{"id":3340,"date":"2012-07-11T19:57:06","date_gmt":"2012-07-11T23:57:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kodegeek.com\/blog\/?p=3340"},"modified":"2012-12-23T12:08:18","modified_gmt":"2012-12-23T17:08:18","slug":"nike-sportwatch-gps-1-year-later-ready-to-go-to-the-garbage-can","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/kodegeek.com\/blog\/2012\/07\/11\/nike-sportwatch-gps-1-year-later-ready-to-go-to-the-garbage-can\/","title":{"rendered":"Nike+ SportWatch GPS: 1 year later, ready to go to the garbage can"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Nike+
\nGood bye watch, one year is so little time for a gadget to last…<\/a><\/p>\n

How I fell in love with my watch<\/h1>\n

I ran my first race with the Nike GPS watch on Aug 17, 2011 at 6:50 pm; It was a 3.1 mile run, at a pace of 8’43 \/ mile. It was nothing stellar yet I was excited because I was kicking the tires of my new watch with GPS and I had no need to use an IPhone or an Android to see how much farther away I ran (before that I was using my Nike+ Ipod nano).<\/p>\n

Yes, I was so excited about the new watch, so simple to use, that I even played hacking my data from the NikeRunning<\/a> website.<\/p>\n

\"NikeSupport
\nNike support on Tweeter. Very slow, lack of answers<\/a><\/p>\n

But today, almost one year later, my watch stopped talking with my computer. The software doesn’t recognize the watch anymore so I decided to contact Nike on tweeter first to figure out if the latest software upgrade on their Nike+ Connect software had a bug.<\/p>\n

So I wrote and after waiting 3 hours with no further reply from their support I decided to give them a phone call (I actually used the callback service).<\/p>\n

The called within a minute and asked me to try several options (restart your watch, re-install the software, reboot the machine, install on a different machine) and nothing worked. So looks like is a hardware problem and if I have the purchase receipt AND if the warranty is still under one year I can get a replacement, no questions asked.<\/p>\n

So my watch is barely a year old and no receipt. Here are the bad news: Nike doesn’t re-furbish their watches, they don’t offer to repair it and there is no option to buy a new watch at discount. You have to buy a brand new watch, with a warranty of only one year.<\/p>\n

While $160 won’t exactly break your bank account it also true that you expect a Nike watch to last more than a year; Now my data is trapped inside the watch with no way to recover it. To make things worst I also purchased the Polar Band to capture my heart beat while running, so that is another device that I cannot use now.<\/p>\n

The aftermath<\/h1>\n

So the watch is busted. Looking through Google I found http:\/\/nikewatchrepair.com\/. They charge you $12 just to receive your watch and later they tell you how much the full repair will cost, but before I asked them if they support my model and they never got back to me.<\/p>\n

Repair is also not possible. Now I have a powerful watch that can capture heartbeats and distance using the GPS and yet cannot export the data.<\/p>\n

So what went wrong here?<\/h1>\n

There is nothing wrong on Nike offering only one year of warranty for the watch, that seems to be the standard; Also it is my fault that I did not keep the receipt after the purchase which limits greatly my options.<\/p>\n

But Nike dropped the ball here on the following:<\/p>\n