TomTom Runner 3

The TomTom Runner 3 is a runner’s watch for the fitness-obsessed masses. It costs as little as a third the price of a high-end runner’s watch or Android Wear smartwatch, but still gets you full GPS multi-sport tracking, great battery life and a smart-enough look.

For those wondering how this differs from the Runner 2, this new version has a compass and very basic on-screen route tracking that should help you out if you get hopelessly lost during a walk out in the wilderness. But it is otherwise pretty similar.

There are still no true smartwatch functions beyond the sporty stuff, and a few parts of the TomTom Runner could do with a redesign. But for those serious about training, even if it’s a couch-to-5k plan, this watch is far better than the average Android Wear watch.

TomTom Runner 3 price and release date

• Out now
• Starts cheap at $120, £120 (roughly AU$160)
• Four models to choose from

The TomTom Runner 3 is out now and starts at around $120, £120 (roughly AU$160) for the GPS-only model, rising to $150, £150 (around AU$200) for a Runner 3 with added Bluetooth headphones and 3GB of storage for music, then $170, £170 (roughly AU$230) for one with a heart rate monitor.

The top model with the lot costs $220, £220, AU$400. Though in all cases you can often find the Runner 3 for less if you shop around.

Design

• Silicone strap with hard plastic watch ‘brain’
• Chunky control pad
• Less bulky than a high-end sports watch

When you buy a TomTom Runner 3 you have a few choices to make. First: color. There’s a black version with green highlights and a pink one with orange highlights. The straps come in small and large sizes.

Whatever choice you make, the TomTom Runner 3 looks just like the Runner 2. A small square screen and carbuncle of a controller below make up a plastic module that sits in a silicone strap. You can take the module out completely to give the strap a wash should it get caked in grime after a Tough Mudder or particularly muddy 5K.

The control pad below the screen tells anyone looking that the TomTom Runner 3 isn’t a normal digital watch, but it is far less big and bulky than something like the Garmin Fenix 5. You don’t have to be running every day to get accused of being an “all the gear, no idea” type with this watch.

Its control pad is one of the few parts of the TomTom Runner that feels a little cheap. It looks a bit like a fingerprint scanner, but the square in the middle is actually just an immovable piece of plastic. Instead, you press the four sides of the border to control the watch.

The chunkiness is deliberate, designed to make controlling it while running easy, but pressing ‘down’ in particular can feel a bit awkward.

In practical terms it’s fine, you can easily use it with sweat pouring into your eyes and your lungs burning, but it could do with a tweak in the next refresh of this line.

Display

• Monochrome low-res display
• Very clear on a bright day
• Uses a dim front light for night use

You use this pad to do everything, as the display is not a touchscreen. It’s a small 22 x 25mm monochrome LCD with a front light, not a backlight like most LCDs.

It looks like an inverted Amazon Kindle screen: the background is black, text a greyish white. It’s a great screen for a device like this that needs to show stats, not games or videos.

In a dark room it looks dim, and won’t be visible at all unless you enable the backlight. However, on a bright day it will be clearer than any OLED or LCD smartwatch. Like a Garmin Forerunner, it feeds off ambient light rather than competing with it.

The 144 x 168 resolution would seem terrible in an Android Wear watch, but it looks perfectly fine in a run tracker. More pixels would make text sharper, but not necessarily any clearer.

Specs, performance and fitness

• Optional heart rate sensor and Bluetooth headphones
• Multi-sport tracking, but no open water swimming
• 5ATM water resistance
• Fair HR performance for running

TomTom sells the Runner 3 with and without Bluetooth headphones and music storage, and with and without a heart rate sensor. Each adds roughly $50/£50 to the price. The headphones have a neckband design and controls on the right earpiece, and they’re easy to set up.

Simply press ‘up’ from the default screen and the TomTom Runner 3 looks for a pair of headphones with which to connect. You put the earphones in pairing mode by pressing the power button until you hear a tone, as with most wireless pairs.

In sound quality terms, though, they’re comprehensively beaten by the $50/£40 (around AU$65) Skullcandy Method Wireless, which are less scratchy and harsh sounding than this pair.

The TomTom Runner 3 seems to be willing to connect to just about any standard Bluetooth set, so the included headphones aren't your only option.

Syncing music is another slightly awkward part of the TomTom Runner 3. You need to connect the watch over USB to a computer, then use TomTom’s desktop sync software to import playlists (rather than albums/tracks) over to the watch. 

It should auto-populate any playlists you have in iTunes or Windows Media player, although we spent about half an hour getting the music selection sorted. There’s 3.2GB of space to play with on the Runner 3, enough for 10-20 albums.

The average smartwatch can take on dozens of roles if you get imaginative about it, but the TomTom Runner 3 has about four. We’ve covered one already, a lo-fi music player.

Then there’s a watch, which the TomTom Runner 3 does admirably thanks to its low-power always-on display, although you can’t change the watch face, which uses lightly styled numbers.

The third job is basic fitness tracker, as the TomTom Runner 3 makes a solid Fitbit-style step counter. Press ‘left’ from the clock face and you’ll see your step count for the day. Press it again and you’ll see the count for the week.

The final and most important role for the TomTom Runner 3 is the GPS exercise tracker. Press ‘right’ from the clock screen and you reach the activity list. There’s a bunch. Those that use GPS include running, cycling and freestyle, which is (as it sounds) tracking of no specific exercise.

There are also non-GPS modes for indoor cycling, swimming, treadmill running and the very simple stopwatch. One omission may put off a few of you - there’s no GPS tracking for outdoor swimming, although you should be able to use the running mode if you just want distance tracking.

The Runner 3 is water resistant to five atmospheres, making it ready for swimming, just not diving.

Looking through the TomTom Runner 3’s tracking screens is a reminder of what separates a proper run tracker from an Android Wear watch with GPS. There are loads of metrics right there at your fingertips. Scrolling up and down just changes the main one you see. Calories, distance, heart rate, time and pace are some of the options.

However, there are five extra screens available when you scroll right. As well as a compass and a drawn scrawl of the route taken so far, you can look at heart rate graphs, see which heart rate intensity category you’re in and see a breakdown chart of your heart rate intensity so far.

It’s serious stuff when you consider a basic step tracker like the Fitbit Flex 2 costs $99.95, £79.99, AU$149.95. There’s a lot more depth here.

Given how much data is here, the TomTom Runner 3 makes navigating around it very intuitive. With a touchscreen and gestures, you’d be far more likely to end up tangled.

Looking at how the TomTom Runner 3 tracks your runs, there’s clear smoothing-out of routes and snapping to roads rather than using pure GPS data. You end up with great-looking route maps, and every tracked walk and run seemed a good approximation of the route taken, but we’d call the accuracy good rather than sensational.

The algorithmic approach works very well for the optical heart rate sensor on the underside. Many wrist-worn sensors are notoriously sketchy, but after the first minute or so of tracking the TomTom Runner 3’s actually seems fairly good for largely consistent cardio activities like running.

Using it set to its Gym mode with an elliptical machine’s heart rate sensors for comparison, the results were within a BPM or two most of the time. With low-intensity exercise the Runner 3 did on occasion measure the rate as far too fast at certain points, though. It’s not perfect but is good enough to be useful.

Of course, it’s still not a patch on a good chest sensor, but the TomTom Runner supports HR chest straps and bike cadence sensors. However, it doesn’t support the popular ANT+ standard, just Bluetooth. This restricts your choice a bit.

Compatibility and app

• Simple, intuitive app
• Rivals offer more depth
• Support for Android and iOS devices

All of your data is sent over to a phone app wirelessly, although the sync process isn’t continual. You have to boot the app and then ‘wake’ the watch by pressing one of the directional buttons for the sync to start.

As with the TomTom Runner 2, syncing takes a couple of minutes if you’re moving over a couple of days of data. It’s almost strangely slow given how fast most trackers are, but then you do get a lot more metrics than the average step counter.

Once the Runner 3's tracking data gets to your phone, it ends up in the TomTom Sports app. This is good at making quite dense information appear simple and friendly, with little graphs of heart rate and pace you can track through with a finger.

However, Garmin’s alternative may be more useful for the true obsessive. Garmin Connect is far more intimidating but offers greater depth.

TomTom's app works with most Android phones running version 4.4 or newer and iPhones with iOS 8 or newer. You don’t need to worry about compatibility unless you have a Windows Phone, a non-smart one or something truly ancient.

Battery life

• 5 to 11-hour tracking battery life depending on features used
• Proprietary charger

TomTom claims the Runner 3’s battery lasts for up to 11 hours, however that’s with GPS only, not heart rate tracking.

With the heart rate sensor switched on it’ll supposedly last up to 9 hours and that’s fairly consistent with our experience of tracking for an hour or so at a time. Doing this, we got just under a week’s use between charges, but it drops to a much less impressive 5 hours if you use music streaming.

Without any gym sessions or runs you can expect the battery to last for a couple of weeks of basic activity tracking, making it low-maintenance enough to wear as a simple watch if you have a break from training.

To charge the TomTom Runner 3 you unhook the plastic core from the strap a little then slip on a charger dock cable. You can plug this into a computer USB or a phone plug.

Verdict

The TomTom Runner 3 is a strong exercise-tracking watch that doesn’t cost too much but still provides good results. There are niggles, but nothing that upsets what is a substantial, fun-to-use device.

There’s a lot of depth hidden behind its innocuous face, TomTom’s multi-sport tracking is great and very easy to use, and thanks to its low-power screen the Runner 3 can act as a basic watch and step counter for a few weeks instead of a few days.

Who’s this for?

The TomTom Runner 3 is a decent-looking watch that doesn’t have the “fitness freak” or dumpy looks of some of its rivals. You can get away with wearing it as a normal watch, making it ideal if you want one wearable for all occasions.

GPS tracking and heart rate accuracy are both fairly good, cementing this brand’s reputation as a good choice for athletes.

However, if you’re after smartwatch features this isn’t for you, as there are no phone notifications to the TomTom Runner 3.

One important-to-some fitness feature is missing too: open water swimming. Its one swim mode is designed for indoor swimming only.

More a niggle than a full-blown complaint, the Runner 3’s control pad could be finessed a little. It works well but its feel could be improved, and while the device looks good for a running watch, it’s still far from stylish – so don’t buy this if you value form over function.

Should you buy it?

It doesn’t have the smartwatch features of some of Garmin’s watches, but the TomTom Runner 3 is a compelling combination of rich features, fairly good looks and ease of use.

Music streaming is a killer extra, particularly if you like to like to run with as little as possible weighing you down but get bored with just the scenery to keep you entertained.

This generation’s new compass feature adds a hiking angle previously absent, but those serious about the pastime might be better off with a proper mapping watch like the Garmin Fenix 5X. Though that is up to six times the price: ouch.

The TomTom Runner 3 is easy to recommend, particularly as, being shallow for a moment, it’s better-looking than the Garmin alternative.

We’re fans of the TomTom Runner 3, but it’s not the only well-rated watch in this space. Here are three alternatives you might want to consider.

TomTom Spark 3

There’s very little difference between the Spark 3 and the Runner 3 other than where you’ll find these watches sold. So if you like the sound of the Runner 3 but find the Spark on sale, go right ahead.

You’ll get a very similar experience to that described in this review, complete with the same selection of models - some with heart rate monitoring, some with music, some with neither and some with both.

• Read our full TomTom Spark 3 review

Garmin Forerunner 35

Looking like the TomTom Runner 3’s tubby friend, the Forerunner 35 is a lot uglier than the TomTom. This may matter if you want a watch you can wear 24/7. However, there’s a big advantage to the Garmin: phone notifications. It has a hint of smartwatch flavor absent from the Runner 3.

The Garmin is also more expensive, though, and they are otherwise fairly evenly-matched.

Fitbit Surge

Coming at the GPS watch from the lifestyle fitness tracker angle, the Surge’s Fitbit app isn’t quite as well-prepped to crunch lots of data as TomTom’s. Fitbit’s modus operandi is to get you moving more, not necessarily to help you train for a marathon.

Despite this, the Surge doesn’t quite have Fitbit’s signature good looks, and isn’t anywhere near as stylish as the non-GPS Fitbit Blaze, which you might also want to consider. It lacks music streaming too. However, it’s a good watch in its own right, with full GPS tracking and basic call/text notifications.

• Read our full Fitbit Surge review

First reviewed: May 2017