Junior wants and increasingly needs a swimming biased activity tracker. He's 9, swims for British Academy and needs to start timing his lengths/events.
Whats the recommendations?
If its swim specific you want then hard to look beyond the Swimovate Pool Mate which can be had for about £50 and probably a reasonable size for 9 year old.
i have a Garmin swim. You can upload to Garmin connect for a length by length analysis, battery is easy to replace.
If he swims for British Academy, surely he has a coach that’s there to time him, run the session etc?
Also, there’s never a shortage of people in white to time you at competitions (more likely fully electronic at that level)
swim trackers are generally good for freestyle, backstroke etc. Not much good for breaststroke or fly, utterly useless for drills. Fairly useless for self timing as there’s a big gap between touching the wall and hitting the button.
edit - oh yeah, he’ll get reported for wearing one at an event, not allowed anything on your wrist
I use a Garmin Vivoactive HR for swimming, but then I just do some lengths for cross training. It gets confused quite easily. When I use hand paddles, it quite regularly doesn’t pick up the turn.
http://www.wiggle.co.uk/garmin-vivoactive-hr-gps-smart-watch-wintegrated-hrm
I have a finger watch lap counter thingy for swimming. It goes on your first finger and you just hit the button with your thumb each length or lap. At the end of the session you get your average lap time and individual lap times. Pretty basic but functional, got it off Amazon for a few quid ages ago. Doesn't link up or connect to anything else as it's pretty old technology but it works so well for me I've never felt the need to upgrade to anything fancy. See a lady in the pool now and then with swimming specific garmin which has all the bells and whistles but she has problems with it's accuracy and she actually prefered the simple finger watch I had.
TomTom Spark.