Main screen with barometer graph
By Hollis Easter
The Tech4o TraiLeader Pro watch is so mind-bendingly powerful that it’s taken me weeks just to figure out how to start this review (and I’m grateful to Tech4o for its indulgent patience with me). The watch has so many functions that I think it would overwhelm you if I just started listing them, so I’ll post a series of reviews that each talk about some of the TraiLeader Pro’s features.
I’ve been wearing the TraiLeader Pro as my daily watch since it arrived, and it’s also joined me on every athletic outing, from cross-country skiing to the gym to the summits of two of New York’s highest peaks. Although the watch is a bit large, I’ve adapted to it, and it no longer seems out of place on my wrist. Size is a small price to pay for the many features of the TraiLeader Pro, although people with smaller wrists might notice the size more.
Log Mode showing change in elevation
If you’d like an exhaustive list of the TraiLeader Pro’s functions, I would encourage you to check out Tech4o’s website. The TraiLeader Pro is the top end of their TraiLeader line, and it features weather monitoring functions, heart rate monitor, accelerometers for tracking distance, flexible data-logging options, and the ability to transmit its stored data–wirelessly–to a computer for later review. It’s a pretty amazing device given that it only weighs 1.8 oz (50 g).
I find the elastomer wrist band to be very comfortable. It’s a soft, flexible sort of plastic with lots of ventilation holes; these double as adjustment points for wrist size. I like the fact that the wrist band allows fine-grained size adjustment, since my wrists sometimes swell after a long day of hiking.
The TraiLeader Pro uses a single (user-replaceable) CR2032 lithium watch battery. Access is via a coin-operated plate on the back of the watch. The watch seems to conserve battery power in a number of ways. For example, I’ve noticed that when I’m hiking in altimeter mode, the watch initially updates the altimeter every few seconds, but it switches to a slower update schedule when I haven’t pressed the buttons for a while.
Log Mode showing walking speed measurements
In order to make the gargantuan set of functions usable by us mortals, Tech4o has organized the watch’s tools into two menus: the Time Menu and the Trail Menu. The Time Menu handles normal time display, the watch’s two alarms, its chronograph and timer, and the dual time zone mode. Trail Mode covers the more battery-intensive features: altimeter, barometer, digital compass, data logbook, distance traveled, heart rate, calories burned, and a user-programmable data screen.
Although the list of capabilities is long, the watch is quite simple to use–I figured it out within the first few minutes of playing with it. I’d rather not bore you with the navigation details, since they’re easily discovered with the watch in hand. Suffice it to say that the learning curve is initially daunting but quite quick.
When I’m in town, I spend most of my time in the Time Menu, on the main time display. This gives me clock time, date, and a graphical representation of barometric pressure trend, altitude trend, day of the week, current weather (pressure-based), or ambient temperature. I usually leave it set on pressure trend, and I’ve found it quite interesting to have an easy barometric pressure reference. I’ve always known that my headaches were tied to weather, but I now can tell that when I see the barometer dropping suddenly, a migraine is likely to follow. I can then take my anti-migraine pills if I feel the need. It’s handy!
The standard watch functions are all there, and they all work in a pretty standard way. One thing I dislike: in timer mode, the watch offers courtesy beeps at 10 minutes, 5 minutes, 60 seconds, 50 seconds, 40 seconds, 30 seconds, 20 seconds, 10 seconds, 9 seconds, 8 seconds, 7 seconds, 6 seconds, 5 seconds, 4 seconds, 3 seconds, 2 seconds, 1 second, and 0 seconds before the end of the timer. If that sentence seemed annoyingly monotonous to you, you understand why I wish it were possible to turn off these courtesy beeps. It’s a minor annoyance, though.
The watch comes with a battery-powered chest strap that measures heart rate and communicates it wirelessly to the watch. I use the heart rate monitor every time I go to the gym for a cardio workout, since the data logging allows me to see exactly what my heart rate did in relation to my workout. The chest strap is comfortable and I barely notice it once it warms up to body temperature, although it does tend to slip downward when I do pullups. The watch and chest strap seem immune to interference from other heart monitors, unlike my last HRM monitor watch.
I often wear the heart rate monitor while I’m hiking, too. I tend to leave the watch set on the Altimeter mode (if I’m not wearing the strap) or the User mode with altimeter and heart rate selected (if I am wearing the strap. Since I’m a mountain addict, altitude is a valuable data point on my hikes. Compared to my other digital altimeter, the TraiLeader Pro tends to read about 80 feet lower while I’m moving, but they quickly approach each other once I stop. This is within the bounds of acceptable error for me, especially given that altimeters are affected by air temperature (which varies from 92 degrees on my skin to -30 degrees in the air right next to my skin).
User Mode showing heart rate, altitude, and time
One fly in the ointment: I really dislike the calibration mechanism on the altimeter. Since pressure altimeters like this one measure air pressure, it’s necessary to re-calibrate them periodically when they’re at known elevation. (This is true of all pressure altimeters, not merely the TraiLeader Pro.)
Two things irk me about the altimeter calibration. First, it starts the recalibration procedure from wherever I last recalibrated the watch, NOT from my current altitude. As an example, suppose that I calibrated my watch at 1200 feet. I then climbed to the summit of Rocky Peak Ridge at 4420 feet, and observed that the watch read “4580 feet”. It would be great if the watch would start at 4580 feet and let me bump it down 160 feet, but it actually starts at 1200 feet, requiring a gain of 3220 feet.
That would be trivial, but the reset mechanism “accelerates” the longer I hold the buttons down. It accelerates so quickly that I usually end up overshooting my goal by several thousand feet, and I then have to repeat the process in the other direction, and repeat again. If I could offer a suggestion to Tech4o, it would be this: make the altimeter recalibrate from current elevation, and get rid of the acceleration function. Both make your watch harder to use.
Most of the time, though, absolute altitude doesn’t matter that much in the Adirondacks. I want to know how quickly I’m gaining elevation or losing it, and though it would be nice to know the exact altitude, it’s not critical. So I tend to set the altitude in the morning and forget it (although I always re-calibrate on the summits with my other altimeter).
It’s great to be able to suck all that data up into my computer for review, since I’m a data geek. I went through a life-threatening illness in 2008, followed by major surgery, so I’m interested in tracking my recovery. The TraiLeader Pro gives me some very useful tools for doing that, including the ability to graph heart rate, altitude, speed, and various other things on the same program. That lets me see where on the hike my pulse went up. I’m really enjoying having access to the information.
The TraiLeader Pro is great. I love it so far, and if Tech4o would fix the altimeter calibration, the watch would be basically perfect in my book. As it is, I wear it every day and am grateful for the information it provides. I look forward to writing about it more!
– Hollis
