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Garmin Swim watch tracks your water workouts, we hit the pool (hands-on)
Garmin is adding a new product to its line-up of fitness watches, and this one is dedicated to workouts of the aquatic variety. The $150 Garmin Swim tracks your distance swum, average pace, workout time and more, and it uploads those stats to the web to help monitor your progress. Though it's meant to be a part of your exercise routine, the Garmin Swim watch looks like your average plastic digi-timepiece. The watch has six buttons with functions for viewing the time of day, scrolling through the menu options, controlling the timer, viewing the menu and entering workout mode. The setup takes some getting used to, but the illustrative icons on the watch helped us get into the rhythm quickly. Getting started with the Swim simply entails entering the size of your pool, with options to measure in yards or meters. Once that info is uploaded, you press the swim button and are ready to get splashing. We spent a solid half-hour doing laps, and the Swim duly recognized and recorded that we varied our strokes. Stopping the timer each time we took a break created a new interval for our workout, with a rundown of the elapsed time, distance in meters, number of strokes, type of stroke, total laps, average speed and calories burned. That's a lot of data to pore over, and Garmin lets you wirelessly upload it all to the Garmin Connect site. To do this, you have to pair the watch with your computer using a USB ANT stick: once it works, it's an efficient, easy way to review your workout, but it took us a few tries before our laptop recognized the watch. Garmin says the watch's battery will last a full year, which is plenty of time to log some serious laps. For more about the Swim, check out the press info past the break. %Gallery-159003%
Fitter, Happier: an eight-week exercise in using technology to help lose weight
For 27 years he ate what he wanted and avoided exercise like the plague. Can an arsenal of fitness gadgets make this human healthier in just eight weeks? From the snake oil salesman to the Thighmaster(TM), science and technology have promised the end of obesity, ill health and lethargy for centuries. Today, weight loss gadgetry is all around us, with affordable commercial systems available from Nintendo, Nike, Adidas and countless other manufacturers, all promising their technology will turn us into paragons of healthy virtue. How is it then, that for all of this, we live in an age where a quarter of the American population is obese? Do any of these seemingly endless health aids actually work? Will a $200 wristband or a $100 pedometer cause you to banish microwave dinners and saturated fats, take up regular exercise at the gym at least three days a week and sleep well with no bad dreams? Or has the health industry made technology another ineffective distraction that only provides you with a vague sense that you're doing something positive? Is the real answer what it's always been: go for a walk in the trees and eat your greens?
Garmin launches Fit App, motivates you to lose that freshman fifteen
Garmin, the company responsible for helping you navigate to the mall food court, is now hoping to help you work off those cheese fries with the introduction of its $.99 Fit App for Android and iPhone. The mobile app -- which works a lot like the Nike+ -- measures distance, time, calories and speed walked, run, cycled or traveled to capture your calorie burning journey. Connected users can also set goals, track their workouts and share results with others addicted to the burn. In addition to the app, Garmin is rolling out a $49.99 ANT+ adapter for iPhone, which monitors heart rate and cadence when paired with another optional sensor like a footpod. If you can't muster up the energy to try it out right now, we're sure you can at least head on past the break to check out the PR.
Tangerine! 1.0
I wrote about Tangerine! when it was just a wee beta, and before it had an exclamation mark in its name. Now, Tangerine! has reached 1.0 status (and is apparently very excited about it). This app allows you to make playlists based on the tempo and the beat intensity of music.Why would you want to do this? If you have ever been working out, jamming to your iPod in the zone and then had a slow song come on you know how that can throw you off. Tangerine! makes it easy to have high energy, or low energy, music to accompany your activities.A license costs $24.95, and there is a 15 day demo available.
Apple patents workout music matching
It seems that Apple may have plans for incorporating the iPod into your workout other than just the integration with Nike sneakers, as a newly released patent shows that the company has invented a method of adjusting the pace and style of music playback while you exercise. Incorporated into a model called the iPod Sport, perhaps, this technology would use an accelerometer to gauge the pace of a person's workout, and encourage them to "take it to the max" by either increasing the tempo of a particular song (though hopefully not to the point where all your tunes sound like Alvin and the Chipmunks) or automatically changing to a faster-paced track. This is all well and good, but how about throwing in some Bluetooth while you're at it, cause the wire dangling from that runner's head in the illustration has got to go.[Via Unwired View]
