Speedo stroke counter watch

I recently purchased this watch, and can tell you a little about it. First, you don't set the distance you're going to swim. That was true of the old Speedo Stroke Monitor, but it's not true of this one. What you set is the length of the pool in which you're swimming (so it knows how long a lap is). You also key in your sex and weight so it can compute things like calories burned. You can also key in what stroke you're planning to do (FR, BR, BA, BU, or MX - for "mixed"), and it will save this information when it records the set in its memory. When you tell it you want to start swimming, it flashes WAIT five times and then tells you it's READY. As far as I can tell, it doesn't actually start timing at this point. It waits until you actually start swimming. (How does it know? I still haven't figured that out.) The only other thing you have to do is hit the enter button at the end to stop it. It figures out how many laps you did (no, I don't know how it does that, either!), computes the total distance, counts your stroke cycles, computes your speed, stroke length, stroke rate, and calories burned. It also saves data on each lap in your set (which can be particularly useful when you're doing I.M., since your stroke rate, stroke length, and speed are likely to vary significantly between the different strokes). It will save up to five sets before you have to clear it. I'm not sure why it won't save more than that (considering how much data you can store on a chip nowadays). But when you consider how much data it's saving for long sets (it even remembers the time and date when you did the set), it's fairly impressive. There are a couple of features the old watch had that the new one doesn't. One is a light, but unless you swim in the dark a lot and can't bring a flashlight, I don't see that as important. Another is the interval timer. With the old watch, you could set a time and then let it count down from that time. When it reached zero, it would signal you and then reset, and you could set it to either Stop after reseting or Repeat (which would make it immediately start counting down again). The Stop feature was very useful if you wanted to have a fixed rest interval between each set, while the Repeat option was very useful if you were starting each set on a particular interval. But the new watch does not have this feature. If you buy this watch, you should be prepared to spend some time wading through the instructions. I actually had to do a couple of passes: the first to figure out how to time myself, and the second after I got back from the pool to figure out how to access all the data it recorded. I've also had some times when it didn't count my laps correctly, though I was doing drills at the time and maybe that confused it. But when it works, it provides a lot of useful data. I may post again after I've had a chance to use it more. Bob

I recently purchased this watch, and can tell you a little about it. First, you don't set the distance you're going to swim. That was true of the old Speedo Stroke Monitor, but it's not true of this one. What you set is the length of the pool in which you're swimming (so it knows how long a lap is). You also key in your sex and weight so it can compute things like calories burned. You can also key in what stroke you're planning to do (FR, BR, BA, BU, or MX - for "mixed"), and it will save this information when it records the set in its memory. When you tell it you want to start swimming, it flashes WAIT five times and then tells you it's READY. As far as I can tell, it doesn't actually start timing at this point. It waits until you actually start swimming. (How does it know? I still haven't figured that out.) The only other thing you have to do is hit the enter button at the end to stop it. It figures out how many laps you did (no, I don't know how it does that, either!), computes the total distance, counts your stroke cycles, computes your speed, stroke length, stroke rate, and calories burned. It also saves data on each lap in your set (which can be particularly useful when you're doing I.M., since your stroke rate, stroke length, and speed are likely to vary significantly between the different strokes). It will save up to five sets before you have to clear it. I'm not sure why it won't save more than that (considering how much data you can store on a chip nowadays). But when you consider how much data it's saving for long sets (it even remembers the time and date when you did the set), it's fairly impressive. There are a couple of features the old watch had that the new one doesn't. One is a light, but unless you swim in the dark a lot and can't bring a flashlight, I don't see that as important. Another is the interval timer. With the old watch, you could set a time and then let it count down from that time. When it reached zero, it would signal you and then reset, and you could set it to either Stop after reseting or Repeat (which would make it immediately start counting down again). The Stop feature was very useful if you wanted to have a fixed rest interval between each set, while the Repeat option was very useful if you were starting each set on a particular interval. But the new watch does not have this feature. If you buy this watch, you should be prepared to spend some time wading through the instructions. I actually had to do a couple of passes: the first to figure out how to time myself, and the second after I got back from the pool to figure out how to access all the data it recorded. I've also had some times when it didn't count my laps correctly, though I was doing drills at the time and maybe that confused it. But when it works, it provides a lot of useful data. I may post again after I've had a chance to use it more. Bob