Wahoo Blue HR Heart Rate Strap
02 Apr 2013 - DaveI used RunKeeper for a few years . When looking for a heart rate monitor I looked in their online store first and found the Wahoo Blue HR.
A couple other heart rate monitors were considered also. Many health monitoring devices require an Ant+ dongle for wireless connectivity. My iPhone 5 has the new Lightning connector and the Ant+ dongles are for the older, 30 pin connectors. I wanted to avoid too many adapters & connectors. That’s just more stuff to loose or fail.
After reading some of the customer reviews I almost scratched the Wahoo HR Strap. The problems didn’t sound like they were problems with the product though.
Amazon customer reviews of the Wahoo Blue HR Strap
- One of the problems was pairing the strap to the smart phone. The Wahoo Blue HR Strap is pretty simple. There is a strap and the device has a CR2032 watch battery. There are no on/off buttons or display. Documentation was sparse. It is easy to see why many reviewers thought the product was DOA. A big problem was confusion over Bluetooth Smart devices and what that meant. The iPhone 4S and iPhone 5 work with Bluetooth 4 or Bluetooth Smart devices while the iPhone 4, 3 do not. The third gen iPad supports Bluetooth 4/Smart but older ones and most tablets do not. Many Android phones do not support Bluetooth 4/Smart. It isn’t hard to understand the confusion. Wahoo Fitness should have done a better job to make it clear that the Blue HR Strap requires a Bluetooth Smart compatible phone or tablet.
- Another issue that appeared a few times is the HR Strap loosing connection. Wahoo Fitness does state in their instructions that the contacts in the strap should be moistened. The Heart Rate Strap did not show up for pairing in the RunKeeper App until the contacts were moistened pretty well. Once they were moistened it worked fine for the hour or so of exercise.