Adidas MiCoach Smart Run review

The current crop of smart watches are little more than second screens for your smartphone, designed to let you know when you’re getting a call or should check your email. Not so with the Smart Run, the first fitness-oriented smart watch from Adidas. It is strictly designed for fitness fanatics to keep track of their performance without needing a host of other gadgets to monitor heart rate or location.

Unlike most other fitness trackers, which tend to require a separate heart rate monitor, the Smart Run has a light-based sensor built into the watch body to detect your pulse. This is convenient, as you don’t need to wear a chest strap, but will undoubtedly have an impact on battery life. It also has integrated Wi-Fi, which means you can sync your workout to the Adidas MiCoach website without having to boot up a PC first, along with GPS and Bluetooth.

At around 80g It’s rather bulky compared to a fitness band, and is even larger than Sony’s chunky Smartwatch 2, but still sits comfortably on the wrist. The metal and glass construction feels a lot more heavy duty than other fitness gadgets we’ve tried, but may put off those with smaller wrists. The rubber strap has plenty of holes to get a tight fit, which is necessary to get a precise heart rate reading. Two metal teeth lock the strap down so it doesn’t flap about when on the move.

The 1.45in LCD display doesn’t have a particularly high resolution; at 184×184 pixels, it’s easy enough to read the time but it’s a little trickier to enter text. You have to swipe through letters horizontally as there’s no room for a full keyboard, which can be quite time consuming.

Inside, a Texas Instruments OMAP4430 processor runs at a maximum 1.2GHz and is paired with 512MB of RAM. Together, they run a completely reskinned version of Android 4.1. However, that doesn’t mean you’ll be able to turn the Smart Run into a companion for your smartphone; Adidas has no plans to open up the watch to developers, so there’s no way to get notifications on your wrist.

4GB of onboard storage means you can fill the watch with more than enough music to get you through a training session or run; with a pair of Bluetooth headphones, you don’t need to carry any other tech to monitor your workout with your soundtrack of choice. After the latest firmware update, which arrived mid-way through this review, we had no trouble with Bluetooth dropouts – the MiCoach voiceover interrupts your tracks to provide instructions but otherwise it worked flawlessly.

The interface is split into four main sections; watch, training, music and settings. You swipe between each one using the touchscreen, then scroll up and down to go deeper into each section. The Training mode is naturally the most comprehensive, with a calendar showing your last week of workouts, workout regimes downloaded from the MiCoach website and a complete breakdown of your workout history.

You’ll need to use the MiCoach website to get the most from the Smart Run. It’s here you can review your workouts, charting pace, heart rate, speed, time and distance, or plot your route on a map using the GPS data. You can check specific values from any point in a run, dragging a runner icon to a particular position to find out where you were flagging or hit your stride.

It’s here you can plan ahead using pre-built training regimes or designing your own to suit your particular goals. If you program weight exercises or stretches, the watch will display animations to show you correct form the next time it syncs with the MiCoach website.

You’ll need to acquire GPS and heart rate measurements before setting off on a run; the watch won’t actually start monitoring until it secures both. It took roughly 20 seconds to get a heart rate reading, but over a minute to acquire a GPS lock. Once on the move, the watch displays your pace, time and heart rate, as well as distance covered. It can feel a little crowded, but at least all the relevant information is available at a glance.

Unfortunately if you’re more of a gym addict than outdoor runner, the Smart Run can only use its accelerometer and heart rate monitors to track your progress. When you add the data to the MiCoach website, it can’t provide feedback and there’s no treadmill setting on the watch itself; we had to use free workout mode, which doesn’t adjust to suit non-moving exercises. There are options to measure running, walking, cycling, Nordic Skiing (of all activities) and Other on the watch itself, although you can choose from a wider selection of sports and activities through the MiCoach website.

Unfortunately, features like Bluetooth music streaming and the light-based heart rate sensor have a negative impact on battery live. From a full charge first thing in the morning, you’ll be lucky if the Smart Run lasts an entire day – and that’s without using any of its battery-draining features like GPS, Wi-Fi sync or Bluetooth. If you go for a run, don’t expect more than four to five hours from a single charge. This is terrible compared to other fitness bands and watches, which typically last several days on a single charge, and even poor compared to the current crop of smart watches – the Samsung Galaxy Gear will last up to two days between recharges. A firmware update has reportedly improved battery life for some users, but we had to return our review sample before being able to test it fully.

The main culprit is the LCD screen, which never fully deactivates. Although the backlight isn’t at full brightness until you press the physical button below it, the dim backlight is still draining power. We would have preferred the screen to deactivate completely, waking at low brightness with one touch and reaching full brightness after a second press. You can manually adjust the brightness to 5% of its maximum to save power, but this makes the screen difficult to read in bright sunlight. On the plus side, the watch recharges from dead in around an hour, but you’ll be doing this frequently using the bundled charging dock and USB cable.

In spite of this major flaw, the MiCoach is still one of the most comprehensive fitness gadgets around. It eliminates the need for an MP3 player and separate heart rate monitor, has an in-depth training scheduler and doesn’t need to be connected to a PC to sync your data. However, battery life is a real stumbling block and the price is high; at £300 it’s more than £100 more than other fitness watches like the TomTom Multi-Sport. If you can live with the need to constantly recharge it, and want an all-in-one device with detailed training and feedback, the MiCoach is still worth a look, but ultimately we think a cheaper, less power-hungry gadget would be a better choice for most people.