Okay, I'll just spill it right now--I love it!
Is it perfect-No, but it is pretty close.
I was actually REALLY hard on it in my review on Amazon, but only for one reason, the biggest fault this watch has is that it is VERY hard to read in dim light (read that as normal house lighting unless the watch face is directly in line with a turned on lamp, even in the middle of the day). Even then I might not have been so hard on it except for the fact that on the Amazon page, the picture of the product showed the "newer" version (I found out about the versions through a little research after-the-fact) with a white background and black readout. What I received was a watch with the black background and gray readout, the initial version of the watch. The newer black on white version is easier to read (at least it is reported to be). So I was miffed about that.
However, when it comes right down to actual function, I LOVE this watch. It really is pretty cool. It tracks steps reasonably well in the house (there may be a few steps it doesn't pick up, and it picks up when I roll in a chair while working, but I figure pretty much those two instances kind of cancel each other out). It picks up steps when actually walking outside, shopping, or regular walking around the house quite well.
The calorie burn counter is pretty neat too. I can't help thinking it is a little overly optimistic, but it is supposed to be based on your stats (you can add your sex, age by birthday and current weight in to help it base it's BMR on) and you are supposed to track your heart rate regularly, which it also uses to judge added caloric burn.
Not only does it track steps, it automatically calculates daily mileage, and both steps and miles can be separately calculated during workouts that are also added into daily miles and steps.
Of all of the tracking functions, the sleep one is the only one I find kind of frustrating. Either sleep is one illusive thing for me, or it over does the tracking of tossing and turning, or moving around during sleep. I was in bed for 9 hours last night, and I know it didn't take long for me to "lights out." I'd give a half hour to getting to sleep, but I really don't even think it was that long. I did get up twice to go to the bathroom... old bladders suck, lol, but I went right back to sleep... not according to my tracker though. According to it I only got 4.5 hours of sleep. That's last night. Some nights it says I've gotten about 7.5 hours, some in between the 4 and 7 hour mark, it just depends I guess on how much my arm moves when I'm sleeping. I must really flail around in bed more than I thought (sorry Bob, I've always known you put up with a lot with my RLS but I must have been really beating the crap out of you at night for the last 33 years.)
The heart rate monitor is a fingertip pulse button, and it works really, really well. It's kind of fun to watch the "EKG" line run while you take your pulse, lol. What I really love is all of the features, including the heart monitor work great IN THE POOL. The band is secure, and stays on even during the most rigorous strokes, and I can keep track of my heart rate to get a good idea of how well I am doing in intensity.
All of the functions: sleep, miles, calories and steps have a bar graph available for comparing hourly, daily and monthly totals.
I hope that helped anyone who is interested in the fitness watch. It is as reliable as any, I do not use the phone app so I can't report on how well that works, my phone isn't good enough to do it. I don't really miss it though. I probably wouldn't use that much anyway.
I got my LifeTrak Zone C410 for about $75 from Amazon, so it was a very reasonably priced fitness monitor compared to Fitbit and other similar types of watches. It also does have, by the way, a time and date readout on the face, lol, so it is also a watch. I like the looks of it better than the band style Fitbit type monitors as well.
No comments:
Post a Comment