Nike+ v.s. Garmin 301 – running geeks

I’ve started running again 2 years ago, never been a rock star when it comes to running and never actually really got to learn how to run (and no it’s *not* straightforward).
In my case, using a heart monitor has been critical in getting to run up to 15km tracks. Indeed, the heartbeat tells you in which effort zone you are in and for instance I know that when i get above 176bpm I’m starting to burn out and need to relax a bit if I want to run much longer.
To evaluate the effort my requirements are then:

• heart rate
• distance / time
• elevation
• custom workouts
• social integration

I’ve had a Garmin Forerunner 301 for some time now and recently tried the Nike+ since I got my iPhone 4. Basically as a gadget geek I was counting on Nike+ to add to my running experience the “fun” and “social” and maybe replace the Garmin which had been doing a great job till now. Yes the Nike+ solution is way below my expectations. Whenever you do some speed workouts, alternating faster and slower pace, the distance measured by the podometer becomes totally irrelevant, the website (full Flash – kinda weird for an apple partner) is far from being ergonomic, I always have trouble navigating between my runs, the social aspects are limited to publishing to facebook or twitter and of course the soft on the mobile is not using any GPS at all thus no cool map to share online.

on the other side Garmin has released Garmin Connect based on Motionbased acquisition last year and while the service is far from funky it gives perfectly good stats and overview of the run to share.

Finally the fact that the Nike+ software is burnt in the Flash of the iPhone just makes it hard to update and breaks any hope of getting anything decent from this service. On the other side, iPhone has some other nice software such as runkeeper to try out which are taking advantage of the GPS to build nice track logs to share.