New Balance and Intel have teamed up to release one of the first new Android Wear watches of the year. The RunIQ fitness watch is a runner's companion that features built-in support for Strava, as well as New Balance's own running app. Since it has every necessary sensor you'd need to track a workout, it's also competing with the most equipped smartwatches on the market, including the Apple Watch Series 2, the LG Watch Sport, and even the Garmin Fenix 3 HR.

Stuffed with a GPS, optical heart-rate monitor, and more, the $299 RunIQ wants to be the smartwatch that runners choose to wear both on the trail and at the office. But just because it was developed by one of the biggest athletic apparel companies in the country doesn't mean it's the most valuable tool a runner could have.

Look and feel

What Nike did with its model of the Apple Watch Series 2, New Balance did with the RunIQ Android Wear fitness watch. It's an all-black mammoth of a tracker with a 1.39-inch, 400×400-pixel, AMOLED display embedded in a thick, matte black case. On the crown are three physical buttons, up- and down-select buttons, and a larger, middle home button that's branded with a tiny New Balance logo. The top button opens the default running app, which is Strava on this device; the middle button acts like most similar buttons do on Android Wear by bringing up the app drawer; and the bottom button acts as a one-touch lap counter while you're recording a run.

Two halves of a standard 22mm band attach to the case, and New Balance made the RunIQ's band out of soft-touch silicone. This makes it quite flexible, and the small holes throughout the wristband give you plenty of tightening options. You can use other 22mm bands with the case, but the default black silicone band compliments the subtle style of the case. As a watch, it's slick in a weird, dark way, and it looks more presentable than LG's $349 Watch Sport. But the RunIQ definitely doesn't have the style or professional look that Garmin's $549 Fenix 3 HR has. If you like the sporty aesthetic, you may enjoy New Balance's fitness watch. The entire design is also water-resistant up to 5 ATM, or 50 meters. But it's not designed to track swimming exercises.

At 14mm, the RunIQ watch is also really thick. This isn't surprising since it holds an accelerometer, gyroscope, GPS, GLONASS, and optical heart rate monitor. All those sensors take up plenty of real estate, and while the 2.6-ounce RunIQ isn't particularly heavy, it feels large on my wrist compared to the Apple Watch Series 2 (which also includes all those sensors). Its 410-mAh battery should help it last 24 hours on a single charge, or up to five hours when in GPS mode. On our Android Wear battery test, the RunIQ watch lasted an average of 271 minutes, or just about 4.5 hours. That's on the low side for a fitness gadget, but not unheard of in smartwatches—those numbers are roughly in line with what you'll get from an Apple Watch. Nightly charging is something you'll just have to deal with.

Valentina Palladino

Valentina Palladino

Valentina Palladino

Valentina Palladino

Valentina Palladino

Valentina Palladino

Valentina Palladino

Valentina Palladino

Features

The RunIQ watch is primarily a running device supported by New Balance and Strava software. It's not running Android Wear 2.0, but it will be updated this spring to the newest version of Google's wearable OS. A New Balance representative told me the best features of the new Google Fit, including exercise recognition and rep counting, may come to the RunIQ watch, but that hasn't been confirmed yet. The watch still has no official date for being updated to Android Wear 2.0 either.

The default watch face is New Balance-branded, with the time in large numbers in the middle. Three complications let you easily access the device's heart rate monitor, start a new run (with New Balance's RunIQ app), or check your daily step count. You can also check daily activity stats, including steps, calories, and distance, in Google Fit if you prefer, and you can use the pre-installed Strava app to start recording a run.

Having New Balance's run-recording complication on the home screen is odd and redundant when Strava is the "default" running app. Both apps let you do the same thing, so there's really no "default app" confining you—but all your data, no matter which app you record it with, gets uploaded to Strava. You can also download any sport app you want that's available on Android Wear, so if neither of those is your cup of tea, you can switch easily. I downloaded Runtastic as well, just to see how the tracking experience differs from the two preloaded apps.

New Balance's RunIQ app handles all the activity tracking on the watch, which is useful during a workout. You can either tap the center complication on the watch face to open RunIQ or press the top button on the watch's crown. The sheer size of the display and its large, blocky white typography make seeing stats easy at a glance. The display has four different screens you can swipe through: one has a duration timer and your current pace, another has your heart rate in real time, one has your steps per minute in real time, and a final screen counts your laps.

New Balance stresses the use of the bottom side button as an easier way to define laps during a workout than fumbling your potentially sweaty fingers over the touch display. That button is definitely more convenient: I set the display to the heart rate screen and never had to touch it again until I wanted to end the workout. I only pressed the bottom button to divide my time with laps.

The RunIQ's optical heart rate monitor is accurate when measuring lower beats per minute, staying within 3 BPM of the Polar H7 chest strap most of the time. It was occasionally overzealous and rose a couple beats higher than my actual heart rate. But it only took an extra second or two to level out and match the chest strap's reading. Running was a different story though, and the RunIQ watch was a bit all over the heart rate map. It wasn't totally inaccurate, just jumpy: at its best, the RunIQ watch was within 3 BPM of the H7 chest strap even while measuring BPMs in the 170s.

I do a lot of running/walking sessions, in which I alternate sprinting and walking for a few minutes each. The RunIQ watch mostly tripped up when it sensed my heart rate lowering at the beginning of a walking segment. While the H7 chest strap had no issue reporting a gradual slow down from 179 BPM to 145 BPM, the RunIQ watch dropped more quickly to about 111 BPM. It would then take 30 seconds to a minute or so to recalibrate back to about 135 BPM. At its worst, the RunIQ watch leveled out to 10 BPM lower than the H7 chest strap.

GPS and music

The RunIQ watch's GPS, on the other hand, was great to use. The GPS automatically searches for your location when you open the RunIQ app, before you start a run. It took only one to three seconds to find my location most of the time, and you can also start tracking an activity while it locates you. Other devices make you wait to begin your exercise until it finds your location, but not the RunIQ.

Out of RunIQ, Strava, and Runtastic, RunIQ is my favorite Android Wear app to use to track running on this watch, mostly because it shows a variety of stats during a workout. The native Strava and Runtastic apps only show you duration, distance, and sometimes pace, and Runtastic doesn't even automatically record your heart rate (even though the RunIQ watch has that sensor). In the Runtastic mobile app, you can pair the Runtastic-branded chest strap, the Basis Peak, a Runtastic receiver, or "other" heart rate monitors. But I always got an error when I tried pairing the RunIQ watch with it.

The RunIQ watch has 4GB of storage, which is crucial for runners who don't want to take their smartphone with them but still want to listen to music through Google Play Music. New Balance came out with a pair of wireless earbuds in collaboration with Jabra recently, but the company says other wireless headphones, including TK, are supported as well. Google Play Music syncing only works when the device is connected to an Android smartphone, though. iPhone users are out of luck.