This product is great for the health enthusiast who doesn't want to spend more than $30 or $40 to know what their heart rate is. It's a basic product, easy to use, and helpful for keeping your heart fit.

This monitor gives consistent reading of heart rate during workout. When a workout is finished the monitor can provide you with your maximum heart rate during the session, as well as your average heart rate during exercise, and the total time of exercise. Its functionality as a monitor is excellent.

The reason for the less than five star rating is the unfortunately poor design and planning for battery replacement in the monitor. The chest strap battery is easy to change, just insert a coin, twist to remove the battery compartment cover, install a new battery and replace the cover. Unfortunately, the battery in the wrist monitor is not so easy to change. It requires releasing a watch strap pin where the watch strap connects to the monitor, to allow the watch's back to then be opened next. Four small screws must then be removed from the back so it can be taken off. Then an even smaller screw, it is quite small, must be removed from the battery cover so a new battery can be reinserted. This process must be reversed to close the watch monitor. This is quite a tedious process requiring jewelers screwdrivers to work with the monitor's small screws. This process clearly presents some significant problems for the end user. In fact, the manual states in capital letters, "TIMEX STRONGLY RECOMMENDS TAKING YOUR MONITOR TO A LOCAL RETAILER OR JEWELER TO HAVE THE BATTERY REPLACED".

The batteries have proven to be quite long-lived, so perhaps some of the five star reviews may have been made before the batteries needed changing. For a relatively inexpensive monitor to require visiting a retailer or jeweler to replace a battery or risk damaging the monitor is simply poor design.

The bottom line: five stars for information display and functionality, two stars for monitor battery replacement design.

I am not pleased with this product at all. You need to be soaking wet for the transmitter to work and then you still need to move it around on your chest to get a reading. If you were having sex in the shower it might work well! I do not recommend this product!

Completely satisfied with this device after one month of 3/wk use. If you have the proper equipment and are comfortable working with microelectronics, you can replace the CRxxxx cells in both the wrist and chest units in a few minutes yourself, and avoid the cost of having some expert do it for you. This is far superior to another manufacturer's HRM I used previously who required that I ship them off to a repair center - incurring greater costs and a delay.

So far it has been completely reliable. I also note that the Timex chest unit seems to "lose contact" (my assumption) under certain exercise motions less frequently than the previous HRM did.

was pleasantly surprized with how well this works and the great price. I ride bike and really adjusted my rides to try to get my heart rate up to my 85% range, I had a hard time doing it so I knew I needed to push it more. wore it whiile using my treadmill and elliptical and the monitor read the same as they did so I knew it we accurate. very pleased with this - will buy another when ever I need to.