I didn’t intend on buying a TomTom Cardio spark activity/sports tracker when I found I had some credit card reward points to spend. I was planning on buying a different brand.
I spent days looking at devices mainly Garmin’s Vivoactive sportswatch and I was convinced I was going to buy one. I went to a local sports chain store, looked at the Garmin, spoke to the sales person about it but when asked about the heart rate monitor was told he didn’t know much about it so would get another assistant.
It was then that I was told the TomTom Spark Cardio had the better HRM and for some reason I decided on the that rather than the Garmin. I went to the cashier, swiped my bank rewards points cards and walked out with the Spark Cardio.
As I walked out of the store, and bought some sushi for lunch from a mall next door, I was happy enough.
Two days later, though, I was seriously contemplating taking it back to the store I bought it from and replacing it with something else. It just wasn’t doing it for me, for some reason.
I’d known TomTom’s was a powerhouse in the in-car GPS systems but I didn’t know anything about its sports/activity trackers so it’s a surprise to me that I bought it blindly without really knowing anything about it. That was out of character for me, but I decided to stick with it.
I used to have a FitBit Surge activity tracker but somehow my teenage swimmer son had commandeered it and I have an LG G Watch R smartwatch but ever since its battery died – and I couldn’t be arsed getting it replaced – I’ve had nothing that tracks my fitness activity: cycling, walking, the odd jog, apart from my phone – and I hate taking my phone with me all the time. I wanted an activity tracker so now I had a TomTom Spark Cardio.
The company’s Spark range comes in a variety of flavours – one without a HRM, one that can play music – but I picked the Cardio, which has a multisports mode (including indoor workouts), GPS tracking and a built-in heart rate monitor with five training zones.
It wasn’t particularly cheap: I paid $270 (well, I used $280 of reward points) but it was on special at the time so it’ll likely set you back $310 or so if you bought it when it’s not on sale from a bricks-and-mortar retailer.
Build quality.visual appeal
I’d be lying if the Spark Cardio was a looker. It’s not. It looks like a sports/activity tracker and it looks like a black plastic strap with an LCD monochrome screen. Designwise, it’s uninspiring, but TomTom have thought outside the box a little with it in that the main body can actually be detached from the rubber strap (it doesn’t have standard watch strap fittings like other sports/smart watches) and a new strap “wrapped” around it. Additional straps come in a variety of colours and designs.
TomTom has also “old-schooled” it in the interface, too: The Spark Cardio doesn’t have a touch screen as is the feature du jour at the moment: It has a four-way rocker that you use to scroll through the menus. I actually like the rocker and as those of us who have exercised then tried to swipe on a touch screen using a sweaty finger will know, a touch screen doesn’t always work.
The TomTom’s design is functional without being stunning. It also has a monochrome LCD display, which, again, I don’t have a problem with. It means the Spark Cardio has great battery life. The strap, too, is a little unconventional in that instead of having a buckle like a traditional watch the strap has dozens of holes punched into it and there are three pairs of pins that you push into the strap holes. It actually gives a remarkably good fit and is pretty comfortable.
One thing that I’m not that taken with is the charge cable: It’s a proprietary design and you have to actually pop the watch body out of the strap a little to clip the charge cable in. It’s clunky and I would have preferred a standard mini-USB port on the watch’s back.
The interface and the using watch itself
The Spark Cardio sports an LCD monochrome screen, which means that you’ll get good battery life out of it. TomTom says you’ll get about five days between charges using the GPS mode & xx days when not. I was getting about a week between charges, which was pretty good.
The Spark Cardio doesn’t have a touch screen so you use the four-way rocker to scroll between the various menus. The main screen shows the time in large numbers, which might be off-putting for some people, but I kind of like it. It also displays the date but it’s squeezed vertically in the right hand corner. It seems strange at first but you get used to it.
When the watch isn’t being used to track an activity (more on that later), pressing the left side of the rocker shows you steps for the day; pressing it again shows you steps for the week. A nice feature is pressing up on the rocker -pad from the weekly step count screen shows you how many hours of sleep you’ve managed this week (at the time of writing this, which was a Wednesday, I’d managed 21 hours of sleep).
Pressing right from the home screen takes you to the activity screen where you can select the activity you want to track. The TomTom has: Running, cycling, swimming, treadmill running, gym, indoor cycling, freestyle (which I think means walking or anything like that) and a stopwatch.
Once you’ve selected an activity, you press the rocker pad one more time to the right, giving you a screen that shows your heart rate, details about your activity (distance, time, speed) and the GPS lock, which is in the left hand corner.
The TomTom was pretty good at picking up the available GPS satellites, meaning I was generally up and running within a few seconds (the watch will vibrate when it has locked onto a signal). Sometimes, though, it seemed to take ages to find satellites, especially if I was mountain biking where there was a lot of trees. Overall, though, I was pleased with how quickly the Spark Cardio locked on to satellites.
I was interested to see how the Spark Cardio went with cycling, both road and mountain bike. I was pleased to see that I could upload my training data to Strava, a training data site that I use on my smart phone. You can also upload data from the Spark to a few training data portals like Endomondo, Nike+, Jawbone and MapMyFitness.
The Spark Cardio’s Heart Rate Monitor isn’t always on so you won’t be able to get your resting heart rate while you sitting on the couch. It’s only active when you’re doing an activity and it tracks your heart rate over the duration of your training session so you can analyse it later using TomTom’s MySports software (which is functional at best) or Strava’s own web portal. Personally, I checked all my data via Strava: It’s much better than TomTom’s MySports portal.
The Spark Cardio maps your activity using mapping software, which you can look through later. In the case of cycling, it showed me where my heart rate was its highest and what my speed was at particular points around a course.
The Spark Cardio’s display is bright and clear, with large numbers that are easy to read while on the go and while it didn’t display my heart rate on the screen it was recording it in the background, letting me view the data at the end of the ride. It has an ingenious way to activate the backlight at night: You just have to hold your hand over the screen and the back light comes on.
Things that bug me about the TomTom Spark Cardio
The more I’ve used the Spark Cardio the more I’m liking it. I like the easy to read display (especially as my eyesight seems to be getting worse the older I get), but it has a couple of niggles that annoy me.
For starters, the activity tracker doesn’t have an auto-pause. OK, not having auto-pause isn’t a deal breaker but the function is nice to have, especially if I’m, say, on a road bike ride and get stuck at traffic lights for a while. I’m hoping TomTom’s developers will bring this function at some point but it seems if comments from posters on the company’s support site are anything to go by, users have been waiting for a couple of years for the feature and don’t hold much hope of it becoming available.
It would also be nice if you didn’t have to scroll through so many screen when you’ve finished a workout. To reach the home screen from the activity tracking screen you have to press left on the rocker pad three times. Three times. That is quite a few. Picky? Yeah, maybe but not so many button presses would be nice.
Another gripe is that the watch body itself doesn’t always feel that secure housed in the strap, especially when you press on the rocker pad. Some times when I pressed left or right on the rocker pad I could feel the watch body move slightly. Nothing that was an issue but it was noticeable and annoying at times.
Overall, though, the TomTom Spark Cardio is really finding a place in my fitness schedule. In the space of a month, I’ve gone from not sure whether I wanted to keep it to finding it’s an invaluable part of my training programme.
Here’s hoping that TomTom support it and listen to its users.
