I know there have been a few posts about this - dcrainmaker’s review pretty much pushed me over the edge to get one of these - but I wanted to let everyone know that it can be purchased (without heartrate monitor) for 249.95 (free shipping, no tax) from timex-ironman.com. Note that this isn’t the official Timex site - timexironman.com - so I’m not really sure how they got the device before the September release.
I ordered it last week and have it in my hands now. I don’t work for them, but I figured saving 40-50 dollars in taxes and shipping from REI would be nice.
How do you like it and by chance do you have it paired to a powertap? Any feedback whether it be pro or con would be appreciated.
I don’t have a power meter on my bike yet, maybe someday when I have the money and need.
Initial thoughts: The bike mount that comes with the unit only works when facing one direction - parallel to the handle bars. Since I have clip on aero bars, I don’t have any real estate available on my road bike so I had to improvise a painted PVC pipe bracket to put between the aero bars. It cost me about 6 bucks and it looks pretty good, but I still wish it fit as well as my old Edge GPS.
I have a Garmin HR monitor and a Garmin Speed/Cadence Sensor on my bike. Both of them synced without issues. The HR was pretty sketchy on my ride this morning, reading 48 when I was on a tough hill. I think the battery is dying in the HR strap, so I’ll have to change it and make sure there aren’t any issues with the watch.
Another issue I came across was mostly my fault. I forgot to turn on “auto stop” on the timer, so when I parked my bike in the garage it kept going. The signal must have been pretty week because the track dances all over the place for an extra hour. TrainingPeaks doesn’t provide a way to edit the track that I know of, so it was a matter of opening the pwz file from the GPS on my PC, doing some math to find out exactly where I needed to stop the track, and deleting the appropriate data. Again, this is my fault for not hitting the stop button, but it would be nice if I could edit the GPS track more easily.
Other than the HR issues, I really like it so far. If you’re choosing between this and the 310XT, as I was, price is going to be the biggest difference. I don’t use the foot pod when I’m on a treadmill, so the lack of support for that was a non-factor. The 310xt also has a bit less “clutter” on the screen - but I actually like having the time of day always displayed. It’s big, but it’s not really that bad on my wrist. I’ll post again after I have a chance to take it for a run (recovering from injury).
If anyone has questions about it I’d be happy to answer them or try things out.