Now people who have followed the Nike+ system will have noticed it seemed like a marriage made in heaven. You have a giant tech company partnering with a company who does fitness stuff well and partnering to make a system that makes it easy to track running. Now something that would normally help you track pace, distance, calories and stuff like that is going to cost you quite a bit of money because it's usually from a company that does it specifically and they'll milk you for it.
Enter the Nike+ iPod system. Now it first started off as a chip and a receive for the iPod Nano and it did basic things like tracking what I talked about. You would then plug it into your computer and it'd transfer this stuff over onto the computer and you could keep track of it. Then it become better with iPod touch integration in the 2nd gen version of it. Then came along the iPhone 3GS having built in native support for it. It seemed like a brilliant idea. Buy a 25 dollar chip and if you had the required hardware (iPod or an iPod with the receiver) you could go running, listen to your music and track your runs.
I actually loved this system because it was a basic system, nothing fancy, and with that it just worked. Start a workout, go run, finish run, upload data. You'd even get someone who would tell you how far you've run, or once you're past the halfway point, how much more you have left to run. If you pressed the "home" button, it'd tell you all your metrics, like how fast you're running, how far you're run and how long you've run. You'd even get someone to congratulate you when you broke a personal record, such as words of encouragement from Lance Armstrong, some USTAF sprinters, so all in all a pretty cool little app that was pretty cheap. Best of all it didn't even require that you use Nike shoes for it to work, and that was the best part.
But skip forward a few years and many many workouts (Hundreds) and it's come a very long way. It's now been updated tons, there's tons of little features, a new UI and the system isn't quite what it used to be anymore. I miss the simpleness of the old system where it just worked. A big part of this system is the online portion where you can have coaching and what not, but I'll cover that in a later review because as far as I'm concerned, that still works. But coming back to the iPod version, for some reason after you pause the workout and you come back to it, Nike/Apple have decided that it would be a good idea to dim your music so you have to crank it back up to get it back to pre-pause levels. And then when your nice announcer comes on to give you cues, you will bleed from your ear drums because they shout at you because you had to turn up the volume to hear the music. Other thing is the cues for some reason seem to have disappeared sometimes, which as runners we like hearing or seeing how far we've run. The runs don't always sync up with the computer, they disappear from iPod. Sometimes the sensor will keep on disappearing and then it'll be like "workout paused". So all in all it's a giant pain in the ass.
It's unfortunate that something that I came to love and actually helped bring me into running and love it has fallen from my good graces because the system is no longer the simple press start and go system that I came to love. It also looks like Apple and Nike may no longer be in such great terms that they used to be. Nike's made a wristband version which is similar to the iPod system but without the music. They've made an app that uses the GPS in the iPhone instead, and they've also got a GPS watch that should be coming out soon, done in collaboration with TomTom. So with that it looks like while it was what brought me into running and I'm thankful for that, it's not the same as it used to be. It seems like a curse of everything that gets good, companies feel the need to change stuff up and more often than not screw it all up. So with that, time to look for a new running partner (human and gadget wise) and looks like maybe something that's a wee bit more purpose built.
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