lot more information available on the device than on both the Nike+ and the Garmin. Charts of altitude, speed vs time, speed vs distance, pace information, and surprisingly cadence information. Neither the Garmin or the Nike+ was able to give cadence so it wasn’t possible to cross check the results, but it said I did 157 steps/minute - a quick check on Google showed that the average cadence at the pace we were going should be around 150 steps/minute. I wish I knew how it works!

The Garmin that Jeni has also has a heart rate monitor built in which the N82 and Nike+ don’t have. I think it could be a winner if Nokia were able to find a way of integrating a heart rate monitor into the N82.

I wasn’t able to compare how the data looks when synced up via the web site, or on the PC, but considering the data it collects it should be quite good.

Accuracy: Nike+ 3/5 Garmin 5/5 N82 5/5
Ease of use: Nike+ 4/5 Garmin 3/5 N82 3/5
Startup time: Nike+ 5/5 Garmin 3/5 N82 3/5
Features: Nike+ 2/5 Garmin 4/5 N82 4/5
Comfort: Nike+ 4/5 Garmin 4/5 N82 2/5

Overall: Nike+ 18/25 Garmin 19/25 N82 16/25

Conclusion

If you carry a phone already, and don’t want to carry anything more, then the N82 is perfect as you get the Sports Tracker built-in. It is very highly featured, although a bit clumsy to use occassionly. It looks like a very comprehensive phone as well, and David will be reviewing the N82 as a Smartphone next week - as an all-in-one gadget it could be a nice choice, phone, media-player, internet device, camera and sports tracker - quite a lot in a (not that) little package. I think I’ll be sticking with the Nike+ as it fits my needs more closely. I’m not one for carrying loads of gadgets when I run and like things to be as light as possible.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 7th, 2008 at 9:30 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.