For example, there are little blips around the watch face at the usual 5-minute marks of a watch face. The entire watch body is made of finished steel, making it hard as nails. The RunIQ is also chunky, particularly as the face of the thing is pretty large thanks to the generous 1. The RunIQ has three buttons on its side. New Balance works the upsell angle like a pro.
New Balance has also teamed-up with Intel to make this watch. Google has already released Wear 2. Returning to the old version of Wear is an unpleasant blast from the past. Used out on a bright day the screen is almost invisible unless you use the Brightness Boost function. And that turns off after a few seconds anyway, leaving you in the relative dark.
The most important question, does it have the fitness chops to make it worthwhile? Not really…. The New Balance RunIQ has its own fitness app and watch faces, designed to hook up with Strava to give your data somewhere to go. As you run or ride you can look at your distance, speed and time on the main screen. Flick to the left and right and you can check out your heart rate, cadence and lap times.
Swipe down and you get music playback controls. It works pretty well, with much better results than I got from the Huawei Watch 2. Notification support is still reliable and Google Now integration remains a little messy and overbearing. New Balance does include a couple of its own watch faces with complications widgets to check in on resting heart rate, step count and launch sports tracking.
There are a couple of Google Fit faces as well, but until Wear 2. The Intel Atom Z34XX processor, along with with MB of RAM powering performance, should be enough to keep things running smoothly, but it can feel laggy in places, especially when launching the Strava app and swiping through notification cards. The 4GB of storage means you can transfer music over to the watch and pair with Bluetooth headphones to listen to tunes during a workout, sans phone.
New Balance also includes its own MyNB app on top of the Android Wear app but there's not much to write home about here. You can tinker with watch settings: tweaking watch face colours, choosing the main metric displayed during tracking, heart rate zones and turning on the audio messages to tell you when you've hit distance markers. There's more marketing material than there are settings so you might find yourself spending very little time in the app.
But you do have to download it to get the watch up and running along with the Android Wear app, which can make for a confusing experience. While it's difficult for hardware manufacturers to make Android Wear feel all that different on the software front, New Balance makes a valid attempt by deeply integrating sports tracking app Strava into the RunIQ experience.
That means that once your Strava account is set up and connected, hitting that top physical button pushes you into tracking mode. It only supports running or cycling and settings are pretty minimal, letting you do things like activate auto pause and change units of measurement. Read this: Essential tips and tricks for using Strava. You can swipe through four different screens showing distance, endurance based on heart rate bpm readings , cadence and laps.
Swipe down on the touchscreen and there's also a really well designed music player widget for skipping tracks and adjusting volume. It currently only works with Android phones, though, with iOS support in the works. When you're done with your workout, data is automatically synced directly to Strava. It's a really simple app to use, data is easy to soak up on the move and syncing does work effortlessly.
It is disappointing that there's no support for indoor run or cycling tracking here though. So we've established that the Strava support works pretty seamlessly, but it's no good if the tracking isn't up to scratch. We've focused on the run tracking, but we'll update how it holds up for cycling at a later date. GPS signal pick up is not the quickest, and we've definitely spent a good few minutes staring at the loading GPS message before being able to get up and running.
We did find you can get up and running and the mapping does its best to catch up. Pacing and splits were in line, as were elevation recordings.
Sadly we can't quite say the same about the heart rate sensor data. The average bpm readings and the time spent in heart rate zones were in line with the Spark 3's sensor and the Polar H10 heart rate chest strap we also ran with. The maximum heart rate data readings, though, appeared wildly inaccurate, with a difference of 10bpm on some occasions in comparison to the other two devices, which we have come to rely on for accurate readings. Sadly it looks like another optical heart rate sensor to add to the long list of ones that simply are not good enough to measure accurately from the wrist when you start factoring in high-intensity training.
The RunIQ features a mAh battery that should get you a day's use and five hours in GPS mode, meaning it should make it good enough for a slow marathon. Although we're not sure how comfortable we'd be relying on it for a sub-5 hour marathon based on our experiences.
In general use you'll get a day max and not much more, but as soon as you factor in GPS and heart rate its stamina takes a bit hit. That's a very similar performance to what we found with the Tag Heuer Connected Modular 45 , albeit that's not a fitness-focused smartwatch. Sports watch replacement? We don't think so. As is always the case, tinkering around with display settings and not utilising the sensors can make the difference, but that kind of defeats the purpose, especially with a smartwatch masquerading as a sports watch.
Sign In. Wareable is reader-powered. If you click through using links on the site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Learn more. Tuesday April 4, By Michael Sawh michaelsawh. By Michael Sawh. New Balance RunIQ: Design and screen New Balance has decided to keep things simple and understated on the looks front and that's absolutely fine with us.
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