Suunto T4 first impression

I have to admit that I'm a gadget junkie. I got my wife the Suunto T4 today. I already have too many heart rate monitors and training tools. I've already got the Garmin Forerunner 305, the Garmin Edge 305, and the Suunto T6 and I used to have the Garmin Forerunner 201, the Garmin Forerunner 301, the Polar A10, and the Suunto Advizor. I could't justify getting another one for myself, so I got it for her. ;-) I think that I've spend enough time with these to have a good understanding of the caveats of each one.

My hope with the T4 is that Suunto's Coach will provide her with a reasonablly well thought out workout schedule that she'll develop the consistency to keep with the program.

I think that the documentation that comes with the T4 is really bad. It needs to cover more of the key concepts that a person using the watch are likely to need to know to make use of the gadget's features. To be fair, the Sunnto training site does add quite a lot. The biggest problem is you need to kind of wrap your head around Suunto's way of doing things which is a bit different than most of the literature out there:

1. most literature talks about 5 HR zones. Suunto has 3.
   
2. This is the MOST important thing to understand. Books about exercise and training think in terms of time@%HR. This really has been kind of the state of the art since HR monitors came out. The reality of it is that this doesn't actually represent a real workout. It is very hard to have that steady of a state. Suunto gets around this and introduces a new concept called training effect. If you make a graph of HR on the Y axis and time on the X axis. Training effect is the area under the curve. The great thing about the Suunto products is that they handle non-steady state workouts.

One may hope that the T4 seems like the ultimate device for people who don't want to have a coach but want to get in shape. It really does seem to have almost all the features that you could want but it is a complicated piece of equipment and the way that it works with its notion of "training-effect" is different enough from what is commonly talked about in books that it isn't a turnkey system. I couldn't just give one of these to my mom and not expect to have to explain how to use it to her. It seems like you need to know quite a bit about training and using a HRM to get the most out of the T4's coach features.

Things that are different than the Suunto T6:

1. Unlike the T6 which comes with a cable which you can connect to your PC using the provided USB cable the T3 & T4 can't communicate with a PC and you can't download the data unless you have a PC-POD.
   
2. Unlike the T6, the T3 & T4 don't record every beat of your heart. They just record the summary from your workout. Even if you have the PC-POD you can't see what your heart was at any given point during a workout. This might not matter to some people but it will matter to some.
   
3. The T4 only stores the previous 15 workouts in its internal logbook. If you want a long term storage of your data you must buy the PC-POD so that you can download your data to the computer.
   
4. The T4 doesn't seem to have an altimeter like the T6.
   

On the other hand, some of the problems from the T6 also carry through to the T4.

1. There doesn't seem to be a provision for multiple bikes. This won't be a problem for my wife but I personally have three bikes, a road bike, a TT/Tri bike, and a mountain bike. You sort of need to be able to pair multiple bike PODs to the T4.
2. As my sport is triathlon, the T4 seems to be missing some features that are needed for triathlon. For example the ability divide a workout into segments like swim, T1, bike, T2, and run or even just bike, T, run for a brick workout. You can do some of this with a lap timer but it really doesn't break the data down as nicely as you would like. However, this limitation shouldn't affect my wife who isn't competitive and won't need this feature.

One nice thing about the T4 as opposed to the T6 is that it is actually useful without having to connect it to a computer. The T6 is a PC peripheral which records a very specific kind of data. The T4 is a stand alone gadget which can be used without ever connecting it to a PC.