Runalyzer Heart Rate Monitor Review

Runalyzer Heart Rate Key

The Runalyzer HR key is billed as a small widget that plugs into the bottom of your iPhone and allows your iPhone to receive HR information from the ‘analogue’ heart rate monitor belts such as the Polar T31 Coded – which I own.

I bought this as I thought it would give me a bit more information about my HR and allow me to do easily do zone training with the apps on my iPhone. I bought this back in October 2011 and it has, to be completely honest, been nothing but trouble.

Runalyzer just doesn’t work

I have only ever got it to work out on a run or cycle once or twice. I had a bit of support from the iSmoothRun guys and the Runalyzer people – apparently there was a bit of software issues at the beginning, but supposed they got ironed out. I tried the key numerous times and I either get no reading, or it reads for a few seconds/minutes and then just stops and it seems I am not the only one to have trouble with the Runalyzer Key.

It’s all a bit weird as it seems to work well with the Runalyzer Utility. I can sit at my desk and the utility will pick up my HR well and show me the graph of my rest heart rate, but when I put my phone into the arm band to go running and use iSmoothRun it seems to lose it’s marbles. Further support from Runalyzer wasn’t really forthcoming and has left me massively disappointed – just the usual read the manual kind of thing… thanks.

Giving up in frustration

I have now given up trying to use the thing and it is sitting on my desk gathering dust. I occasionally get it out in the vain hope that it might spring into life because someone updated some software – sadly this is yet to happen.

Needless to say that I really recommend you save your £49 for something more worthwhile.

1/10 – And I can’t even use it as a paperweight… 🙁