The TomTom Touch is a fitness tracker that tries to bridge the gap between very simple step-tracking fitness bands like the Fitbit Flex 2, and the sort of advanced GPS trackers marathon runners use.
It's much closer to the basic brigade, but has a body scanner feature that works out how much of you is made of fat and how much is muscle. You two are going to get uncomfortably close.
While a neat idea, the reliability is patchy at best and the TomTom Touch is held back by usability issues that make this tracker less fun to use than some alternatives, but it’s not a complete write-off.
Price and release date
- Out now
- £129.99/$129.99 (around AU$215)
The TomTom Touch costs £129.99, $129.99 (around AU$215), which puts it in the same sort of price range as the Fitbit Alta and Fitbit Charge 2, and only slightly cheaper than the TomTom Spark 3.
All of those wearables also have screens, but if you can live without a display and just need basic tracking skills you can pick up a Fitbit Flex 2 or Jawbone UP3 for significantly less.
However, none of these alternatives have a body fat scanner built in.
Design
- Water-resistant
- Chunky but innocuous
- Need to press a button to wake the screen up
The TomTom Touch looks like a generic fitness tracker band aside from the unusual silvery circle just below the display. It’s no fashion accessory and is quite thick, but is also fairly innocuous.
The Touch is a plastic pebble that fits into a flexible silicone strap, much like the Fitbit Alta and a number of other trackers. It’s moderately comfortable, though we needed to adjust the fitting a few times during testing to avoid ending up with a wrist full of red indents from the sensors.
You don’t want to leave it flapping about loose though, as those same sensors rely on solid contact with your skin. Some experimenting may be required to find the best fit.
The TomTom Touch looks like a very simple band of black when not in use, a bit like the Fitbit Flex 2, but unlike the Flex 2 it actually has a display, one that covers most of the glossy black lozenge on the front. It’s a low-res monochrome OLED: not fancy, but it provides good clarity in all sorts of environments.
Though it’s here that we stumble into the first big issue with the TomTom Touch. Its display doesn’t turn on with a waggle of your wrist, you have to press the silver button on the front to get it to wake up.
This annoys, particularly as the Touch also functions as a watch, with the default screen showing you the time and how close you are to meeting your daily steps goal.
Basic use of the TomTom Touch is wonky too. You flick up and down on the front of the face to get to the other screens: upwards to see your current step count, calorie count, distance travelled, last sleep duration and exercise duration.
Swipes down get you to the active participation bits, the body fat scanner, heart rate sensor and exercise logger.
All this seems fine aside from using a lot of screens (and therefore swipes) to show just a few basic figures, but the TomTom Touch display often also doesn’t respond to gestures. The little guy doesn’t seem to like being woken up at times.
It is water-resistant, though. Despite having an exposed micro USB port in the main unit and, as far as we can see, only a minimal rubbery lining, it’s IPX7 certified. That means you can wear it in the shower without worry, though it’s not waterproof enough to swim with.
Specs, performance and fitness
- No GPS
- Patchy body fat scanner
The TomTom Touch, unlike a lot of TomTom gear, does not have GPS. This feels like a tracker for people who spend time in the gym rather than running outdoors. If GPS is something you need, consider the TomTom Spark 3 instead.
Aside from an accelerometer pedometer, the TomTom Touch has an optical heart rate sensor and an all-important body fat scanner. This sets it apart. There’s also a vibration motor, which can be used to signal very basic call and text notifications from your phone.
The heart rate monitor is only really designed to check your resting heart rate, an admission that like most wrist-worn HR sensors, it’s not much use for calculating your rate during vigorous exercise.
While you’re mostly still, the TomTom Touch’s heart rate readings seem fairly reliable, but there’s an annoying caveat.
When you manually check your rate, it tends to take about 4-5 seconds for the reading to settle down to your actual heartbeat. However, the display times out just after this, and you’re back to a black screen. Nice.
As standard, the TomTom Touch takes your resting heart rate automatically throughout the day, and then produces a graph of your average heart rate over the days and weeks. It’s not desperately useful, unless part of your fitness goal is to bring down your resting heart rate a bit.
The fat scanner is a similar case. To get a reading you have to place your index finger on the silver sensor and wait for 10 seconds. This fires a tiny electrical signal around your body, then received by a similar sensor on the underside. The reading is then used to calculate the amount of fat and muscle clinging to your bones.
In our experience, it’s patchy at best. It failed to successfully make a reading about 60% of the time, which gets frustrating when you have to spend 10 seconds per attempt.
Like the strange, varying responsiveness of the touchscreen, this seems to happen in fits and starts. At one point six readings in a row failed. 30 minutes later, we managed to get several successful readings in sequence.
We had already carefully read up on TomTom’s recommended techniques at this point, so we have no explanation other than that the software is possibly a bit buggy at this stage.
Talking to a few people we know using the TomTom Touch, it seems to slightly exaggerate fat levels. Perhaps we’re all just hoping it does, though.
Regardless, we’ve had a better experience in the past with body analyzing scales, and it’s also annoying that you can’t see your results on the watch itself, just the MySports phone app.
There are numerous usability problems like this. For example, you have to plug the TomTom Touch into a PC to update its software, even though every other manufacturer seems to let you do this through your phone. Syncing with a phone can be painfully slow too.
At one point we switched phones and so went without a sync for several days. The sync process then took almost 30 minutes, which seems mad.
The app
- Dull app
- Offers little context or motivation
The MySports software doesn’t offer any startling insights either. This is the TomTom Touch’s companion app, and it’s a lot less fun and motivating than, for example, Fitbit’s one.
The way it relays data is not very compelling. For example, one feature it has that many other apps don’t is a one-day graph of heart rate readings throughout the day, but it’s delivered in such an uninspiring graph, which doesn’t let you dig further into the data, that it all seems a bit pointless.
You can set goals for your sport activity, body fat ratio and so on, but there’s no further motivation to keep you interested. Fitbit maps your steps onto great treks across the world and lets you compete with your friends. TomTom offers dull pie charts and graphs.
We’ve been watching the development of fitness tech for years, and major improvements have been made in contextualizing your activity or digging deep into the stats, particularly with high-end runners’ watches like the Garmin Forerunner 620, but the TomTom Touch has neither depth nor inspiring context.
You can set the Touch to record specific runs and walks, but all this really does is to separate out the usual distance and step data (all recorded using the pedometer rather than phone GPS) into discrete entries in the app.
If the Touch didn’t have the unusual fat monitor to set it apart, it’d be in real trouble.
Battery life and compatibility
- Battery won't last more than 3 days
- No battery indicator on the Touch
- Easy to charge
The TomTom Touch’s battery disappoints too. It is quoted as lasting up to 5 days between charges, but we only got it to last 2.5-3 days, which is poor given the feature set and lack of always-on screen. The display seems desperate to be off, if anything.
There’s no warning about the battery level either. You have to head to the Devices part of the MySports app to see the battery level. This is a missed opportunity when the Touch has both a screen and a vibrate function, perfect tools to give you a heads-up when, say, the battery hits 20% charge.
In some respects, the TomTom Touch seems almost unfinished, and we hope some of these holes will be plugged in future updates. There’s not even a vibrate wake-up alarm for example, even though there is basic sleep tracking, telling you how much kip you got last night.
Charging is at least simple. You just push the main unit out of the strap, then plug in the USB cable to your phone charger. There’s an on-screen indicator of how near to a full charge the Touch is.
The TomTom Touch is also compatible with a wide variety of devices, as both iOS and Android handsets are supported - though if you're running Android you should check that the MySports app works for you, as TomTom doesn't guarantee compatibility with all Android devices.
Verdict
The TomTom Touch has a neat feature you don’t get elsewhere. Body scanning gives you a rough idea of how much fat and muscle is under your skin, and working on bringing down your body fat is a great metric if you’re looking to get healthier.
Having a screen on the device is handy too, letting you use the Touch as a watch.
Unfortunately, there are more issues than positive points. While the TomTom Touch offers more metrics than some, it doesn’t make particularly compelling use of that data and the body scanner is often a pain to use.
This low-level annoyance is a constant presence too thanks to an occasionally unresponsive touchscreen/interface and a screen you need to press a button to wake.
Poor battery life compounds this. Lasting only three days between charges, it only has the longevity of a much smarter device.
Who's this for?
The TomTom Touch is really for those who like the idea of a wrist-mounted body scanner, since its other features are done better elsewhere.
As it's plain and shower-proof it's also a fitness tracker you can wear all day, though limited battery life means you'll still have to take it off more than you might like.
Should you buy it?
We like the idea of a fitness tracker that can tell your body fat level. It’s a decent way to check your fitness progress, particularly when excess fat around the middle can have a major effect on your health.
The TomTom Touch isn’t a particularly complete-feeling tracker, though. It suffers from too many usability niggles and obvious missing features.
Some of these will probably be fixed in updates, but the poor battery life and software that lags far behind the best seem unlikely to improve dramatically before the Touch is superseded, making the likes of the Fitbit Charge 2 or even TomTom's own Spark 3 a better bet for most buyers.
