Heads up!!! Here’s your massive holiday sports tech deals list! This includes the Garmin Epix for just $419, the Apple AirTag 4-Pack for just $69, the GoPro Hero 12 Black for $249, (or the brand new Hero 13 or $299!) and plenty more! Go check out the full list of 100+ deals here!
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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!
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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 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.
With all the discounts etc only $150 more for the 810 over the 500 seems nice, but with Garmin being kinda evil (charging for API) and incompetent (crappy GC2 rollout) I’m going to take a pass for now…
$5,000 fee for an APi isn’t too much? I hope tapiriik won’t stop working.
I would be amazed if the likes of Tapiriik survive this fee. You are likely though to see the larger platforms such as strava and sporttracks partnering with Garmin and provide native syncing. There will be no need for a middle-man like Tapiriik. A shame for those guys who have shown great innovation in their services, but they just won’t survive the consolidation of larger players.
Ray – I will be interested in your opinion on the API costs. My 2 cents; I am struggling to see how having big name software partnerships cannot also coexist with with smaller companies and hobbyists using the tiered approach that connectstats proposes. I don;t see how they are mutually exclusive. I like Garmin and have their equipment, but they are seriously getting hit harder and harder (as you well know)) by smartphones, new form factors, and online platforms like strava. The real innovation is done by small companies and Garmin’s position by putting a $5K bill for every innovator stifles innovation and the future of the business.It also shows us what they are really scared of.
I completely agree. I fail to see why they can’t deliver a lower free tier, with API limits based on queries. This is entirely commonplace in the industry. The way I see it, if companies smaller than Garmin can do it that way (the rest of the fitness tech industry, some only a few people), and if companies larger than Garmin can do it (see: the rest of the non-fitness tech industry, ala Google, etc…) – than certainly Garmin can do it. End of story, full stop.
$5000 is too much for a web api like this. This will completely knock out the hobbyist developer where a lot of the current apps started. It’s not clear what their real motivation here. Given the number of developers likely to be willing to pay this much, they aren’t likely to have a ton of takers so they won’t be making much.
Like other posters I don’t really get the a Garmin stance in all this.
IMO the whole recent round of updates across the fitness range has been a disaster, both technically and as a PR exercise. You’d think given all the new players in the market place they’d want to keep existing customers AND encourage others to develop for their platform.
I’m another who’s not gonna be spending any more money with garmin until the smoke clears (and I’ve a drawer full of garmin gear – mainly thanks to your pesky reviews!)
…….. And something you might have missed. The truly excellent veloviewer site have released a pebble app this week. Worth looking at.
Both of those kickstarter projects look interesting – but like you Ray, I’m ‘OFF’ of both Kickstarter and Indigogo as I’ve been burned too many times. I’m happy to support early technology companies – but there’s no feedback loop and a couple of things have come up short…
thus I’ll save the money and just buy stuff that works. Lactate threshold is certainly useful and an interesting dynamic if someone could get it working – can’t wait to see Ray’s review of that when it comes out and is actually working!
Another crowdfunding one you may or may not have seen:
link to indiegogo.com
Sounds a bit dicey to me, but then so do a lot of the crowdfunding pitches lately. Way too many promises, way too little delivery. Frankly even the “successes” have mostly been underwhelming at best, IMHO.
I know the IOS 7.1 update is this week, but a heads up, Apple seem to have changed how BLE works. Some BLE devices now appear in the Devices list in the Settings app – Viiiiva, but not my Fitbit One. They must have also changed the API, as a number of my apps wont recognise my Viiiiva HR strap anymore. 4iiii, Wahoo Fitness, Strava & Cyclemeter apps still work with the Viiiiva, but none of the HRV apps recognise the HR device i.e. ithlete, HRV+, HRV4Training, Sweetbeat, etc. The Fitbit app still works with the One.
Does anyone know if this is resolved? I have avoided the 7.1 update until I heard more information. But I can’t even find any confirmation that this is actually a problem.
Both kickstarts seem wrong. The lactate threshold one, Seems like a cheaper version of the moxy sensor which would be good but doesn’t seem like it ccan do what moxy can. Why don’t they use the existing muscle oxygen Ant+ profile? Why is it measuring the calf muscle, that’s not the one limiting performance? They say it talks to garmin watches, but how? What do those devices see? too many questions
The pedals, fast in out, great, and maybe great for mountain biking. But how stable are they is it only interfaces with the small cleat so can the shoe rock on them? May not matter for mountain biking, but long road rides? You may say Egg beater pedals have the same issue, but then don’t as they are designed for the part of the pedal on either side of the cleat to make contact with the shoe to take some of the load and make it more stable. SPD, those have a largish flat area the cleat sits on and is pressed onto
Hi Eli. Dustin here from BSX Athletics. I just wanted to say I appreciate your contribution to the conversation and healthy skepticism of our Kickstarter campaign. I thought I’d see what I can do to resolve your concerns and answer what outstanding questions you have.
BSX Insight is the first-ever wearable lactate threshold sensor. Similar to other optical techniques, it uses LEDs to shine light into the exercising muscle and then record the signal that returns. Depending on the physical and chemical properties of that tissue, the signal is distorted along its path. These distortions (also known as absorption spectra) are what contain the information we are able to process afterwards. You mentioned Moxy which does something very similar. BSX has done 3 things which makes it radically different from existing technologies though. 1) It has perfected both the front end electronics as well as the post processing intelligence to do this with much higher quality and exponentially lower cost than other comparables, 2) it has taken the next logical step that many ‘diagnostic’ tools always seem to miss and makes it both simple and actionable (e.g. measurement of LT-the gold standard in performance measurements and the real-time maintenance of training zones), 3) it includes both lactate threshold PLUS heart rate, cadence, pace/speed, and calories wrapped into a single device to minimize the technological burden on the end user which keeps so many ‘wearable’ devices from actually being worn.
Our device uses surrogate sampling techniques. The concept of measuring surrogate markers to correlate with biologic events/conditions is common practice. In medicine we use surrogate markers all the time to measure things we otherwise couldn’t measure and /or quantify. When we want to know how the kidney is functioning we measure creatinine instead; when we want to assess liver health and/or toxicity we look at the transaminases. By measuring surrogates of lactate we are simply applying the same rigor a physician would use to help him/her understand the body system of their primary interest in a manner that overcomes many of the traditional limitations to blood-based lactate testing.
BSX Insight takes the many variables it records to build a real-time composite profile for that athlete. We have developed novel algorithms that use proprietary machine learning techniques to deliver a robust predictor (True Positive Rate > 0.95) of lactate threshold. What we mean by this, is that across all athletes in our sample population we were able to identify the lactate threshold event using Insight with 5% or less deviation from what independent professional assessment determined it to be using traditional blood sampling methods. Those errors measurements essentially represent the percent of deviation from what the blood tests determined an LT to be, and what Insight determined them to be. Current efforts are investigating how much of this error is due to true inaccuracies in Insight’s data collection and/or algorithms, vs how much is due to the increased resolution that Insight has over traditional measurements and therefore represents an overall improvement in accuracy.
I would love the continue the conversation with you either here, or I’m also happy to jump on a call and discuss in person if it helps.
As always Ray, thanks for all you do in the endurance community and encouraging the ‘tough’ conversations. I’m a huge fan!
Dustin Freckleton, MD
President, BSX Athletics
Thanks for the response. Sent you an email as followup
Just to add – the Endomondo update for Android this week brought a slew of really useful features, including support for BTLE sensors and ANT+ sensors through USB OTG, the latter of which is pretty much for first for the front line of fitness apps for android. They’ve also added a lock screen widget, which means that you can get running data on screen without the fear of accidentally pausing the run, which is a really neat little feature.
Looking forward to Strava et al adding similar features soon – ANT+ support on Android really is a bit dismal.
Thanks for the tip Matt! I’ve had the ability to plug my Suunto dongle into my phone for a while now, with nowhere to collect the data.
A big update for Endomondo and nice to see a way to capture ANT+ on Android!
Ray,
Have you looked at the indiegogo for this GoBe health monitor? Looks pretty interesting. Apparently it can measure real time caloric intake via impedance sensor. link to indiegogo.com
Interesting although I am pretty skeptical.
Yeah, I’m pretty skeptical, especially the timelines seem pretty near-term with little external media coverage with an actual device. I did back it this morning, but, I’d be hesitant to recommend others do as well.
just gonna wait on the review, and if it works as advertised buy it.
currently sounds too good to be true
Garmin typically discounts/offers rebates on older products before releasing a newer one. Is there a update to the 810 in the works for next 12 months??
For those worried that the new Garmin policy will kill 3rd party apps…I propose that Garmin is not stupid in the sense that they don’t know that. I think that’s their intent. Garmin probably listened to a bunch of MBAs (like me) who reinforced fears that 3rd party access equals loss of control of the data, and therefore loss of control of the customer. So Garmin thinks they are preserving their ownership of the customer with this move.
Not for one second do I agree with Garmin, but I think Garmin knows full well they will kill apps with this approach. Expect the fee to go up if enough don’t go under. Expect “shifting sands” of API specs to keep 3rd parties off guard and a step behind. Ironically, I think Garmin just created an opening for competitors to take Garmin’s customers with a smarter data and app approach, making their worst fear come true.
Well Said, nicely written – Garmin has never been good about presenting and analyzing data. Just look at Garmin Connect. Their specialty and what makes them the lead is their hardware. But now they are trying to wall off their data….and as a result, people will buy their hardware less…or at least hold off,..because the API price is an indicator that Garmin does not feel confident about their position in the market if they are fending off innovation. If Garmin wants to survive they need to innovate their hardware and stop focusing on data.
There is some famous quote about malice and stupidity I can’t recall which seems a bit appropriate (stupidity is FAR to harsh, Garmin are not stupid by any means)…
I personally feel Garmin’s intentions are in the right place – they have a long history of being very pro-customer. And former staff I spoke to mention this. Hopefully it still holds true.
I think they are simply feeling cost pressure right now. Consider the division leads that see a $millions bill every quarter for staff, hosting, support, etc. And every Q4 their question probably goes something like “how is this helping us sell watches again?”
Being one of the early innovators in this space means they probably have a lot of technological legacy and data. It costs a lot! Somebody like Suunto or Polar can pop up a website using the latest and greatest tech, not worry about the billions of hours of data (yet!). Modern scaling and caching tech. No problem. Everything has been solved now pretty much. Not true in 2007. I’m sure there are lots of crusty old motionbased.com code hanging around in GC that nobody knows what it does. Pity the college grad who has to unravel that. LOL.
Incidentally Garmin are not alone in this… read the blog posts and look at the release delays of another major competitor in this space you can tell they are struggling with legacy weight. (I won’t name them but it rhymes with “naming geeks”… figure it out)
Aaron, I think that you’re referring to Hanlon’s razor: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
GPS bike tracker:
link to kickstarter.com
Smart Jacket: (lights on jacket and the lights can change based on app and/or heart rate)
link to kickstarter.com
Yeah, I was looking at that (bike tracker) a few weeks ago. My concern is that it seems overly complex, and a bit large as well. I’m really hoping the BikeSpike project pans out. Speaking of them…haven’t heard from them in a while now. :-/
I’m looking for an android phone and one of the major features for me is to use it to replace occasionally my 310xt.
Although I know you’re not into the mobile phone industry, it would be nice to have a post about the best choices: connectivity, water resistance, shock, cases availability, etc.
Also, sorry for the double post on the giveaway it was not intended.
I think the S5 is probably one to look at, since it has ANT+ as well as Bluetooth Smart. Same goes for the new Sony phones too. Those (and the Samsung’s) have a variant of waterproofing. Check out my MWC posts from about two weeks ago for more details.
And no worries about double-posts. I’ll get them all cleaned up before the giveaway.