Tech 4 O Accelerator Men's Hiker Watch

List Price: $84.99
Category: Sports
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Equipment Details

• Stylish men's hiking wristwatch with built-in accelerometer for gauging distance
• Produces highly accurate readings of user's speed, distance, and caloric expenditure
• Adjustable step counter accounts for walking style, stride, terrain, and pack weight
• Built-in stopwatch and countdown timer; powerful 7-day, 10-week memory
• Clock with 12/24-hour time, date, and daily alarm; 1-year warranty

Sports reviews of Tech 4 O Accelerator Men's Hiker Watch

Customer Review: Insane that this is a $42 watch
Sport shop rating: 5 Stars

Description of Tech 4 O Accelerator Men's Hiker Watch

Speed & Distance Pedometer

• Highly accurate step counter with adjustable sensitivity allows users to tune the sensors to their individual walking style. Doctors everywhere are now recommending 10k steps a day to maintain a healthier lifestyle.
• All sensors are contained in a simple wrist watch. That means no funny looking mechanical belt clips our funky shoe pods.
• Get off the beaten path! Free yourself from mileage markers at the track or trail! Pick a new route every day! The Accelerator can automatically distinguish between running and walking, and can calculate your average speed, distance, caloric expenditure, and total exercise time.
• The Accelerator has a delayed step counter feature that differentiates between ancillary movements and actual steps. This feature provides users with the most accurate results by delaying calculation until it has registered 10 steps in a row to eliminate false step counting.
• The smart scheduling features allows users to set the pedometer to automatically start/stop counting steps at a predetermined time every day, so you'll never forget to turn it on.

Personal Profile

• This feature allows users to customize their watch to their specific body type and walking/running style. No matter how fast or slow, tall or short, each user can personally enter their weight, average walking stride, and average running stride in order to ensure accurate results.
• Hikers can easily account for loaded pack weights.
• Runners can dial in the stride length to account for varying terrain and/or speed workouts.
• Quickly adjust weight and stride lengths as conditioning improves.

Chronograph

• The accelerator series? powerful stopwatch features allow users to record exact results to within 1/100th of a second for up to 50 laps and a total time of 24 hours.
• Although the watch has several advanced ways of calculating speed and distance, the old-school chronograph still has a place and purpose.

Countdown Timer

• A simple countdown timer can come in real handy at times. Set it for 10 minutes as a quick reminder. Use it to monitor your running/walking pace and set speed goals. Alternative Time Zone
• Great for those that travel! Allows users to set and display an alternative time zone along with the current home time display. Never lose track of time no matter where you are.

Daily Alarm Mode

• We are all creatures of habit in our daily routines. The daily alarm is a great way to set a daily reminder or morning wake up alarm.

How the Technology Works
The underlying technology in the Accelerator Series Watches is an accelerometer sensor. Accelerometers are used to measure acceleration. Originally developed during the Space Race to replace outdated gyroscopes, accelerometers can be found in a diverse range of today?s products such as automobile air bags and tilt meters. In the Accelerator watch, a user's movement (acceleration) produces varying degrees of electric current within the sensor, allowing the watch to detect different levels of acceleration, and therefore measure speed and distance.

Another way to explain how an accelerometer sensor works is to envision a marble in a bowl. When the bowl is moved, or accelerated, the marble inside will roll (accelerate) along the bottom and sides of the bowl. When the bowl is accelerated faster, the marble will move a greater distance up the sides. The accelerometer sensor in the Accelerator Series watch acts like an electronic marble in a bowl. With every step forward, the wearer of the watch (bowl) is accelerating forward. By measuring the acceleration of the "marble", the software inside the watch can then calculate the wearer?s speed and distance.

The Competition
There are really only a few different ways to calculate the speed and distance of human-powered, on-foot travel. The first was basic math, next came the mechanical pedometer, followed by satellite tracking GPS years later. Mechanical pedometers are cheap and abundant, but also highly unreliable. They operate on a simply pendulum clicker that relies on the walker?s hip movement to count steps. Unfortunately, mechanical pedometers end up counting a lot of non-walking movements and assume that walkers are making consistent and repetitive steps.

GPS technology is impressive, but also expensive, complex, and not always ideal for outdoor activities or indoor training. Satellite signals can be lost in heavily forested areas, indoors, or behind large buildings and receiving signals eats up batteries. When a good signal can be found, often the device does not receive info often enough to account for twisty backcountry trails.

The Future
The Tech 4 O Accelerator Series fills the void between old mechanical pedometers and the overkill of GPS. A simple, yet versatile, wrist-watch design can provide extremely accurate speed and distance data in all conditions.

Sports and Outdoors