handheld gps units

After giving it a full charge, 3 hours, I took it out for a test drive. For the first 30 minutes I could not pick up a signal in Miami. I did a hard reset and it picked it up within 3 minutes. Went for a 3 mile run around a local 9-hole golf course, heavily ligned with trees, and to my amazement never lost contact with the signal. Was extremely accurate in measuring the distance and having a pace time allows you to really push yourself. Backlight can be kep on during the whole run - great feature for night running - or 2, 1, .5, .25 minutes. Much smaller than I expected. Love the display. Would recommend to anyone who runs, jogs, walks for exercise.

I got the Forerunner just in time to start the new year, and it has been a great motivational tool to keep me running on a regular basis. Just seeing it on my desk makes me want to go for a run!

I run a number of different routes, and it is nice to be able to alter them on the fly to keep my distances fairly consistent. I've used it for walking, running and on my bike to check speeds and distances, and it's easy to delete workouts if you don't want bike or walk data polluting your running logs. If you're running in the dark you can press the power button briefly to turn on the (very nice golden) back light for about 15 seconds at a time.

The only problem that I've had is after changing my weight settings the calorie counter seems to be a bit whacked out - 216 calories to run 6.27 miles in under an hour at 175 lbs. doesn't seem quite correct. Hopefully new firmware or a reset will correct it, but I'll wait until after the PC log software is released before trying to correct it.

It's easy to strap onto a bike that has a thick cyclometer or light mount on the handlebar, so I can't imagine buying the bike adapter at this point.

Great product. Haven't been so happy on the bleeding edge since getting my first generation iPod.

I am very disappointed in the Forerunner 201. It loses GPS signal far too frequently. I run in a golf course community with average to below average tree cover. In a 7 mile run the Forerunner lost GPS 20 times, including at an open-grass field retention pond. I checked one of my other GPS, a Garmin eMap, and it showed that there were 10 satellites available at the time. So I rate the Forerunner as a very poor GPS.

The most important feature to me was being able to see current pace. It was displaying 8:41 pace all the time, and I knew I was doing my standard 6:45. I imagine this error is due in part to losing GPS signal. I changed the pace smoothing setting to "least" to get a more instant value, but it's still not matching up entirely. 7:10 displayed when I'm doing 6:45's.

The autolap feature has been very buggy. You will often hear it beep at an autolap, and within a minute you'll hear it beep an autolap again. I left it at the default 1-mile setting, and the first day I used it it had autolapped 8 miles in a distance that it itself had measured to be only 3.3 miles!

There is also a minor rounding bug. If you set your training partner for 6:20/mile and later check this setting you'll see 6:19. This is probably due to 6:20 being stored as 6.33333 internally, which converts back to 6:19 without rounding.

The unit attaches to the wristband with short fabric. There's too much play in this fabric, 3/8-inch, and the unit flops on your wrist when you run. It would be better if there was 1/8 to 1/16-inch of play in the fabric.