it was time for a new sports gadget, as lately i was growing unhappy with my current setup while running, consisting of a heart rate monitor belt, in-ear headphones with cable that are about to break every moment now, and the runtastic app on my mobile phone for gps tracking, heart rate monitoring and playing music. way too many cables and straps, also the runtastic app got worse for me with every update and lately it took ages to get gps working, and once it worked it did not do so reliably. so why not get rid of as much ballast as possible and pack it all into one new and shiny device? after quite an amount of research i decided that the tomtom spark 3 cardio + music would be the best choice for me. here is why i thought so; it has an optical heart rate monitor that is embedded in the wristband; it has a mass storage device that can hold 3gb of (mp3) files; it does the gps tracking (that's what tomtom is best known for) and uses "quickgps" that should get it started faster; it has interval training support and you can get warnings if you are out of a customizable boundaries, such as heart rate zone range. as a bonus it is also water resistant to 40 metres, and it is controlled by just one button. the only thing i was yet unsure about was how to transfer the information to my laptop and then to runtastic, as runtastic is known to be not so open to other sources of input rather than its own. thus a direct link was not possible. although there is a command line utility that enables communication with older tomtom watches this latest model was nowhere mentioned in the documentation. but once the watch was unpacked, this problem was quickly solved. the watch automatically and effortlessly synchronises with my mobile phone via bluetooth, then transfers the data to the tomtom site at once. there i can export the data to various formats, such as tcx files, which then can be imported easily on the runtastic site. ha, now that was surprisingly easy. for listening to music i bought wireless in-ear headphones. pairing them via bluetooth with either the watch or the mobile phone was a matter of a few seconds. the mp3 files can be transferred via the included usb cable, the watch itself shows up as a mass storage device, and can be mounted without any problems in linux. the files can be arranged in playlists using the m3u8 (m3u with utf-8) standard. the only downside is the firmware upgrade management, which requires either a windows or a macintosh operating system. luckily, nina has the latter one. so once in a while i might have to borrow her macbook to hook my watch to it and install firmware upgrades. i do not think that would happen too often. no more cables, no more straps - i am happy. a first test showed the gps really starts very fast; once the "quickgps" was updated via bluetooth and the smartphone, it took less than ten seconds to get full bars on the gps indicator, and the watch was ready to go - how awesome. i covered it with a lot of layers of cloth, and still the gps data was extremely accurate. i think the watch might also serve as a mere gps tracker for my next holidays or photo trips, as you can disable all the other features of the sports tracker. on internet discussion forums i read the battery lasts up to eleven hours with these settings; i will try that as soon as possible.