TomTom, Your Multi-Sport GPS Watch is Unfinished!

Although the overall wearables market, according to Reportlinker, as reported recently by MarketWatch, “will grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 43.4% from around $5 billion forecast for 2013 to $9.2 billion in 2014 and more than $30.2 billion forecast for 2018.” , the sport watches have been around for a long time now. My old Garmin Forerunner 305 finally died after close to 8 years of constant use!  However, because of the heated wearables market, the sports watch products need to really compete in this new era, and need to produce well designed and thought out products in order to either retain old customers or attract new ones. I recently bought the TomTom Multi-Sport with the heart rate monitor (the chest strap kind). I train for triathlons, and while I was waiting for my production ready Bia, which was not quite ready yet (I’ve been a loyal supporter and field tester), I needed a replacement for my old Garmin. TomTom has been a real disappointment, and I really wanted it to do the job! Competition is a good thing! In case of the TomTom, unfortunately, the Cons outweigh the Pros! I would not recommend this to any of my triathlon friends! It’s like the TomTom product management got just so far, and then quit and shipped it with bunch of features just not fully baked! Pros:

1. Good visibility display and intuitive way to go from one sport to the next on the watch. User Interface is well thought out.
2. Easy bike mount. I like how you can take it off the wrist band and easily put on the bike and then back on the wrist. Well designed. The wrist strap is also comfortable.
3. Quick satellite connection, don’t need to wait forever
4. Easily connects and transfers data from watch to MySports TomTom smart phone app!
5. Nice integration with MapMyFitness – automatically transfers my works out from TomTom app.
6. Good battery life! Lasts for a very long time!

Cons:

1. Swimming – no GPS tracking in open water, so as a triathlete, this is really disappointing. I swim in the ocean, and this is a must have. I didn’t even think about checking before purchasing, because if it tracks running and biking, why would it NOT track swimming?
2. Swimming again – it counts pool laps, but badly. It doesn’t track when kicking with kick board, or doing some other drills that don’t necessarily involve a regular stroke. Swimming portion is not well implemented for either open water (which it doesn’t do at all) and lap swimming also.

Software/Website – You would think this was a website designed for Kindergartners! Can’t manually edit the workout data on MySports.tomtom website. Can only edit some of the data that was transferred to the MapMyFitness site. Swim data in particular – on MapMyFitness I just delete the workout and enter it manually because the only data that is useful is the time it took to do the workout. Can’t edit the distance when doing open water swim – would like to be able to at least change whatever the distance it calculates, which is completely wrong. I don’t even know how it can calculate the calories burned if it gets the distance wrong by about 100%. Can’t manually change number of laps swam – either on the watch or on the website, so the distance here can’t be adjusted in any way. Total time v. actual work out time – this is very frustrating. The Garmin Connect website reports both the Total Time (the total time of the given workout, including stops, etc), and then subtracts time used for stops and breaks, and gives you these as averages as well, so you get the following as an example for a bike ride: Total Time 55 minutes Actual Time 50 minutes Total Average Speed – 15 Mph Actual Average Speed – 16 Mph Here is a detail page from Garmin Connect that shows the various stats: I wish TomTom calculated these as well. It can’t be that hard to do, just delete the time you’re not moving and then run the calculations the same as Garmin does. MapMyFitness should do it too, and they don’t! Bottom line for a triathlete who is interested in keeping track of the swim workouts either in the pool or in open water, this is useless. Wish I knew that before buying. To TomTom product management – I don’t know how you could not get few swimmers together to give you their opinions and suggestions! And that you didn’t really do a good competitive analysis for the types of reports you should provide on the website. As I stated before, it’s as though you got done part way, and then just gave up and decided to ship before really finishing all the features, and then took repurposed MapMyFitness to have fewer features and look like something drawn with crayons!

IoT: To Be Open or To Be Closed?

I love all my Apple products, I really do! Our Apple TV was so easy to set up, and works seamlessly with my iTunes, and my iPad and iPhone all work in lovely harmony! Not to mention my old and tired, yet still perfectly happy Macbook! Yes, in 2009 I drank the Koolaid, and have not looked back. Occasionally I will try another system, like the Samsung Galaxy mini-tablet, and discard it for it’s poor user experience. But still, I do use Google apps, Google Maps being far superior to Apple’s, and Chrome is a much better browser than Safari or IE! And I’m sure that most of my mobile devices have Qualcomm’s chips in them!

But back to IoT… Apple recently announced their new IoT platform or standard, HomeKit. I suspect that like iTunes, it will be closed for just it’s own ecosystem developers and users. Google in the meantime, with the acquisition of Nest (the smart thermostat and fire alarm gadgets) now has it’s own IoT platform, which they will use for attracting developers to create cool apps for the IoT in Google’s image!

But wait, that’s not all! There are now also various consortiums being started for the IoT. One of them is based on Qualcomm’s own Alljoyn! Qualcomm decided to make it into an open source framework, now part of the Allseen Alliance and is is a project of the Linux Foundation. It has attracted quite a “who’s who” as members, such as LG, Ciscos, and most recently Microsoft. What does all this mean? Well, it means that IoT is becoming mainstream! Apple, Google, Qualcomm, Microsoft, Cisco need to sell more devices, and now that between 2013 and 2017, mobile phone penetration will rise from 61.1% to 69.4% of the global population, they need the consumers to use these devices to manage all the other devices they want us to integrate into our lives. The vision that Ericsson painted in their video not too long ago, “Social Web Of Things” is almost here.

IoT and Security – Commnexus Panel Video!

Thank you Commnexus for uploading the video from last week’s M2M SiG panel discussion on the topic of “Making M2M Secure and Economically Viable”. We had an excellent and interactive discussion with the audience and the panelists. Sunvir Gujral from Qualcomm’s Alljoyn organization did a great job as moderator. I was very fortunate to be able to bring together panelists from companies like Viasat, Verizon Wireless, Intedigital, and my friend Neeraj, the CEO of Tagnos. I wanted to get perspectives from people like Neeraj Bhavani, who is actually deploying hospital M2M solutions, Viasat’s Ian Alison, a “hacker” who knows how to break into M2M systems, Verizon’s David Prill representing the carrier perspective, and Interdigital’s Phillip Brown who is in charge of standards in M2M.

 

 

 

 

Please see the video to get a good feel for the various views, and also to see the very interactive participation with the audience! Again, thank you to Commnexus, Latham and Watkins for hosting, and all the panelists for a great event!