Timex IRONMAN R300 GPS Sport Watch is YOUR Personal Trainer
The R300 from Timex is a very stylish sports watch that’s also a great personal trainer. The watch features extended battery life, on-wrist heart rate, quick and accurate GPS, downloadable workouts from elite athletes and a simple menu interface to tie it all together.
- Long battery life up to 25 days with regular use, 20 hours when using GPS; always on display
- On-wrist optical heart rate with HR zones & HR zone training; onboard GPS (GPS & GLONASS)
- 24/7 activity tracking (steps, distance, calories, sleep & pace when running on treadmill); sedentary reminder; 3 alarms
- Multiple workout modes: outdoor run, treadmill, cycling, indoor cycling, walking, gym training
- Adjustable 24mm textured silicone strap fits up to 8-inch wrist circumference; water resistant to 30m (100ft)
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C. D. Hicks –
I really wanted to like this watch, but it has proven to have some serious drawbacks. I believe most of the issues I’ve experienced could be fixed with software and firmware updates, but I’m not going to wait around hoping for things that might never materialize so I’ve decided to return the watch for a refund.I’ve been using a Xaomi Mi Band 3 and Mi Band 4 for the past ~1.5 years, which I only spent $30-35 on, so I was expecting this watch to be an upgrade. Imagine my disappointment when I downloaded the Timex Smart app only to find that it is a re-skinned and dumbed down version of the Mi Fit app. It doesn’t offer nearly as many features and customization as Mi Fit offers for the Mi Band such as quiet hours for night-time and customized vibration patterns, among other things. The only advantage that the Timex offers over the Mi Band is built-in GPS, but that alone doesn’t make up for all of its other shortcomings so I’m going back to the Mi Band.The screen looks bad. It really looks like a screen you would have seen on a watch 5 years ago, especially because it is framed by such large bezels. Timex claims that the screen is calibrated for outdoors and that is why it doesn’t look as crisp as you see in the product’s advertising pictures. I’ll give them some credit because it does look a little better outside, but that doesn’t make up for the poor resolution and dim performance inside.The watch UI is a bit unintuitive; not a deal-breaker but somewhat annoying. I had problems with the app syncing accurately to Google Fit, which was never an issue with the Mi Band.The Timex isn’t all bad, which is why I’m giving it 2 stars. I really like the strap; I found it to be very comfortable and it offers many levels of adjustment to get a good fit. I found the heart rate monitor to be accurate and it did a fine job at tracking workouts.One other technical note: The Timex Smart app is apparently tied into the same backend as Mi Fit, so when I deleted my Timex account, it also appears to have deleted my Mi Fit account. Now I’m going to have to create a new Mi Fit account and reconfigure the Mi Band before I can go back to using it.
Conscientious –
What I don’t like- The watch face is in dim, poorly contrasting colors which are hard to see. It makes me feel like I’m color blind and I have to turn on the back light in order to read the watch. I’ve called their tech support and they put in a request for me for new “faces” that would take care of it, but who knows when that might happen?- It takes at at least 7 clicks to get to the stop watch function and back to the main screen.- You can’t see previous day’s steps on the watch. You can only see them in the phone app.- You can only track heart rate history through work outs. If you don’t use work outs, then you can’t track your heart rate.- Tech support had to keep going back to the experts to answer my support questions. They had little direct knowledge of the product. When I asked what was the design mechanism for tracking steps when GPS is off, the support person had to go ask and came back with “it’s some sort of pedometer”. That was a non answer.- The users manual does not come with the product. You have to download it as a PDF. It’s very sparse, not well illustrated, and difficult to make sense of. I had to end up calling tech support, just to get the watch working. It doesn’t work out of the box. It doesn’t even do local functions until you connect to the internet via bluetooth and download the operating system.- There are many more terrible things about the user interface – too many to describeWhat I do like- I love that the watch keeps my daily steps. I’ve used pedometers all my waking hours for 25 years and they always break down, especially when I sweat in work outs. Now, I’ve finally stopped using pedometers.- I’ve tested the accuracy of the step counts a couple times and it seems to be on target- I love having a step counter that I don’t have to wear separately that chafes my skin, dies when it gets wet, or is dropped, etc.- I like that it tracks my sleep patterns and even gives deep sleep, light sleep, and awake in bed figures, although I don’t trust them fully.- I like how seamlessly it connects to the phone app and automatically uploads from the watch to the app- I like how when it connects, it automatically downloads the latest operating system updates
Broadway –
So far, the HR monitoring is very inaccurate. It says it can do it every second but it doesn’t, the alerts are dumb and make a stupid sound on each alert that you cant turn off from the app and the UI is clunky. You can only change some settings in the app and other settings embedded in the watch. Vibrations are too strong and clunky, you’re not able to adjust the vibration amount.Sync process is dumb, you should be able to automatically sync if the watch is in range but you can’t you have to refresh the app each time to get your data across. Whatever was installed initially it was atrocious, update made it a little better. Music sync is still driving me nuts, it has to have the phones app open to be able to modify the music (play pause etc). Sometimes it will say its playing a song when it isn’t. TIMEX really need your own developers to make the back end programming better. I like the simplicity but this is dumb. I expected more from TIMEX. The workouts are good and offer a good amount of useful data. Battery is so far solid which is the main reason I was excited about this. It’s likely that TIMEX won’t follow up with improving the software as they likely hired consultants to build it. Now the finished their bad job, TIMEX probably won’t go on to improve the software. If you want to compete in this market, you will have to get better at software and UI design otherwise this hardware will die a sad and quiet death. It has potential but you need to wake up and smell the roses before this becomes a waste of your time and resources. You’ll probably go back to doing what you know and let Apple take a monopoly in the smart watch world. BE BETTER! Get up and make your own software and algorithms!Ill keep it for a week to try the workouts but its so far a very bad purchase.