A few weeks ago, the Nike+ SportWatch GPS caught my attention. I hadn’t been thinking about upgrading my simple, 6-year old Timex stopwatch, but this thing really impressed me.
There are a few major items that appealed to me right away:
First, the giant screen and numbers. In the winter months, I frequently run in the dark and my current watch, even with its backlight, takes some effort to see. Even in broad daylight, I sometimes have to squint down at it for longer than I’d like to.
Then, there’s the “tap to lap” feature. I still occasionally, in the heat of a run, hit the wrong button. I’ve always wanted a screen I could just touch, or in this case, whack!
Finally, I’d never given GPS running a second thought, but suddenly, I saw the appeal in it. I like having stats, I race against myself, and a GPS watch will give me plenty of stats.
Since I first saw the watch, I’ve read some detailed reviews of some other GPS watches and now suddenly, the Garmin Forerunner 610 has leapfrogged the Nike watch in my quest for a new watch. At first, I didn’t think much of the advanced features of the more expensive watches, but now I actually think I would use them and, by comparison, the Nike watch now seems a bit lacking.
…
I wrote all of the above a few days ago to help me sort out my opinions and make a decision. Today I was at Runner’s Edge in Farmingdale, NY (this is an awesome store, BTW, I’ve bought a ton of gear from them over the years) and they had both watches in stock. Despite the fact that I was leaning toward the Garmin watch, I decided that since my needs from a watch are actually quite simple, and the Nike watch was my first instinct anyway, I bought he Nike watch.
Well, I now hate the Nike watch.
First, I’ve always thought it was really cool-looking, but, in just a few hours, my opinion has changed drastically. I think it is quite ugly.
Second, it is uncomfortable and I have concerns about its quality. With the exception of the screen, it is made entirely of plastic. The wide plastic band is not comfortable against my skin. I tried wearing it for a while around the house and I can’t even conceive of wearing it out for a run. This watch reminds me a lot of a toy watch I had when I was a kid. I wore that around quite a bit and it didn’t take long for the plastic band to crack. I have to really bend, twist and battle with the Nike band to get it hooked and unhooked and I am not at all confident the stiff plastic material will hold up to this kind daily abuse.
I have the same concerns about the USB plug. I would not be comfortable doing this with the watch for fear of cracking the plastic USB connector over time. It takes a firm snap to expose/hide the connector at the end of the band and you can feel it bend slightly when you do this.
Finally, I’m not even sure this one works correctly, the Nike application seemed to be having some intermittent problems staying connected to it even when plugging it directly into a known-good USB port. At first, the Nike application even said it was corrupted and unusable, but that error message only appeared on its first attempt at communicating with it. Update: I think this problem did clear up after the firmware update.
