TRIED & TESTED

ALL THE LATEST GEAR, KIT, NUTRITION PRODUCTS AND BOOKS

Poolmate Plus

Swimovate.com

£90

The Poolmate Plus is a relatively recent offering from Swimovate, the company that makes watches that count your lengths while you swim. Its stand-out feature from the rest of the range is its use of NFC (Near Field Communications) technology to share data with your phone or tablet (as long as it’s an Android). But more on that shortly. Let’s have a quick look at the watch itself.

Pricewise, the Poolmate Plus is in the middle of the Swimovate range, sitting alongside Poolmate Live. However, the latter requires an additional data transfer cable, which costs £30, if you want to transfer the data to a computer. Ignoring the NFC data transfer for now, the Poolmate Plus offers two additional data points to the entry-level Poolmate2: stroke rate and stroke length. Otherwise, it is similar both in looks (although Poolmate2 has additional colour choices) and functionality, featuring lap counting, stroke count, total distance, speed, time and a measure of your swimming efficiency. The one function we felt was lacking, and which is available on the more expensive models, is a length-by-length breakdown of your swim. So, for example, you can see your total time and average number of strokes for a set, but you can’t see if your speed and stroke rate was changing during that set.