You gotta love press releases that lay claim to ‘world firsts’, when in fact they’re totally not.  Case in point is FINIS’ Swimsense, a watch that keeps track of how many laps you swam and can actually differentiate between backstroke, freestyle, breaststroke and butterfly.

Last year we saw the Pool-mate, which laid claim to pretty much the same feature set, but at a cheaper price.  Course, that one didn’t allow you to download your data to a computer and review your workout in a handy little graph.  Up to 14 workouts can be reviewed using their free online portal, while the more serious athlete can pay a low monthly subscription for a more robust feature set with an unlimited workout review.

The FINIS Swimsense will be available this holiday season for $200.

FINIS Launches Swimsense®, a Ground Breaking Performance Monitor That Will Revolutionize Swim Fitness

Swimsense® makes sense of your swim workout with automatic motion sensing technology that detects and records your swim strokes, calories, laps and more
Livermore, CA – (August 30, 2010) – FINIS, the Worldwide Leader in Technical Swimming Development and provider of select training equipment for the U.S. Olympic Swim Team, unveils the Swimsense® Performance Monitor (powered by SportSense), an intuitive device worn around the wrist while swimming. Using motion sensing technology, the Swimsense Performance Monitor automatically detects and distinguishes stroke types, records the number of laps swum, total distance, calories burned, lap time, pace and stroke count. With built-in automatic stroke recognition Swimsense is the first Performance Monitor in the world that can automatically differentiate between backstroke, breaststroke, butterfly and Freestyle. Custom settings allow the user to configure Swimsense for unique pool sizes, and personalize calorie calculations by specifying gender, weight and age.

The Swimsense Performance Monitor is effortless for fitness enthusiast and recreational swimmers to use, yet records the detailed training data that elite swimmers and triathletes demand. Swimsense will be available this holiday season 2010 for $199.99 MSRP at a variety of retailers including www.FINISINC.com.

“Most fitness enthusiasts and serious athletes who partake in swimming as part of their training routine can’t remember how many laps they swam last week or how many calories they burned,” says John Mix, President of FINIS. “With the Swimsense you can easily keep track of that and more. Simply get in the water and go, the Swimsense will automatically capture your entire swim workout as soon as you hit the start button. At the completion of your workout you can view your current swim session and any of your prior workouts for comparison.”

With a free online workout viewer, you can upload your workouts via a USB connection to review up to 14 past workouts/swims for easy monitoring of your progress for easy progress monitoring. For the more serious swimmer or professional athletes, FINIS will also offer a subscription Training Log. For a low monthly fee you can create and track goals, workouts plans and access and store an unlimited number of past workouts for performance analysis. The intuitive design and high resolution of the interface make reviewing your workouts easy, and the Training Log is fully upgradable with automatic software updates. For more information about Swimsense and the entire FINIS product line, including gear used by the U.S. Olympic Swim team, visit www.FINISINC.com
About FINIS:
Founded in 1993 in Northern California, FINIS was started by John Mix and Olympic Gold Medal Swimmer Pablo Morales. The Monofin and the Swimmer’s Snorkel were the first products they developed for the US market; afterwards, they continued to focus on creating training tools for swimmers and coaches worldwide. FINIS products are currently available in over 60 countries and are used by US and International Olympic teams, elite triathletes, and fitness swimmers.
Innovative research and design is FINIS’ highest priority. This dedication has resulted in truly unique products such as: the Swimmer’s Snorkel, which is recognized as the paramount tool to improve a swimmer’s technique, the SwiMP3 that uses bone conduction technology to play music instead ear buds, and the Z2 Zoomers fins, which demonstrate an intimate understanding of swimming musculature, hydrodynamics, and engineering.

Having previously reviewed a few underwater MP3 solutions it was clear to me what I expected from the Finis SwiMP3.  While other incarnations of submersible MP3 players had issues with water always getting in your ears disrupting the flow of sound, the SwiMP3 player had to eliminate that in order to be a plausible contender.

Immediately upon “unboxing”, it was apparent that the SwiMP3 player was exactly that.  Tailored to swimmers, the only way to adorn the product was to attach them to a pair of goggles.  The clips on each earpiece are designed to loosely fit around any pair of goggles and were a bit weird to try and situate them correctly without a mirror.

Once I aligned the earpieces to an optimal place on my head I did some laps.  The first thing I noticed was the “bone conduction” aspect.  While sounding more fancy than it needs to, it basically just means that there are no actual “traditional” earphones that you plug into you ears.  The sound vibrates through the plastic casing, eliminating the water suction problem in past underwater MP3 products.

Does this work?  It totally does, but at the immediate sacrifice of the most imperative aspect inherent in a pair of earphones.  The sound.  The main blemish is the quality.  It sounds very shallow and distant sounding (puns all day) and that you are hearing it from “3 doors down”.

I can say right now that the biggest problem with the Finis SwiMP3 is the volume fluctuations that must be suffered.  The thing is, swimming in water has its own sounds and you must jack up the volume in order to hear the music.  The bad part comes to when you are at rest and taking a break from swimming.  Not only does the music sound shrill, but it’s also searingly loud.  I’m not sure if this could be avoided by a volume toggle button but it’s very harsh to say the least.

As far as controls go, I say don’t futz with them.  At a storage capacity of 256Mbs, I would just make a playlist and swim and try to enjoy the novelty of listening to music underwater.  The swimmer I spoke to at the gym expressed that if the SwiMP3 was priced at under $100 it would be much more appealing, and it would definitely help break up the drudgery of doing laps in the pool.

My take on the product: I’d want it to be more versatile and offer a design that allowed you to use the headphones without a pair of goggles.  Bad sounding music is far better than no music at all and I feel that other sports could benefit from this “bone conduction” technology if you will, as it works far better than similar products in its genre.  The quality of construction could be a bit more heavy duty and it could sure have more memory, up to at least quadruple it’s current size.

Beyond that, the Finis SwiMP3 is an interesting product that should garner the attention of swimmers all over looking to cut up the monotony of doing laps.  While not a stellar underwater MP3 solution at this moment, Finis could make some important strides to improving the SwiMP3 so it is more appealing to its niche’ market.

Note:  For the life of me (from the Verve Pipe’s The Freshman), I could not get my original iMac G5 to recognize the SwiMP3.  Beware as I could also not get it to mount as a disk image on my buddy’s newer Powerbook.

Pros:

• Allows for underwater music sans suction problems of similar products
• Easy to use
• Mildly comfortable

Cons:

• Volume issues
• Memory too small
• Pricey

Buy it for $135 here!

I can barely swim 2 pool lengths without inhaling a gallon of water, let alone keep count of how many laps I’ve completed.  The Pool-mate watch automatically keeps track of how many laps you’ve completed as well as average stroke per lap, speed, calories, distance and efficiency.

Using an accelerometer, the watch doesn’t detect the actual turn to register a lap.  Nope it detects the glide portion of your swim after each turn, you know when your arms aren’t flaying about.  Clearly it won’t work for any kick only exercises, but the company claims its compatible with the ‘front crawl, back crawl, breaststroke, and butterfly’.  Battery life should be good up to 12 months and the Pool-mate watch from Swimovate will hit this July for $114.

Now, I’m just waiting for a waterproof iPhone case paired with the appropriate app to cannibalize this market.

[via Popsci]

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