Casio Sports Phys - STR-800

Casio has made watches for all different purposes, some with just simple settings for hobby users, and some that seem to be for the more serious.

This watch is one that has been designed for serious runners and has a 500 lap memory (where most have 10-50 lap memories and occasionally 100). It is the Casio STR-800 and is part of the Casio Sports Phys line of products. It was released in Jan 2005 and came in 4 different colours, with this grey and black model being the STR-800-1V.

It has an off-centre design with the left side protruding with buttons on the top and bottom (for easy access while running). The shape is actually like a rounded version of the Timex Skiathlom watches I've blogged before. On the back are 4 orange bumps which hold the back plate of the watch a little away from your arm to stop you getting too hot under the watch, and this feature seems to be called the 'floating back'.

It uses a 2877 module which is powered by a CR2016 battery which gives about a 3 year life.

The display is a 3 line LCD with a large 6 digit time across the centre, a dot matrix array on the top, and a small line of digits at the bottom. Modes are stopwatch, timer, alarms, and world time.

Casio Phys Walking & Calorie STR-400

I was out doing an annual walk to raise money for a local sports association today, and managed to find a walking watch.

The watch is another by Casio and is called the Walking & Calorie watch. It seems to be under a one called Phys which I've not come across before, but I'd guess it was a line of specialist sports watches. The watch has a model number of STR-400J and was a Japanese model for walkers.

The special feature is that it has a walking pace function. When you start the timer, the watch starts counting steps, not movement based, but based on the pace you set (which you can have silent or marked with beeps). Based on the steps, the watch calculates the total  distance and calories burned (-my walk was just over 10,000 steps, 6.5km and I burned 187.4 calories in case anyone is interested). The watch stores this data and gives you the information for the past week too. Other functions are the standard stopwatch, and 5 alarms which are vibrating alarms too (the Vib Alarm in Casio speak) .

It has a large easy to read LCD screen, with the time (in large digits) across the centre. There is another 4 digit display at the bottom which shows the date (or has other functions such as time display during other modes). At the top is a small dot matrix array showing the day and which mode you are in, or what is being shown (e.g kcal, km, min, etc.), and shows information in Japanese as well as English for some of the items.

The full model number is STR-400J-1JF, and originally sold some time in the 2000s for 10,000 yen. It is still available from the Casio site now (Aug 2013).