This morning I found two new gadgets in my RSS feeds.
The first is the H2O Audio SV i700 MP3 player. The idea is that it plays MP3s underwater... certainly something any swimmer has considered while doing lap after lap while staring at the line on the bottom of the pool. Of course, as Paul said a while back, one of the great things about swimming is the isolation and peaceful silence. And I do seem to guage my speed via auditory whooshing cues. But having an MP3 player every now and then might be cool. Available at the end of September 04.
The second device is the Suunto T6, a training watch (via active.com's newsletter). It has the basics like heart rate, bike speed and running speed. I didn't see cadence or power. Where they go off the deepend is with their claims of VO2 analysis. They claim to be able to tell me how much oxygen I'm using. And hor much respiration I'm doing. The pic of the Suunto T6 has a little gizmo coming out of it that looks like a pulse oximeter, but I doubt it is. Pulse oximeters have become critical to what anestesiologists do. Around the year 2000 I read reports of them putting one on Everest climbers. I can't help believe that this sort of data would be helpful to training. That said, I think that Suunto is not measuring directly... they're calculating off of heart rate. I come to this conclusion in two ways. First, they never say that they have a sensor to measure it directly. If they did I have to believe they'd mention it... it'd be new and novel. Second, they put up some scientific references that point to heart-rate-based inferrence of VO2 data. Their marketing materials are slick... almost too slick. And they oversimplify the training process into nice little "overtrained" and "undertrained" columns. While the data sounds nice, I'm skeptical on this thing. It looks like they're taking some base heart rate data and wrapping it with a lot of mathematical equations and fancy user interface. Which isn't to say I wouldn't love to play with one. I'm just skeptical. Available now, although I couldn't find it on any retailer websites.
Sunday, February 7, 2010