Training with the Leikr

[welchomatic]

I am hoping folks considering buying a Leikr Sports watch find my review of the watch and running/biking with it helpful in making a decision.

I have been an avid user of the MotoACTV watch, having gone through three of them. Eventually Motorola closed it's data portal, and I had to move on. I decided to list the things that made me like the MotoACTV so much,and look for a watch that had those features. I wound up asking for the Leikr as a christmas give for December 2015. I have to say that for as late as my wife ordered it, I was stunned at how fast it got from Denmark to USA. FIVE STARS on delivery!

Fast GPS lock: Leikr advertises a fast lock. In reality, it regularly took over a half hour to even find a single satellite. I am a distance runner, so I got to test it out on a three hour run. It took two and a half hours to lock on, into the run AFTER sitting outside in direct view of a cloudless sky for 45 minutes. How accurate is the GPS when it does lock? For various 5K runs, the total distance has been as little as 54 meters and as many as 27.8 miles. There is absolutely NO correlation between the distance you run and the distance the watch records.

Ability to tell what time of day it is: If the watch is dormant, the time of day is almost an inch high. But when you press any button, the time of day shrinks down to 4 pixels. Worthless.

Haptics: One thing I didn't like about the MotoACTV was that the only way to get feedback was to have headphones plugged into the watch and listen. The Leikr has a haptic motor, which I thought was great. However, every time the watch changes the number of satellites it sees, it buzzes. And it buzzes every time you pass a mile. So due to the above point, the watch is buzzing constantly. There is a setting to disable haptics, but it does little good. The watch will buzz it's way to a dead battery. I find this very distracting. When I am doing an endurance workout, I want a clean mind, not one that's jarred into alert every few minutes because my wrist is vibrating.

Ease of Use: The MotoACTV had a touch screen, which I liked, but figures a well designed menu could work well with the four buttons around the watch face. True, IF the buttons were not so hard to push. You need to stop running, focus on pressing a button, and press quite hard.

Syncing: I liked that the MotoACTV used to sync wirelessly to the cloud as soon as it saw a valid hotspot. The Leikr requires that you press a button to save your workout, and press two buttons to sync. This is OK, except that around April, the watch stopped accepting workouts that were to be sent to Strava. Emails to Leikr asking when this would be corrected were replied to WELL BEFORE a complete month expired, saying the issue would be resolved soon, and that my workouts would be saved, and available when the problem was corrected. It's almost August, and I'm sure there is a frenzy of activity at Leikr, long nights, lots of coffee as they work to resolve this issue. I think it should be working any minute now. By the way, the watch only holds 16 workouts. Older workouts appear to roll off the back end.

Charging: The watch comes with a $50 cheap USB docking station. My watch may or may not charge after being firmly placed in the docking station. I like surprises, and one that Leikr provides me nearly every time I try to use the watch, is to find that it is completely discharged despite my double checking that the charging battery indicator was on when I placed the watch in the docking station.

Frequent Software Updates: I guess they had perfected the software prior to my purchase of the watch, as those have stopped. GREAT WORK, Leikr! You DID IT!

Customer Support: Several Emails had been sent by me to Liekr support. Two of them were replied to (again, WELL before a month had expired) telling me they understood my frustration. and.... nothing else. no suggestions, no attempts to remedy the problem. Just that they could feel that i was a bit upset. I went to the Kickstarter page to look for the folks in charge of this project, and then went on to Linkedin to see if they still work at Leikr/Acorn Projects. Nope! They've all moved on to other projects, to help make the world a better place. Good luck, Team!

In my last email to Liekr, titled "Why are you still selling this watch", I asked them to please open source the code for the watch so that the few remaining users of the watch could make it a useable product. THAT got a response. I have been invited to return my watch to Leikr for a refund. I did so, with Signature Required, and for some reason, think that my $480USD has flown the coop, never to be seen again. Let's hope this company can do SOMETHING right.

My overall rating - Steaming pile of goo out of five stars. I'm sorry I ever crossed paths with this company and it's watch.