Nike+ SportWatch GPS Powered by TomTom (Black)

I love this watch. I would give it 4.5 stars if I could, but I think this watch is closer to five stars than 4. The watch is slim and stylish enough to use as an everyday watch, but I chose not to to prevent wear-and-tear. The main piece of information you must know about this watch is IT WAS BUILT FOR ONE PURPOSE AND ONE PURPOSE ONLY - TO TRACK YOU RUNNING. I use this watch with the Nike+ footpod and Polar Wearlink for Nike+. NOTE: You must use the Wearlink designed for Nike+.  Polar Wearlink + Transmitter Nike Plus PROS:- Links very quickly with satellites. I have never had a satellite link problem unless I had not synched the watch with my computer in over 24 hours. To prevent this, I plug the watch into my computer the night before I plan on running.- Easy to read numbers- Buttons easy to operate, even with gloves- Accurate tracking of my runs- Can use with footpod only. Watch self-calibrates footpod with GPS.CONS:- Stuck with one main display unless it is changed via computer. It would be great if there were presets that would allow changing the main display based on the type of run you are doing.- When putting on the watch, the band coming together tends to pinch my skin.- I still have not figured out the backlight. Supposed to just be able to tap the screen, but I see the backlight randomly turning on.Even with the CONs, this watch is very capable. You will not be disappointed as long as you regularly synch the watch with your computer.

I've been a long distance runner for around seven years. I have logged nearly twelve thousand miles. Switching to the sportwatch from the nike band was a huge improvement, and I am an airhead for not thinking of switching far earlier. It shows your elevation changes during your run, displays your rate, pace, mileage, route. It's awesome. Plus the nike page is so interactive, and so well integrated, connected; I mean, with facebook and all these sweet little tools it has. Plus logging your calendar with goals and ranking your mileage. It is definitely much more than a watch to me.Anybody who is looking to change their life, maybe lose weight, or get healthy or just get in serious shape, I can't recommend it enough. For the money, it is really worth every penny.One additional note, the usb which connects this to my computer sometimes doesn't register the device. I should probably contact Nike about this. It doesn't diminish any feelings I have for the device or the recommendation I am giving to all out there. Just an observation.

Brief Introduction:----------------------I purchased this watch from Amazon back in June 2012. From the 1.5 years that I owned the watch, I've put in a little over 2,000 miles. I've ran about 600 miles running outside using the GPS and 1,400 miles running on treadmill.My Thoughts:------------------Up until December 2013, I love the watch and it served its purpose well. I thought I would be able to use this watch for at least another few years. I’m not a gadget freak, so I generally won’t upgrade or change tech stuff unless I absolutely need to.This watch is not very expensive (mid-range) for a GPS running watch. Obviously, you cannot compare this to a more advanced (and more expensive) dedicated running watches with detailed running analytic that can potentially help improve your speed and/or reach your goals, This watch is designed to simply track your mileage and pace for both indoors (foot pod) and outdoors (gps). For me, it served more as a motivation to push myself to run more or run faster than previous months. It's more of a watch to improve your active lifestyle and not really a watch for dedicated competitive runners.Some people hate the NikePlus website because it's flash base and occasional slowness issues. However, I actually like the website because it's visually pleasing to the eye, and it provides me with enough information to see how I've improved over time and help motivate me. It also provides me with a way to create new goals and I get "trophies" for my accomplishments. I could easily see how I'm doing in comparison vs my friends, the entire Nike+ community, and men my age. Finally, Nike Plus website provides you with milestones for you to reach, which is sort of like in martial arts, you have different color belts. For Nike Plus, you have yellow, orange, green, blue, purple, black, and volt. You'll reach different color belts when you hit a certain mileage. At 2,000 miles, I'm at purple belt. I'm about 1,000 away from black belt. For advanced runners, these little things may not mean much, but for me they work and get me motivated.Issues:------------------Starting from early last month (Dec 2013), I've been having some issues. It started off as a minor issue and then grew to become annoying and now just frustrating.Last year, I had a goal to reach 1,000 miles for the year. For one of my longer (10 miles) runs, Nike Plus couldn't sync with my watch and hence the run was unrecorded. Since I was so close to reaching my goal, I contacted Nike support team to have them address the issue. They were very quick to manually add that run to my stats. Things were fine for another week and then it happened again and I contacted Nike support team again. It started to get annoying when I started to contact the support team once or twice a week to have them sync my runs. They indicated that they were in the process of upgrading the server and that I wouldn't experience the issues anymore once the new servers were in place.It started to get frustrating the past two weeks where the synchronization became very erratic. There were some runs that Nike Plus counted four times and there were some runs that Nike Plus ignored. I had communicated with Nike support team a few times a week to the point where I started to annoy myself. Finally, the foot pod started to become very inaccurate. I typically run at a pace of 7'30", but the foot pod/watch was clocking me at around 8'40". I guess the foot pod is starting to die, but in theory, it should last for 1,000 hours and I'm no where even near that number. I’ve tried calibrating the foot pod outdoors in the frigid January temperature twice and it still had issues. It seems like for runs shorter than 20 minutes, they’ll be slightly off. However, the longer I run, the more inaccurate the foot pod becomes.In conclusion, I would have loved to keep this watch for a few more years. However, with the constant frustration I have to deal with from both the hardware and software side, I've decided to switch to a Garmin.One thing to note, there's no legal way for you to get your Nike running stats off the NikePlus website, so they essentially have your stats as "hostage". Once you leave the Nike+ community, you'll lose your running data unless you can go through the backend and extract the historical data. Garmin allows you to import/export the data as you wish.