Thursday, October 29, 2009

Invisible Shield & Suunto T3c

First of all, I am not getting any kickback from reviewing this thing... I am talking about the protective skin I put on my Suunto T3c Heart Rate Monitor. But seriously, if I had known these things existed a few years ago, I wouldn't have 3 HRM's with scratches and gouges all over the glass/screens. If you have a cell phone, iPhone, Blackberry, iPod, GameBoy or other handheld gadget, you gotta check these out. Anyway, see below and you'll know what I am talking about.

So...I got the new heart rate monitor (HRM) a about a week ago. You know the cheap little film that comes over the face of a watch or a phone...? Well, that peeled off after a couple of hours of playing around with the functions. Since I have scratches on the other HRMs and watches and cellphone, etc, I decided not to wear the HRM until I did something to protect it. The down side of the the T3c is that the face glass is not subset at all so if you were to drop it, its most likely going to get scratched. I read a review on some site that warned of this problem with this particular model, but they recommended getting an Zagg Invisible Shield. I found an online company called Invisible Skinz and ordered a skin for the HRM. The shield or skin sounds simple--I thought it was just a piece of clear flexible plastic that you stick on the glass surface, right? That's what I thought, but it turns out to be more than that (its actually a military level protective shield--check out their site). I ordered it Saturday, got a reply right away (same day) then on Monday they shipped it out. I was expecting it to just come in an envelop since the face of my HRM is about as big as a 50 cent piece, but it came in some pretty top-shelf packaging... Check it out: The tri-fold box on the right was folded up and inside the sleeve (left). In it were the following (below):
The little pack with the bar code had the skin in it, the tube (top) is a spray of some kind and the little black thing is a squeegie. A squeegie. A squeegie. One more time, squeegie. Cool word. Anyway, I cleaned the face of the watch, carefully peeled the skin from the backing, careful not to touch the adhesive side too much (I pinched the edge with my fingernail tips), gave each side a light misting of the top-secret spray as directed, then applied the skin to the watch. I then squeegied it until there were no bubbles. Here's some before and after pix:



Can't tell the diff--neither can I.
How much was the Invisible Skin for the Suunto? $9.95. Plus, I had a discount code of the net which gave me a $1.99 discount (which offset the shipping). Total was $9.93. You could think that is a lot, but if you have a $300 Garmin or even a $50-100 Polar or Suunto HRM, or a crazy expensive handheld, what is a scratch worth to you? Their stuff ranges in price, but they have skins cut specifically for 100's if not thousands of gadgets. You can even get large skins for lap top screens. ALSO, I got a 20% off discount code included so next we are going to order one for Jace's Nintendo DS. Here's their site again: https://www.invisibleskinz.com/
Ok, I gotta get to bed--instructing cycling at 5:30am!

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