TomTom Black Adventurer GPS Outdoor Heart Rate Watch

Very poor value for money, compared with other fitness watches it was like a kids plastic toy. Screen display awful, bluetooth connectivity awful.TomTom are so far off the mark with this it beggars belief!

Still getting used to it, but really has a great heart rate monitor. Will give more feedback after a few more months.

Very good purchese!

Brilliant. Ugly time display, but otherwise just fab. Tunes on the warpath.

I like the watch but not a fan of the original strap you receive. I had to have it replaced after 5 months.The sports activity options are varied so you should find what you need to record.I find the step counter very sensitive, so for example, if you scratch your head or wave at someone it will record as steps. It may be worthwhile putting the watch in your pocket if the pedometer is of interest for you.The watch records your sleep as well which is with a look on the app.I wish the watch recorded location tracking for walks / runs like Android Wear watches (without actively pursuing the options on the watch)Battery life is very impressiveOverall, I like the watch but definitely room for improvement (via a software update.....)

I feel a bit ungenerous giving this three stars. Think of it as three and a half. My main reservation is that it's not very intuitive to use. The scant and wordless instruction sheet that comes in the box doesn't help at all but that's fine because these days I'd much rather watch a video. TomTom's website has several good videos to show you how to use the various functions. I think I need to watch them again though because I still lose my way in the curious system of menus and screens and I've never got the mapping function to work.You control menus with the big four-way button below the screen that needs a very firm press. For many things it's easy enough: press left to get your daily stats, left again to get weekly stats. Up and down to see the different categories (steps, distance, calories etc.). The more advanced functions are to the right, for setting goals, starting the tracking for various activities and sports, checking your heart rate and speed etc. It's supposed to create a (crude) little map so you can find your way back if you wander into the desert without a map (who does that?) or something but I can't seem to get it to do that. I rarely need instructions for gadgets, have an affinity for them, so this must be more difficult to use than it needs to be.I tried the music app with my Bluetooth earphones and it works well. You can store plenty of music in the 4GB of memory and you don't have to take your phone out on your run or bike ride or whatever. I always take my phone out on bike rides in case I crash or something so won't make use of this, but it would be good in a gym. Adding music just means connecting the watch to your computer and dragging and dropping music files. Easy to do.You can transfer the information the watch records to an app on your phone. You have to really. The app is excellent. It looks beautiful and shows an incredible amount of information. To be of use, you really have to wear the watch 24/7 so it can record when you're asleep as well as your active time. It's a fairly comfortable watch to wear, but I don't really like wearing it at night. The thing is that you have to have the strap fairly tight or the heart rate monitor won't work properly. In hot weather, it can get uncomfortable and sticky.What I do like is how the watch vibrates your wrist when you reach your goals. I'm using mine for walking and cycling. So if you set a goal of 10km, you get the vibration as a reward, and a big star on the display to egg you on.If you're using it for mainly cycling, you can remove the strap and attach the watch to a bike mount that you buy separately. You can use it as a speedometer.The strap incidentally makes attaching the charger a bit tricky. At least the battery seems to last well – about a week.An oddity, perhaps just with mine, is that the display backlight seems a bit random. If I switch it on in the menu it often won't come on, but if I run the watch under the tap, it comes on by itself... It IS supposed to be waterproof. Normally you don't need the backlight because the display is very big and easy to read, especially in bright sunshine. The watch feels otherwise robust and tough.To sum up, this watch is very good at recording your steps and distance walked or cycled, your heart rate and sleep patterns. The app it connects to is excellent. I can imagine that if you wore it all the time it would really help you log and organise your fitness regime, and it has modes for all the main activities like cycling, swimming and running. It's quite a big watch but fairly comfortable to wear and the big display means the time and other information is easy to see while you're on the move. My main reservation is that the menus are a bit confusing to navigate through though you'd probably get used to that.

There is one huge problem with this watch that I'm going to talk about first. I can no longer wear it, and that is an enormous disappointment. The metal contacts that allow the watch to recharge sit against the skin and have caused my base metal allergy to react strongly. In a watch of this quality and price this component really should be made of something hypo-allergenic, It is a serious design flaw that they are not. Nickel allergy can appear in people who aren't usually sensitive when they sweat too, so wearing this could produce your first reaction. If you get sore patches where the contacts are touching the skin of your wrist, take the watch off immediately. Kinesiology tape was my temporary fix so that I could review this for you, especially as it has to be worn constantly so as to be able to monitor sleep patterns. But I can't tape my wrist forever;Tom Tom need to sort this out - and not by plating them either. 14 karat gold or better, titanium, palladium, platinum. Not copper as some people are allergic to that too. The watch is really big. I have had phones with smaller screens in the past. It looks quite smart though, and is reasonably comfortable when set at the right tightness to be able to monitor heart rate. I'd prefer a soft strap, but I imagine that eventually they will bring out alternative straps. The buckle holes do leave a mark with long wear.The app downloads to the PC quickly and simply, tested under Win 10 it is stable, although it runs at start-up and performs updates on PC boot, which isn't ideal. Apps that do that tend to slow your boot significantly. The PC app gives a great deal more info than the Android App does. However you have to take the watch off and physically plug it in to get it to sync with the PC, which is annoying especially when I have a perfectly good Bluetooth connection sitting there unused. The Android app is good. Stable and not data-hungry that I've noticed. It sits waiting for the watch to wake up, then automatically receives your data since the last time it synced. Both the PC app and the Android are intuitive and simple to use, and give good data.I really like this watch. The ease of use is really good - the joy of getting a gentle backlight just by holding my hand over the face is so nice. Decent big clear numbers for time and date are excellent - although downloadable faces would have been a nice addition to give that extra ability to personalise. The music player is simple and much easier to control on the move than my phone. I would have liked access to my phone's music as well via the watch, but that's just a niggle. The GPS is actually pretty accurate, even in the house. With my allergy issues I've not been able to wear it while on a long power chair run out with the dogs, but this is Tom Tom so that'll be the bit it does best.I'd be wearing it, praising it to high heavens and giving it 6 stars if it wasn't for the allergy issue. It really is a great little piece of kit but what a shame their lack of experience with wearables has caused this problem. A little more research and testing would have sorted it out long before launch.