Nike Minus

I apologize to all of you that may have purchased the Nike + Sports Watch or any of this progeny prior to reading this review.  I have used my Nike + Sports Watch for nearly two years now and I have being meaning to write a review since the first time I used it.

As an avid runner and cyclist, I was excited to get the Watch primarily for its GPS feature.  At the time it was one of only a small number of watches so equipped.  While I did some research prior to purchasing the watch, nothing prepared me for the faulty design.  Having owned several Polar brand watches equipped with heart rate monitors it caught my attention that the Nike + was paired with a Polar brand transmitter.  One of Nike’s first “sports watches” came with its own off-brand heart rate monitor that was not very accurate.  What I discovered was that Nike chose for this watch, for whatever reason (generally, the bad decisions are related to costs.  Read:  increase profits), to use an older model transmitter no longer used by Polar.

The issue with transmitter is two-fold.  First, the transmitter is un-necessarily bulky.  The newer models of this transmitter, all available when this model of Nike was introduced, are all sleeker, fit closer to the body, fit more tightly to the skin, are more comfortable to wear and easier to clean and maintain.  Additionally, the older model employs a small medal hasp to fasten the transmitter strap together for use around your body.  However, if the hasp breaks or is lost the transmitter is rendered useless.  This happened to me almost immediately.  When I called Nike they said they do not supply “replacement” parts.  As a result, my $300 watch was useless because of a $.03 metal hasp – which cannot be replaced.  Ironically, this design flaw had already been corrected by Polar.  The only explanation for using this old, poorly designed transmitter by Nike when the newer, less problematic transmitter was already available to them had to have been cost saving.  A poor decision I submit, as I, and I can only assume many others, replaced the entire watch with a better designed competitor’s model rather than purchase a replacement transmitter when the cheap metal hasp was broken or lost.

The decision to replace the entire watch was made that much easier when you look at the next significant

design flaw.  The first thing I noticed when I took my shiny new Nike + watch out of the box in which it arrived was the short watch band.  When I put it on it fastened around my wrist using the last holes in the band.  And I have an average-sized wrist.  Anyone with even a fractionally larger wrist than I could not wear the watch at all.  How hard would it have been to walk around the Nike cubical farm and measure a few of the wrists of the male employees before finalizing the watch band’s length.  Instead, it appears, they chose the wrist models most convenient to them: five or six year-old Asian sweat laborers.  As a consequence, should my wrist get even the tiniest bit larger, due to, say, my improved fitness – the motivation of which lead me to buy this “fitness enhancing” product in the first place, I would not be able to wear the watch.  Or, heaven forbid that I might want to wear the watch over a long sleeved shirt of jacket while running or cycling.

Finally, the watch does not provide for “sessions.”  For example, I might want to track my walking sessions separately from my running sessions to preclude the watering down of the data gathered during the sessions.  As it is, I can either track everything and have all the data averaged together, essentially making all the data irrelevant and inaccurate or track only one type of exercise and forget the others.  My ten-year old $15 Timex could track multiple training sessions, as well as laps and a hand full of other running-oriented function.  Surely, this could not have been that expensive of a feature and would have made the Nike + an actual, effective tool for monitoring fitness.

While the display is large and easy to read, the information presented is either displayed on the smaller upper portion of the screen or below on the bigger larger portion of the screen.  However, one cannot toggle between them.  Really?  On any given run for example, one might be more concerned about elapsed time than one’s heart rate.  Or one might be more interested in one’s pace rather than the distance covered.  With the powerful and flexible Nike +, you must first choose your display profile on your computer – before you leave for your run and it cannot be changed during the activity.  This design mess is made that much more limiting if you do not have access to a computer in between activities, like when you are on vacation or away for a weekend.

For those of you that are considering a sports watch with a GPS feature, check out almost any other product.  The Nike + system is so poorly designed and so overly priced you could easily find a superior product entirely by random choice.