Garmin Forerunner 305 - Gadgets of Desire

I was lucky enough to borrow one of these from a friend the other day and took it for a run. What is it? - do I hear you say. It's a Garmin Forerunner 305 - top of the range, don't cha know. In the UK it goes for about £159 but in the US it sells for about $219, which is much better if you have a friend in the States who can bring one over!!

Well it's like a GPS for the body rather than the car. Strap it to your wrist and it tells you your heart rate, pace, altitude and route plus all the usual timing stuff. You can also use it when you are out on the bike.

Then once it starts to build up a picture of your state of health and performance it gives you training and pacing recommendations.

A cool bit at the beginning, when you turn it on, is the watch has to aquire all of the satellites that it needs and you can see them all zipping about on the screen. When they get 'grabbed' they change from white to black.

Once you've done your training you bring it home and dock it into the station connected to your PC and it charges back up as well as downloading all of the data.

The software reveals even more about the routes and performance. Two downers are that it doesn't work on Mac and export functions are limited - I'd liked to have seen an 'export to CSV' function.

Desired.