This Bowflex strapless heart rate monitor offers heart rate without having to use a chest belt by touching the sensor buttons on the watch. Accurate heart rate anytime.
Owner Reviews, Ratings, Comments and Criticism
As far as its role as a watch, this bowflew product gets the job done, unlike other strapless-heart-rate-monitor watches, this one actually looks like a normal digital watch, I don't know about you, but I want a strapless one because I want to wear it in PUBLIC without a strap around my chest, and since I am in public, I don't want everyone who passes by to say, what kind of watch is THAT? Thus leading to an unwanted 2 minute conversation.
Now then, the watch aspect features everything you need, a backround light, day of the week, month/day, time, alarm, stopwatch(called a chronograph), a countdown timer(which beeps every second for the last 5 seconds and then 3 times at zero and then for another 10 seconds) and of course your heart rate.
There are numerous features that resolve around the heart rate function, which you can display by holding down the bottom center silver button for 5 seconds(the sensor is where a battery is on a normal watch, up against the wrist). You can set a heart rate zone, which is down automatically for you based off your gender and age, though you can manually set your own. This is EXTREMELY useful, if say, you want to get into that "fat burning zone" which for me is about 130bpm, you can set the bottom and top bars for what ever beats you want, if you are in the "zone" your HR will appear along with one beep(though you must manually take your HR by holding down the button for 5 secs), if your higher or lower than the "zone" it will beep twice and then show your HR with either a H or a L accordingly.
A nice little feature is that along with your HR it will show your relative HR, which is to say, the percentage that you are pushing yourself, so when an exercise says "go 80%" for such and such time, you can now actually SEE what HR is that percentage, based on your age ex. My "maximum" (safe, anyway) HR is 200bpm, so if my HR while say, walking is 100bpm, the display will show "100bpm 50%" to indicate my relative HR. Very useful.
This brings me to the last feature of this watch, the calorie counter. Based on your current HR(The manual says to take it just prior to using this) (sidenote: manual is very simple, yet detailed and very helpful) this timer will show, other than a timer, the amount of calories you have burned based on your HR, haven't used it much, but it could prove very handy in the future.
Now for the bad stuff, there is one more useless feature I forgot to mention, the dual time function, basically, you can set any time you want, besides the "actual" time, maybe for time zones or something, but you can change mins and secs too, I don't know, seems pointless to me, whatever. My only other gripe is that I am not 100% confident in the accuracy of the monitor. It could just be that because of its short monitoring interval(5 secs) it is overly-sensitive, for example, while sitting here, my HR is 64bpm, but if I stand up its 84, even though I didn't really do anything, same thing if your just sitting somewhere and breathing(unlikely right? :D ) your HR picks up a bit on the inhale and drops on the exhale, these "inaccuracies" disappear however, during exercise, since the heart is beating faster, thus greatly lessening the affects of say, standing up and breathing.(and don't wear it too tight, this can make your bpm higher than it really is, inversly for too loose)
For those of you who decided to skip my overly detailed review(hey, I was the first one, after all) and just want a blunt answer, yes, this thing is great, yes I highly reccomend it and yes, you should get one(hopefully in a different color, so I don't run into people with the same watch as me ;) )
