Today I had the chance to test the Nike + iPod Sport Kit as a friend of mine who bought it years ago (and never used it) gave it to me to give it a try. The bundle contains two devices: one transmitter to put into the shoe or sock (which is really small, compared to the Polar S1) and a receiver that is connected with the iPod nano.

When the receiver is connected to the iPod nano, a new menu option is displayed in the main menu. This is where some settings as weight and power-song can be changed. To improve the performance and accuracy of the measurement, it can be calibrated with a 400 meter test run. The last thing to do is to choose the playlist that should be played during the training and your iPod is ready to start.

During the run the display of the iPod shows time, distance, speed and the song that it is playing. If you run too fast to read, just press the OK Button, and time, distance and speed are announced by a nice configurable female or male voice.

While jogging, I recognized that the displayed speed was very unstable. Sometimes it showed 4:25 min/km and a minute later 7:40 min/km, although my impression was that I didn’t change my speed at all. As every kilometer on my route along the Rhine is marked with a milestone, I was able to test how exactly the distance is measured. The first try was good with about 5% difference (950 meter instead of 1000) but when I tried it a second time,there was a difference of 20% (1200 meters instead of 1000).

Back at home, I used Google Earth to measure the track and to my surprise there was only a difference of about 1%! Google Earth counted 10,3 km and the iPod showed 10,2 km. So I will give it another try to proof that this was not just luck.

My first impression is that the Nike + iPod Sport Kit is a nice device for people who use an iPod nano to get a feeling about their track-length without manual measurement. It is a good start into training documentation, but misses some important features for advanced users.

Pros

• Easy to install and configure
• Nice iPod integration
• Not very expensive (30€)

Conts

• Unrealistic speed during the practice
• No pulse measurement supported
• Works only with iPod nano models

So far I did not have the time to upload the data to the Nike + iPod portal, but as soon as I

Last sunday I had some time to work on the integration of the RS200 SonicLink module. When I started I recognized that although the software is quite young some major refactorings are necessary to keep the code well structured and easy to understand. As I do not work on the software every day, it is very important, to have good sourecode, to prevent frustration, errors and delays.
As the sunday was over pulse-o-meter had a completely new XML-engine and a new more flexible importer structure.
With this new structure the RS200 import should be done until the end of this week. After that there will be some beautification work on the user interface. Then the first test candidate is ready to be tested.