More and More Devices for Runners

Reuters.co.uk has an article about the growing and lucrative market for fitness devices for runners, such as heart rate monitors, GPS distance monitors and converged devices that combine MP3 players or cell phone handsets with some type of distance monitoring.

The article talks about some of the players in the market such as Polar, Suunto, the recently announced Nike+iPod collaboration between Apple (AAPL) and Nike (NKE), and does a nice job profiling Bones in Motion's BiM Active service at Sprint Nextel (S), which turns certain GPS-enabled handsets into personal activity monitoring devices.

The article doesn't do such a good job when discussing Garmin (GRMN) and only writes:

Garmin, a company best known for marine, hiking and road trackers, offers fitness devices with mobile phone-sized heart monitors, which cyclists mount on their handle bars.

I guess the journalist didn't do enough research on Garmin's leading Forerunner line of GPS devices, such as the Garmin Forerunner 205.

It's definitely a fun time to be a runner if you like gadgets as well. I'm currently in the process of trying to get my hands on a new GPS-enabled product from MotionLingo called ADEO to review. The ADEO is an audio GPS training device that supposedly connects to a MP3 player to provide audio alerts regarding the activity. We'll see how it goes.

As for my actual running, I put in a steady effort this morning with about 5 miles at around 7:00 mile pace. Wasn't too bad nor too hard I hope....

Technorati Tags: Garmin, GPS, Global Positioning System, Satellite Navigation, Forerunner, Nike+iPod, Bones in Motion