This post was originally posted on Oct 21, 2015, and has been updated on July 30 and August 21, 2016.
Since a couple of days I am a satisfied owner of the fresh TomTom Spark Cardio and Music. I have planned a longer time of getting a new GPS watch in order to get more motivation for the training. Moreover, the secondary target has been to get a watch with some smart watch features as well. As I don’t directly enjoy using a heart rate belt, another benefit of the watch is its ability to measure heart rate directly on the wrist by using a set of optical sensors.
UI
As I have been accustomed of using touchscreens lately, Spark for sure feels different as it does not have one. When it comes to the fact that the device is a fitness watch designed for multisports such as swimming, this is not a surprise. The navigation works by using the “joystick” below the screen. By pressing the up key in the watch mode, the watch starts to look for a Bluetooth headphone for the music functionality, by pressing right the menu with training types is opened. A press downwards opens various settings etc. The activity, sleep tracking and calories consumption is opened by pressing the left hand side of the navi button. The principle of moving around is the same: up and down in a specific menu: move to different items/change the current selection. By pressing to the right a selection is confirmed and by pressing the left hand side of the button, one ends up to the previous level. For me it took a while to get used to the navigation, but it is intuitive, just different.
In the following there’s a short overview of the most central training options of the watch. In summary there are the following programs included:
- Run
- Cycle
- Swim
- Treadmill
- Gym
- Indoor
- Freestyle
- Stopwatch
Running
There are several predefined types of training available for running: one may set target distance, time or calories for a training, run intervals, rounds, at a specified heart rate zone or do a competition (TomTom provides some predefined race types or you can compete against your previous workouts). Obviously you can also run freely without any program and just let the watch measure heart rate and store the GPS track.
Until now I have only tried to run rounds and heart rate zone based workouts. I was surprised that the watch does not provide an automatic alert every kilometer (or mile if you prefer) if you don’t select the rounds option. Then it works just fine. The heart rate zone based variant is a nice way of keeping the pace within a specified area (as long as your heart rate zones have been specified correctly). When starting a workout with the functionality the watch gives audio feedback and vibrate alerts if one is not running within the specified thresholds. This may be good, but also very annoying, if you are running at a pace where the heart rate zone is changed too often.
Other sports
I have used the watch until now merely for the running so I am unfortunately not able to evaluate the other predefined programs yet.
Activity Tracker
The activity tracker seems to do its job like Fitbit Flex I own. I don’t use this, though very actively at the moment, so maybe I’ll have a closer look at this later.
Sleep Tracker
Not enough use yet to be able to give a review.
Music Player
The Music variant of the watch is able to store about 3 GB of music in MP3/AAC format. The watch itself does not provide any intelligence for controlling the playback, but for now it is the headset that is used for this. Maybe this will be enabled by a future update by TomTom.
The music player seems to work fine, but I had some issues with the Bluetooth headset as the one I own has its controlling unit on the right side. I wore the watch on my left wrist during the first workout and there were interruptions in the music playback. After reading some forum posts at TomTom web site it was clear that one should preferably try to use the watch on the same side where the controlling/broadcast unit of the Bluetooth headset resides. So I went for a second run where I switched the watch to another wrist. After that I have not had any major issues with the music playback. TomTom already provides a list of supported headset alternatives so this may be helpful for someone who’s searching for a new Bluetooth headset to be used with Spark.
Optical Heart Rate Monitor
I don’t have any complaints regarding this, but I can only say that it seems to work adequately well for a recreational runner. I would not take the heart rate belt back any more. On the other hand if you are fond of swimming I think it is not possible to track heart rate during swimming at the moment. If that’s what you want, you’ll have to have a look at some other devices.
Battery Life
I have not used the watch enough yet to give a final verdict. I can only say it seems adequate for my purposes (doing a two – three hours’ workout with HR monitoring + GPS and listening to the music). I’ll get back to this when having used the device a bit more.
Summary
All in all I’m very satisfied with the watch at the moment. If also the promised smart phone notifications will be added to the watch, it will be even better than now. 🙂
Update (2016-07-30)
Now that I have been using the watch during the past eight months I can say that there are evident drawbacks and benefits with it. Overall I’m still pretty satisfied but this doesn’t mean there aren’t things that could be better. I list some comments I have to add to the previous review.
It didn’t take long to get accustomed with the user interface. I still like it, but at some occasions its limitations have also become evident. If the connection to the bluetooth headset is lost during the workout you cannot reconnect without stopping the workout, reconnecting the headset and starting a new workout. This has really bugged me a few times.
I had some problems with the previous software versions and the watch UI froze completely randomly during a workout. Usually only thing that helped then was to attach the watch to the computer and get the watch reseted. However, if the watch started to react, I lost the workout completely which was really frustrating. With the newest software version (1.3.27) most things have been working better.
I’m pretty satisfied with the optical heart rate monitoring as well, but sometimes the results it provides seem faulty which is bad. When I start a workout the heart rate shown by the device is sometimes considerably higher than I’m certain it is. When restarting the results sometimes look more realistic. So I have to keep eye on this one constantly. Also, during some runs I’ve noticed that the heart rate at the beginning was considerably higher than later during the run. Also I have noticed some deviations when running in the cold weather (a lower heart rate than expected), but this probably has to do with the used technology and the current limitations (the blood veins get smaller in the cold weather).
The 24 hour heart rate monitoring is a great addition to the watch and was provided by a software update. I really like to use it analyse my performance and overall tiredness. At some points it has been evident that I have been too tired (a higher heart rate than usually) and I have been able to adjust my training or life according to that.
The “hardware” of the watch has not been entirely reliable either. I have already got the wrist band replaced twice so there must be / must have been a problem on the production line or with the band material. Both times the wrist band has got broken at the lower attachment point of the watch. I hope the new wrist band is better than the previous ones. I personally think it is pretty unacceptable that a sports watch does not endure the normal use longer than a few months.
The second main complaint about the watch is the fact that the promised update bringing the smartphone notifications still has not been delivered. Maybe this will happen, maybe not, but at the moment I’m pretty disappointed that it was promised, but still not there. Most other competitors already have this feature so TomTom really should put some effort on this.
All in all, for a hobby runner the watch still seems to be a good option and provides good opportunities for other sports as well. One of the strongest reasons why I bought the watch – the ability to listen to the music during the workout is still valid and a great plus. The problems with the bluetooth reception have been mostly solved and the music playback works as desired.
I think I still probably would buy the watch if I knew that the issues with the arm wrist band are solved, the smartphone notifications provided etc.
Update (2016-08-21)
The past week has been a really bad one due to the problems with the watch. I honestly don’t know what has happened – whether I have encountered an issue that is reproducable only under special conditions or whether it is something else, but suddenly I have lost two workouts entirely, because the watch resetted itself after the workout. After that nothing else worked out than to connect the watch with the computer and reconfigure it.
I haven’t had time to investigate the issue more. At first I think I’ll reset my device to the factory settings and try to reproduce the error. The issue might have something to do with the way I turned my music and bluetooth headset off. I’m not certain any longer if I turned those off before stopping the workout. This has to be studied more carefully.
The TomTom support suggested me to browse my mobile phone for the workout file and upload it manually, but unfortunately this was not successful, as the file was not there any more. I find it totally unacceptable that a sports watch loses workout files before they have been properly saved. Even though I am only a hobby runner it would be too much after the marathon to notice that the whole race is suddenly gone forever.
All in all, I lost the confidence on the device and my decision is to restore it to the factory settings, repackage it and sell it on eBay. If I cannot rely on that my race and trainings are stored properly, I get too much extra stress that is totally unnecessary. I have bought myself yesterday a Garmin Vívoactive HR watch and will tell more about the watch in a future post. Now I can concentrate on learning to use the watch before the marathon next Saturday.