Review: FORM Smart Goggles
10:36am, 22nd Mar 2023 | 9 Comments
Blog by fetcheveryone
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FORM have very kindly sent me a pair of their Smart Goggles, and asked me to do a review. Full disclosure – there was no accompanying paper bag full of used fivers – so what follows are my genuine thoughts. Not that I would have changed my view for a bag of fivers, but it would have been nice. That's all I'm saying.
A bit of background on me as a swimmer: I've gone through phases of once-a-week pool swims in the past, but last year I had my biggest swimming year to date. I got involved in a 24 hour outdoor relay, and discovered that I actually quite enjoy open water swimming. I finished the year having swum just over 50 miles. On top of that, I've also entered a 9km swim this July – so there is plenty of swimming in my future.
Most pool swimmers at places I go turn up with all manner of floats, paddles, flippers and other mysterious toys; and they do lots of special drills to help improve their form in the water. I just swim front crawl up and down as many times as I can in the hour-long session. I started the year swimming a mile in 41:XX miles, and I've trimmed that down to 36:XX just by virtue of doing it regularly.
Obviously the biggest draw about these goggles is the ability to see your data live as you swim. I don't like doing what the proper swimmers do, but I *do* like seeing my stats. When you're running, it's very easy to see the numbers on your watch as often as you'd like. But it's a totally different kettle of humans when you're swimming. The only real opportunity comes when you turn for each length, and then (unless you want to stop) you've got a split second to angle your watch towards your face, and hope that the lighting and water are kind enough to let you see the numbers.
Frankly, it's a pain, and I'm lucky if I get the manoeuvre right about once every 250 metres. And without this feedback, I find my swim pace tails off a little bit towards the end of my hour. If I notice this during one of my frenzied glances at the watch, I put some extra effort in – but it still makes pacing pretty tricky.
So enough complaining about what once was – let's try these goggles out.
Here's what's inside the box:
there's a snazzy goggle box, a getting started leaflet, and a special adapter for adding a Polar HRM that sits on the strap of the goggles against your temple. The HRM itself isn't included, but it's a nice touch to include the adapter. I'll do a follow up on that in a later blog.
Inside the goggle box, there are also six additional nose bridges – which feels like a heck of a lot of options, but with the goggles retailing for £249, it makes sense not to fall at the first nose hurdle for the sake of a few pennies. And luckily for me, I seem to have a default nose!
I needed to let the straps out a bit to fit them over my swede of a head, but they sat well on my eyes. Here's a close up of the chunk of tech that sits on the side of one of the goggle eyes (just WHAT is the term for one goggle eye please?). It looks like there's a little projector-type thing in there; and a corresponding prism-type arrangement in the clear bit of the goggle that bends the light out to a focal point ahead of your eye. There are two buttons – one cycles through options, and the other is a 'confirm action' button. Not hard to use once you've got your head round it.
Here was my first (and pretty much only) cause for concern. I am pretty short-sighted (my prescription is -5.5 in my left eye, and -6.0 in my right eye), so the display was a bit blurred. With my contact lenses in, it was very clear. There doesn't appear to be anything in the settings to amend the focal length. I also wondered if this might be possible with some sort of insert to bend the light differently.
To see how much of an issue this might be, I borrowed Katie's lovely -4.25 eyes. She was able to read the display pretty well – so it seems that it's only an issue for severely short-sighted people. The goggles are reversible, so if you've got one eye that's better than the other, you can wear the display on that side.
There's an app that goes with the goggles. The set up is fairly straightforward – you just need to create a user account with FORM, and enter a few more details. The goggles talk to the app via Bluetooth, so you can amend some settings without having to wear them.
Anyway... let's get wet at last!
The fit in the water is pretty good. The peripheral vision isn't as good as a bog-standard pair of Speedo goggles, because of the chunk of tech on the side - but it's not too bad once you get used to it. And in fifteen hours of swimming, I've only had two tiny water leaks, and one slightly larger one when I pushed of from the side with a lot of vigour. The display is yellow, which contrasts very nicely with typical swimming pool blue.
Here's what it looks like when you're swimming:
The default pool swim mode gives you elapsed time and elapsed distance. The distance updates at the end of every length when it detects a turn, and it shows a split time for that length for a few seconds – long enough to take it in. And in terms of accuracy it has miscalculated only two lengths in 23 miles of swimming. These were both because I had to slam on the brakes mid length and switch to doggy paddle, due to a slower swimmer ahead of me. This level of accuracy is no mean feat – my Garmin Forerunner 935 is not bad, but occasionally throws in an extra length here or there if I've done an unexpected arm movement.
That instant feedback has been great for helping me with my pacing, and is undoubtedly the best feature of the goggles. If you're just bashing out lengths, it's so easy for your arms to fall into a bad habit, or for your legs to get lazy. I know that if my lengths are 34.29s or better, I am keeping pace – so every half a minute or so I either get a pat on the back, or a reminder to focus on my effort and form.
The post-swim analysis in the app is reasonable enough – you get all the stuff you'd expect to see, including all those split times, stroke count, etc, but it's also pretty good at working out which stroke you are doing too. Beyond that, it's not dissimilar to the post-swim analysis that you'd get with your Garmin or on Fetcheveryone.
Battery life seems great. The first charge gave me about 9-10 hours of swimming before they finally complained about low battery.
Beyond my simple swimming, the goggles come with a 12 month membership that gives you access to 1000+ workouts and the ability to build your own. So you could do an interval session, and the goggles would prompt you for efforts and recoveries etc. There are also 30+ training plans written by swim coaches. After the 12 month free trial, the current price is £13/month for access to these tools. Personally, it's disappointing that the workout builder is behind a paywall, as interval modes have been a part of GPS watches for over a decade now. On the flip side, just because the vanilla goggles won't let you build a workout, they can still help you track your pace during an interval session – you just have to remember what comes next in your workout plan.
The goggles also offer an open water swimming mode. You can pair them with a Garmin or Apple watch to make use of their GPS tracking; or you can just keep track of time and stroke rate if you don't have a compatible watch. I am hoping to get back to open water in the next couple of weeks – but unfortunately my Garmin Forerunner 935 is not compatible with the goggles. I will still try them out with the stroke rate mode and do a follow-up review.
Overall, these are extremely useful for immediate feedback and awareness of where you're at on your swim. For me, seeing the numbers as I go along brings a great deal of nerdy fun to my swimming. It would be great if future iterations had some ability to adjust focus for the seriously short-sighted; and paid-only access to the workout builder seems like a misstep. But most importantly, will I keep on using them? Most definitely.
Here's a link to them on Amazon - it's an affiliate link, so if you buy them, I get a few quid - but don't feel obliged
:
amzn.to
A bit of background on me as a swimmer: I've gone through phases of once-a-week pool swims in the past, but last year I had my biggest swimming year to date. I got involved in a 24 hour outdoor relay, and discovered that I actually quite enjoy open water swimming. I finished the year having swum just over 50 miles. On top of that, I've also entered a 9km swim this July – so there is plenty of swimming in my future.
Most pool swimmers at places I go turn up with all manner of floats, paddles, flippers and other mysterious toys; and they do lots of special drills to help improve their form in the water. I just swim front crawl up and down as many times as I can in the hour-long session. I started the year swimming a mile in 41:XX miles, and I've trimmed that down to 36:XX just by virtue of doing it regularly.
Obviously the biggest draw about these goggles is the ability to see your data live as you swim. I don't like doing what the proper swimmers do, but I *do* like seeing my stats. When you're running, it's very easy to see the numbers on your watch as often as you'd like. But it's a totally different kettle of humans when you're swimming. The only real opportunity comes when you turn for each length, and then (unless you want to stop) you've got a split second to angle your watch towards your face, and hope that the lighting and water are kind enough to let you see the numbers.
Frankly, it's a pain, and I'm lucky if I get the manoeuvre right about once every 250 metres. And without this feedback, I find my swim pace tails off a little bit towards the end of my hour. If I notice this during one of my frenzied glances at the watch, I put some extra effort in – but it still makes pacing pretty tricky.
So enough complaining about what once was – let's try these goggles out.
Here's what's inside the box:
there's a snazzy goggle box, a getting started leaflet, and a special adapter for adding a Polar HRM that sits on the strap of the goggles against your temple. The HRM itself isn't included, but it's a nice touch to include the adapter. I'll do a follow up on that in a later blog.
Inside the goggle box, there are also six additional nose bridges – which feels like a heck of a lot of options, but with the goggles retailing for £249, it makes sense not to fall at the first nose hurdle for the sake of a few pennies. And luckily for me, I seem to have a default nose!
I needed to let the straps out a bit to fit them over my swede of a head, but they sat well on my eyes. Here's a close up of the chunk of tech that sits on the side of one of the goggle eyes (just WHAT is the term for one goggle eye please?). It looks like there's a little projector-type thing in there; and a corresponding prism-type arrangement in the clear bit of the goggle that bends the light out to a focal point ahead of your eye. There are two buttons – one cycles through options, and the other is a 'confirm action' button. Not hard to use once you've got your head round it.
Here was my first (and pretty much only) cause for concern. I am pretty short-sighted (my prescription is -5.5 in my left eye, and -6.0 in my right eye), so the display was a bit blurred. With my contact lenses in, it was very clear. There doesn't appear to be anything in the settings to amend the focal length. I also wondered if this might be possible with some sort of insert to bend the light differently.
To see how much of an issue this might be, I borrowed Katie's lovely -4.25 eyes. She was able to read the display pretty well – so it seems that it's only an issue for severely short-sighted people. The goggles are reversible, so if you've got one eye that's better than the other, you can wear the display on that side.
There's an app that goes with the goggles. The set up is fairly straightforward – you just need to create a user account with FORM, and enter a few more details. The goggles talk to the app via Bluetooth, so you can amend some settings without having to wear them.
Anyway... let's get wet at last!
The fit in the water is pretty good. The peripheral vision isn't as good as a bog-standard pair of Speedo goggles, because of the chunk of tech on the side - but it's not too bad once you get used to it. And in fifteen hours of swimming, I've only had two tiny water leaks, and one slightly larger one when I pushed of from the side with a lot of vigour. The display is yellow, which contrasts very nicely with typical swimming pool blue.
Here's what it looks like when you're swimming:
The default pool swim mode gives you elapsed time and elapsed distance. The distance updates at the end of every length when it detects a turn, and it shows a split time for that length for a few seconds – long enough to take it in. And in terms of accuracy it has miscalculated only two lengths in 23 miles of swimming. These were both because I had to slam on the brakes mid length and switch to doggy paddle, due to a slower swimmer ahead of me. This level of accuracy is no mean feat – my Garmin Forerunner 935 is not bad, but occasionally throws in an extra length here or there if I've done an unexpected arm movement.
That instant feedback has been great for helping me with my pacing, and is undoubtedly the best feature of the goggles. If you're just bashing out lengths, it's so easy for your arms to fall into a bad habit, or for your legs to get lazy. I know that if my lengths are 34.29s or better, I am keeping pace – so every half a minute or so I either get a pat on the back, or a reminder to focus on my effort and form.
The post-swim analysis in the app is reasonable enough – you get all the stuff you'd expect to see, including all those split times, stroke count, etc, but it's also pretty good at working out which stroke you are doing too. Beyond that, it's not dissimilar to the post-swim analysis that you'd get with your Garmin or on Fetcheveryone.
Battery life seems great. The first charge gave me about 9-10 hours of swimming before they finally complained about low battery.
Beyond my simple swimming, the goggles come with a 12 month membership that gives you access to 1000+ workouts and the ability to build your own. So you could do an interval session, and the goggles would prompt you for efforts and recoveries etc. There are also 30+ training plans written by swim coaches. After the 12 month free trial, the current price is £13/month for access to these tools. Personally, it's disappointing that the workout builder is behind a paywall, as interval modes have been a part of GPS watches for over a decade now. On the flip side, just because the vanilla goggles won't let you build a workout, they can still help you track your pace during an interval session – you just have to remember what comes next in your workout plan.
The goggles also offer an open water swimming mode. You can pair them with a Garmin or Apple watch to make use of their GPS tracking; or you can just keep track of time and stroke rate if you don't have a compatible watch. I am hoping to get back to open water in the next couple of weeks – but unfortunately my Garmin Forerunner 935 is not compatible with the goggles. I will still try them out with the stroke rate mode and do a follow-up review.
Overall, these are extremely useful for immediate feedback and awareness of where you're at on your swim. For me, seeing the numbers as I go along brings a great deal of nerdy fun to my swimming. It would be great if future iterations had some ability to adjust focus for the seriously short-sighted; and paid-only access to the workout builder seems like a misstep. But most importantly, will I keep on using them? Most definitely.
Here's a link to them on Amazon - it's an affiliate link, so if you buy them, I get a few quid - but don't feel obliged
: amzn.to
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