TomTom Runner Cardio review

When the TomTom Runner and TomTom Multi-Sport GPS watches arrived last year, they didn’t exactly set the fitness technology market on fire. They were decent enough devices, but they didn’t offer anything new, and failed to make a strong enough case for themselves against the established competition. But that’s all about to change, with the arrival of the TomTom Runner Cardio.

TomTom’s latest GPS watch certainly couldn’t be accused of bringing nothing new to the market; in fact it could quite accurately be described as ground breaking.  So what’s so special about the TomTom Runner Cardio?

TomTom Runner Cardio heart rate monitor

If you take your training seriously, you’ll already be well aware of the benefits that a heart rate monitor (HRM) can bring. Training with an HRM allows you to monitor and dictate the effort of your sessions, as well giving you valuable insight into your fitness levels over time.

If you find that you’re running the same route, at the same pace, but with a reduced heart rate, you know that your cardiovascular fitness has improved, and there are far less simplistic metrics to apply when you have live and historical heart rate data to work with.

Traditional heart rate monitors take the form of sensors that attach to a chest strap. The strap will be equipped with electrodes that touch your skin and send the data through to the sensor, which then transmits that data to your sports watch, cycle computer, smartphone or even gym equipment.

There’s nothing wrong with the traditional method – it works, and the inconvenience of having to wear the strap is far outweighed by the benefits of the data collected. But what if you could get a constant, accurate measure of your heart rate without the need for a chest strap and wireless sensor? Well, thanks to TomTom, now you can.

As it’s name hints, the TomTom Runner Cardio’s party trick is that it has a heart rate monitor built right into the watch, and that’s something that many runners – ourselves included – are very excited about.

TomTom Runner Cardio how the heart rate sensor works 

The TomTom Runner Cardio measures your heart rate differently to the way a chest strap sensor does. Instead employing a type of electrocardiography to measure your heart physically beating, the Runner Cardio uses an optical sensor that’s mounted in the rear of the watch.

Accompanying that sensor are two very bright LEDs, which shine through the surface of the skin. The sensor then measures any changes in skin colour, since skin tone changes ever so slightly when your blood pumps through it. By tracking those changes in skin tone, the Runner Cardio can calculate your heart rate.

This type of optical heart rate measurement isn’t new – Withings employed a similar system in its Pulse activity tracker last year. In fact some smartphone apps utilise the handset’s camera and flash to achieve the same results. The difference is that all these other devices have only offered a “spot” heart rate measurement, rather than a continuous one, making it a far less compelling feature for anyone who’s serious about their training.

To maintain that continuous heart rate measurement, the Runner Cardio needs to be kept pretty tight to your skin, but not uncomfortably so. To ensure a solid connection, TomTom has designed a new strap, which employs a three-prong buckle, along with pins that hold the excess tongue in place. We found that the Runner Cardio was very comfortable to wear, even on long runs.

TomTom has added a lot of features to its sports watches since they launched, so the heart rate sensor isn’t the only thing that’s new since we reviewed the TomTom Multi-Sport back in January.

Some of the updates have just been handy little extras, such as the addition of a stopwatch that you can fire up without triggering an exercise session. But there are some that really help make the TomTom Runner Cardio and its siblings better training partners. One of those features is the ability to configure interval sessions in your runs.

Interval training is a great way to push your body hard, during shorter workouts. Rather than running at a steady pace, you throw in bursts of extreme effort, followed by recovery periods. Interval training on a treadmill is easy, since you can configure the treadmill itself to switch the pace up and down as required, but it’s a bit more tricky out in the real world.

TomTom, however, has made interval training incredibly easy. If you select intervals as your goal, you can then fully customise your warm up, your high intensity intervals, your recovery period, and how many sets you want to incorporate in your run. You can configure your cool down too.

You can choose to base your intervals on either time or distance, and the Runner Cardio will vibrate when it’s time to switch up or down, so you don’t have to keep checking the watch even if you’re listening to music while you run.

But what is that integrated heart rate monitor like? Pretty awesome actually. For a start you can shave a few minutes off your preparation time, since you won’t have to find the chest strap, wet the electrodes, secure it around your chest and snap on the heart rate sensor. And not only is the HRM built into the Runner Cardio more convenient, it’s also every bit as accurate as a chest strap sensor.

We tested the Runner Cardio alongside a chest strap sensor over a 10km run, and for the most part the results were near identical. Not only that, because there’s no wireless transmission going on with the Runner Cardio, your heart rate measurement isn’t subject to the spikes and drop outs that can sometimes affect chest strap sensors.

TomTom has made it easy to make the most of that HRM functionality too, with a very simple implementation of training zones. The zones are split into Sprint, Speed, Endure, Fat Burn and Easy, and each has a default value assigned to it. You can customise the zones to suit your own needs though.

You can easily check what zone you’re in while you’re running, and if you’re embarking on a set of intervals, you can make sure you’re in the correct zones for your intense and recovery periods.

TomTom claims around eight hours of use from a full charge, assuming that you’re using both GPS and heart rate functionality. Battery life isn’t really something that bothered us during testing though, since we tended to leave the watch in its docking cradle between runs, ensuring that it was fully charged the next time we needed it.

Like the previous TomTom watches, the Runner Cardio uses a proprietary docking cradle for charging, which means that you will have to carry that cable with you if you want to charge away from home.

TomTom Runner Cardio web portal

When TomTom launched its GPS watches last year, its web portal was a major weak point. It was something of a work in progress, and couldn’t really compete with offerings from rivals such as Garmin or Polar. Today the TomTom MySports portal is a much better product, though still a fair way behind Garmin Connect, especially since Garmn updated its service recently.

But the best thing about TomTom MySports is that you don’t have to use it. You see TomTom makes it really easy to export your data to third party services. In fact, TomTom MySports is based on the Map My Fitness portal, with the two sites even sharing the same login.

The first thing we did when setting up the Runner Cardio, was pairing it with Strava. So now every time we sync our data with TomTom MySports, that data is also exported to Strava. And since Strava is our preferred activity logging service, we don’t even need to look at TomTom MySports unless we really want to.

You can also sync your data using the TomTom MySports app on your phone. This is pretty handy if you’re out and about, but still want to log some activity. To initiate the sync you need to navigate to the Phone setting in the watch menu and select the Sync option. The Runner Cardio will then connect to your phone and start to transfer its data.

The app isn’t the best we’ve seen, and layout, design and usability could be better. It also takes an absolute age to sync the data from the watch and upload it. That said, it’s not like the Garmin Connect app is much better when it comes to design and layout, although it does seem to sync data with devices far more quickly.

TomTom Runner Cardio Conclusion

The TomTom Runner Cardio isn’t cheap, but it’s one of those rare products that’s stuffed full of really innovative features, but is also incredibly easy to use. And when you factor in that no other sports watch offers heart rate monitoring without a chest strap, then that £220 asking price starts to look pretty reasonable.

There are sports watches with more features that will appeal to serious athletes and hardcore runners, but for the most part the TomTom Runner Cardio provides everything that you could want from a training partner.

There are a couple of niggles – the proprietary cable and slow syncing with the app – but they can’t take the shine off what is an undeniably great product. Ultimately, if we had to spend our own money, this is the running watch we’d buy.