MotoActv

I own one of these devices. I purchased it from Amazon, along with the Motorola heart rate chest strap.

Living in Costa Rica, my purchases are forwarded to me via creative methods, so I know I am often taking a risk when I purchase new technology sight unseen, or even proper clothing sizes for that matter!

So after about 3 months with the MOTOACTV what do I think? I have never owned a fitness/gps watch before and my experience is limited for better or worse by that fact.

From a fashion or vanity perspective this device rocks. I get many questions and compliments about the look and styling when out in public. This watch draws attention with its sleek, modern design, and the "shake to wake" screen usually causes people to do a double take.

I wear the MOTO on the wrist strap. This is solid and secure, nestled into its metal frame. This device connects to your computer via a mini USB connection and also has another opening for the headphones. On the MOTO forums there are numerous customers who are furious about the device failing due to water contamination. Motorola advertises it as water resistant not water proof, and I have no way to validate or measure the claims of the forum posters, however, the issue is prominent enough that it makes me paranoid. I wear a sweat band on my left arm, above the watch, take it off and clean with a towel immediately after runs, and take it off whenever I find myself thinking about heading near water (kitchen, shower, pool after the gym, etc)

In addition, after 2 weeks of use I had to follow the recommendations to disable the factory included headset's manual controls, since they had become saturated with sweat and were causing the device's MP3 player to malfunction.

When not using the headphones, a tiny rubber grommet is used to insert in place of the headphone's jack. This grommet is not attached in any way to the device, so every time you remove it, you have to save it somewhere, and insert it again after you finish training. You are only provided with 1 of these grommets. Maybe many of you are more careful than I, but I lost mine after maybe 3 weeks, and have been walking around with a gaping hole in my MOTO ever since.

As a novice runner, I have not attempted to use several of the advanced planning features that include intervals and stages, etc. I usually am planning a run for a specific distance at a single, consistent pace. Either way, the web portal's performance is a work in progress, to be kind. In a standard calendar format, you can plan each day's run. However you have no control over selecting whether Sunday or Monday should begin your week. Also, the MOTO synchs with the web portal and downloads all of your planned workouts into its memory. However, after you have completed a run and uploaded the data, the portal does not reflect this on your planning calendar. So you are forced to always check in various locations for planned runs versus completed runs and their corresponding data.

In general, the MOTOACTV web portal is an unstable platform. On any given day and with any given browser the web site will be unavailable, or allow you to sign in, only to then begin displaying pages incorrectly, incompletely, or crashing. Due to these issues, I upload my data to MapMyRun, MyAsics and SportsTracker as back-ups and because I find some of their features , such as route creation, much more advanced and user friendly, not to mention stable!

I synch my data both via the mini USB connection and wirelessly, having set up my router's information during the device set-up. Both methods are fairly quick and I've experienced no issues regarding dropping data or failing to make a connection.

GPS acquisition has been great for me. I've never had to wait more than 2 minutes to get a lock on the satellites, and I just have the MOTO start looking for them as I walk about 200 meters from my home to my usual starting point for runs. I have tested the GPS acquisition from several areas in the San Jose, Costa Rica area and have similar results.

The Motorola heart rate monitor chest strap has performed well, after I learned that for best results I needed to wear it slightly off center and really soak the two sensor areas with water/saliva prior to putting it on.

The calibration of the accelerometer for indoor/treadmill running has been fairly poor. Sometimes it's within 1/10 of a mile on walks but never better than 1/2 mile on runs. Other times not even that good.

Overall, I would have to say that if you are a patient person, who often enjoys testing out beta products and/or new technology, give the MOTOACTV a try. There are enough positives and hopefully enough potential that this thing could still develop into a rock solid device that sets a new standard regarding an all in one fitness device.

On the other hand, if coughing up $250 plus the cost of accessories for a device that might fail due to excessive sweat and still has a significant amount of de-bugging (web portal) to be done....if that would drive you crazy and lead to posting on their forums something like, "I feel absolutely cheated by Motorola," then keep a wide berth of the MOTOACTV.