It seems as if everyone has a fitness tracker—whether you’re using your phone, watch, or other body accessories. The challenge comes in deciding what you need in a fitness tracker, and perhaps one can help you avoid carrying a lot of extra stuff around.
The TomTom Spark Cardio + Music watch combines: activity tracking, where you can capture steps, heart rate, active minutes and calories burned; GPS tracking to track your time, pace and distance; sleep tracking; goal setting; audio performance feedback; and a multisport mode, so you can train in run, bike, swim, gym and treadmill modes. On top of that, it allows you to store more than 500 songs (depending on size of files), so you don’t have to bring your phone along, too.
In addition to all that, the watch has a large monochrome display, a lightweight design, and good battery life. If you’re looking to seamlessly incorporate music into your workout, it’s worth a try, so you can ditch the added weight of your phone, as well as the headphones that seems to get tangled every few minutes.
Real-time information allows you to see what’s happening while you’re working out, hiking, biking, or running. Not later, or when you have to sync your watch to some app.
You can store up to 3GB of music (which, as I mentioned above, can number in the 500ish song arena, depending on the file size), allowing you to transfer playlists from iTunes and Windows Media Player and listen to your favorite music from your wrist.
At first, the action of adding music was cumbersome for me, but once I got the hang of it, it became easier. Additionally, I had some problems getting the GPS to lock in immediately, but I’m having fewer issues as time goes on using the watch.
The TomTom Spark Cardio + Music watch comes in black, Shocking Blue, and Sky Captain/Scuba Blue and lists for $199 on the TomTom site. It’s also available at Amazon.