This is a sponsored conversation written by me on behalf of TomTom®. The opinions and text are all mine.
Fitness wearables (smart watches, exercise bands, and all sorts of little computers you can strap/clip to yourself) are all the rage for tech-savvy city-dwellers – tracking steps and helping get you out of your office chair occasionally. TomTom®’s new Adventurer watch will do all that, but it is also enhanced specifically for those who love to be active and love adventures, with special tech and dedicated modes for hiking, skiing/snowboarding, swimming, and more!
I got the opportunity to take the Adventurer out into the snowy North Cascade Mountains, about two hours outside Seattle Washington, for a ski day. When I got to the parking lot, I strapped the watch on under the cuff of my glove (the band isn’t long enough to wear on the outside of most ski clothes, unfortunately) and went through the incredibly-simple Bluetooth connection to the headphones in my ski helmet. With the TomTom Adventurer I can listen to the 3GB of music that I had synced to it from my computer using the straightforward TomTom® MySports Connect program. The Adventurer comes with its own Bluetooth headphones that sound good. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to enjoy the music feature this time around as the headphones didn’t fit under my helmet. After selecting “Ski” mode from the list of activities, it showed me that I’d gotten my heart rate up to 97 bpm in the struggle to get my ski boots on, and told me to get going.
The ski mode primarily tracks 3D distance, speed, vertical, and heartrate, and they’re all helpfully displayed with my favorite feature – Automatic Lift Detection. Imagine this – you finish laying down a line in the pow, hop on the lift, and your wrist buzzes right after you start back uphill because it wants to tell you, quantitatively, just how gnar that run was. No buttons to push with your gloved hand, and no danger of dropping your phone into the snowy abyss below, just the right info at the right time. Very, very cool, and it worked every lift ride, without fail.
You can also see these stats with the relatively-glove-friendly 4-way button, including a live-trace of your GPS track for the day, a compass, and some graph data on how hard your heart has been working throughout the day.
Once you’ve finished your day on the slopes, the watch syncs up with the TomTom® MySports app for a complete analysis of your day, including multi-plot graphs to compare the speed of your runs, elevation, heart rate, and pace. That activity then syncs to your TomTom® MySports account online, where you can dive in further. Both the app and the website allow you to share your day’s activities via Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter, while the site alone lets you download various formats of the GPS data to plug into other accounts you may have. However, I didn’t have to download data to sync to another app – and the MySports app offers an automatic sync option for Strava and many other popular tracking apps.
The Adventurer was a welcome and effortless addition to my ski day – I could review my last run while I was on the lift to drive the next one just that much harder, and then share it all out at the end of the day with just a few taps on the app. I didn’t have to pull my phone out until I was back at the car, because everything I needed (including my music) was right there. If you’ve been holding off on wearable tech because you needed something that could keep up with you outdoors, or you’ve outgrown your step tracker when you go on bigger adventures, the TomTom® Adventurer might be just the thing to take you to the next level.
