Suunto PC Pod Review

The Suunto PC Pod is very small USB stick that allows the Suunto heart rate monitor range (T3C, T4C, and apparently the T6c) to wirelessly connect to your PC and connect to Suunto’s free Training Manager Lite software.

So what does it do exactly and how useful is it?

Having had the T4c for a few months now, I am completely head over heels about it. It has revolutionized the way I train vs just training blindly (but with tons of stats). As you may recall from my review, the T4c has a coach feature which adapts to your training style and recommends what you should be doing to improve.

Well, after you’re done logging all those exercises, you can either leave them on your watch, or you can offload them for further analysis. This is where the PC pod comes into play.

The Training Manager Lite software effectively allows you to keep all of your workouts organized and analyze them in far greater detail than you could in the watch. I have found that it is useful as a visualization tool and as and ongoing log of your activities. Whilst the software is important, I want to focus more on the PC pod itself as there are plenty of other review sites that cover the Suunto software vs the Polar Software vs the Garmin software.

What is worth noting is that the Suunto PC Pod is by far the easiest of all my heart rate monitors for data transfers. Unlike the Polar where I have to align the infrared lights to the USB stick (usually leading to at least one connection failure) the Suunto PC Pod connects wirelessly (via RF vs IrDA) to the watch. In addition, and by far the coolest feature of the PC pod is that because it uses the same protocol that the heart belt strap uses to talk to the watch, you can use it with the software to have a real time monitoring of your heart rate on your PC. In other words, you can use your PC as a heart rate monitor big screen. This is extremely useful if you are doing indoor cycling with a turbo trainer or anything where you want to see things ‘bigger’.

All in all, I think it is a pretty nifty product, it hasn’t let me down yet connectivity-wise, and I’ve been using it to download all my exercises from my T4c for further analysis and logging.

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