by andrew_f_martin on Sep 29, 2008 at 12:41 PM
iTMP got a few square feet in the Polar booth this year. I’m not even an iPhone user, but this was a app I wanted. Rather than schlepp your laptop to stage races or training camps, you can upload directly to your iPhone and sync your workouts. I didn’t seen any mention of GPS, but it can’t be far behind.
I hate to slam a product that is still in development but . . .
I stopped by on Friday and spoke with them at their booth. The product looked to be in an extreme Alpha state of development. I asked for an interview and was told to come back in a few minutes. When I did, they were gone. Coincidence?
What I did see of the app was a bit disappointing to me. It was just a bike computer on your iPhone. Do you feel confident strapping your iPhone to your handlebars? I don’t.
In order to get the data into your iPhone, you have to use a third device. I don’t need anything else to carry with me on my rides, thank you very much. Couldn’t they just have used Bluetooth and eliminated the extra hardware?
Also, I didn’t see any way to sync the data back to your computer or to something like WKO+ or Training Peaks. I mentioned it and the guy I spoke with said that the Training Peaks crew stopped by the booth the previous day.
I’m interested to see the final version and hopeful for a bit more functionality.
The way it was shown to me was that the small device just sat in your jersey and sent data down to the iPhone also in your pocket. No need to strap the iPhone to your bars. All the iPhone does is capture the data which you can then dump later. I don’t do any iPhone development, but I imagine there’s a way to get that into a more useful analytics tool like WKO+.
Did someone unseat me from the Polar Power Challenge? I never got the phone call and I was sitting at 730W for a minute and 8.99W/kg. They said I was a lock!
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