Nike and Tom Tom are both bosses in their respective industries. And now they’ve come together to create a GPS sports training watch that I’ve recently been playing with.

From the outset the news is good. Setup and understanding of this device is idiot-easy. Simply turn the rechargable watch on and wait for it to connect to the GPS sattelites in tech heaven, where I believe all the tech that makes our lives better comes from. Things like the Cloud and such.

If you’re excercising indoors, they’ve provided a shoe pod that you slip into your tekkie and it feeds the info to the watch for you.

Obviously this watch is built with runners in mind, something that becomes clear once you start cycling through the data it collects. Pace, Avg Speed, Time, Distance and calories brunt.

Post-workout, you slip the watch (which has a neatly hidden USB drive in the strap) in to your PC or MAC and download your workout. Obviously this means a 3rd-party software and in this case it’s the Nike+ website http://nikeplus.nike.com/ which like everything these days includes access to a social network with people to follow and share with and the ability to boast to your friends on FB and Twitter that you were out this morning having a jog while they were sleeping in bed.

The community is slick and minimilistic. And the good news is that it has a use beyond it’s social networking abilities, it’s just a home base for you to store your workouts, see the route’s you’ve run and record how you’re doing. Not everything needs to be shared with your friends.

It’s worth pointing out that this device is not the tip of the Nike workout-gear spear. That honor belongs to their intelligent Fuel Band which uses a sports-tested accelerometer to measure your activity (all-day if you desire) and calculate it in a magical measurement called Nike Fuel.

But that doesn’t mean that you’re getting a piece of rubbish in the Nike+ sports watch. It’s rugged as a toddlers teething-toy, fits comfortably on the hand and isn’t bulky enough to be troublesome. And if you wanted to, I don’t see why you couldn’t wear this watch all day…if you want people to ask you constantly how your run was this morning.

The Nike+ Sports Watch doesn’t come cheap though, and those who want that piece of equipment to make them feel like they’re reaching their full potential are going to have to shell out for it. R1 900, and that’s a hell of a lot for something that may last you from January 1st to January 31st. Every year though, so there’s that.

But, and this is a big one from someone who hasn’t worn a watch since Std 8: there is another way.

Upon learning that my review was over and the watch would have to be passed on to the next journalist, I’ll admit I was disappointed. I had become accustomed to knowing how long my usual route had taken me instead of just patting myself on the back regradless of how well I’d run. And so I played with the idea of buying a Nike+ watch. Until I discovered the RunKeeper app on the iPhone.

The RunKeeper app is free to download and use as a basic subcriber, it tosses you into an international running community and gives you pretty much the same feedback as the Nike+ Sports Watch does. The app is open while you run, so it’ll blurt out instructions while your jogging to tell you to speed up or take a walk, depending on what training program you’ve selected. All this while your chosen playlist plays off your device. Nifty, but there are some downsides, some of which make the money for the Nike+ watch worth it.

Firstly, you have to jog everywhere with your iPhone or iPod Touch on you. That’s a lot more inconvenient than just wearing a watch on your wrist and a lot more expensive too.

There’s also the differences between the online presence of the two services. The Nike+ community is well designed, crisp and known as the “largest running school in the world”. The RunKeeper site on the other hand is populated by one-time sign-ups, has quite a limitation of what pre-programmed workouts you can choose from (in FREE mode) and is riddled with uncomplete information.

Still it’s nice to know you’re not paying. If you were you’d be in danger of having to actually use the bloody thing.

Get it: R1 900
From: www.nike.co.za