My Nike+iPod review

Many of you know by now that I received a huge combination present for my birthday from a set of people too numerous to name (well, I could name them all, but it'd take too much effort to come up with amusing blog names). Said gift consisted of an iPod Nano, a Nike iPod Nano armband, the Nike+iPod Sport Kit, and a gift certificate for some shoes (which I used to purchase a pair of Nike+ shoes). Basically all of my ranting about the gadgetness of this rubbed off and people got sick of it and just got me everything. Furthermore, my sister threw in a Puma jacket for good measure. Now I'm really out of excuses.

My first test run involved dragging everything across the country to New Jersey, and then doing some short sessions on the treadmill in my effort to avoid the east coast humidity, which I have managed to do for the last 9 years or so. The first thing I discovered is that the sensor that goes in your shoe starts off as being on, and you're supposed to turn it off by using a pen to press a tiny button for 3 sec. Oh, and the instruction book says that you are supposed to turn it off on the plane. Hmm.

Getting it setup was really quite easy, I just dropped the sensor into the shoe, plugged the receiver into the iPod Nano, and told it I wanted to do a 3 mile run. I programmed in my approximate weight for calorie-counting purposes, and then it asked me to walk around a bit to link with the sensor.

I set the treadmill for a medium pace and then started off, and after the first half mile I could tell that the distance calculations on the iPod were a bit off. When you set it for a distance goal, it will give you audible cues every now and then, and in this case the iPod claimed that I had run the first half mile when the treadmill said it was only about 0.45. After finishing the full 3 miles, it was clear that it was off by about 8-10%, which is fairly significant but apparently within the estimated range. There is a decent FAQ which covers most questions gadgeteers will have about this.

Upon returning home, my first action was to head to the track and calibrate the system to my stride. They allow calibration to both a run and a walk speed, and so I did both around a quarter-mile lap. After calibrating, the distance calculations seemed rock solid (at least around the track again, since it's the only place I can run where I really know how far I'm going).

Running with the whole setup is pretty fun since you can push a button at any time to get distance/time/pace, but even better than that is the ability to sync your runs to a site to track your progress. Here is some idea of what the Nike+ site looks like, it's actually a pretty nice UI (though Nyanko may have some things to say about that) with decent functionality.


This is the "My Runs" section, and you can mouseover each session to see the summary for that, then click to get details, like this:


Here you can see your pace through the whole run, with mouseover details at milestones. Note the huge dropoff in pace at the end here, this was my first run and I thought I had ended the workout already and started walking to cooldown. The screen (and I think the voice too) always says "Press Menu to end your workout" when in fact they mean "Press Menu and then scroll to the End Workout option and press the center button to end your workout."

No laughing at my small distance/slow pace runs, at least not yet. When I haven't improved in a few months then you can laugh. I think I've now fulfilled my blog quota for the next 12.4 weeks with this one.