TuneBand armband for my iPhone 4

I’ve been using the new Nike Plus iPhone app to track my runs… It’s really cool. It talks to you while you’re running, letting you know your pace for each mile you run and it uploads all the data to Nike’s website so you can chart your progress and get a view of your run on Google Maps with a speed gradient that shows you where you ran faster and where you ran slower.  I’m sure there’s more the the website, but that’s as far as I’ve gotten.

Anyways, I carried my iPhone in my hand on my first run but that wasn’t any fun so I went looking for an iPhone armband that I could wear while running.  After poking around reading reviews on Amazon.com and reading random review through Google, last week I bought two armbands for my iPhone 4.  The first one, was the Apple iPhone 4 / iPhone 4G Black Mesh Sport Armband.  It’s not so good… it’s fit to the iPhone 4 but you have to remove the iPhone 4 from whatever case/bumper you have it in and then you have to really squeeze it into this thing to use it.  And once it’s in there, operating the screen is something you can only do by forcefully pushing the piece of thick plastic against the iPhone’s screen.  I can’t even say what it’s like when it’s actually fastened on your arm because I haven’t even tried it yet.

The other iPhone 4 armband I tried out was Grantwood’s Tuneband for iPhone 4 — this one works pretty well.

It comes with it’s own iPhone 4 cover and then the velcro armband slips through a slits on the back of that case.  I wear it slightly above my elbow and it stays in place while I run.  The armband is made mostly of a stretchy nylon (?) material so when you pull and apply the velcro, the whole thing is tensioned on your arm.  I don’t have huge arms but they aren’t that skinny either… with the length of the strap and location of the velcro, if my arms were any skinnier, I’d have to wear this thing higher on my arm, closer to my shoulder.  And there might even be some people whose arms are two thin for this particular strap.  But it works great for me!

I was surprised to see the name brands in iPhone cases (Belkin, Speck, etc) don’t have their own armbands for sports… There’s the  Nike+Armband for iPhone but it hasn’t been re-designed for the iPhone 4 — come on Nike!

The last thing I’ll say is that even though the Nike app is cool with it’s visualizations, GPS maps, Nike Plus website, etc. the is the iPhone feels a  little bit big to be carrying around on runs like this.  So maybe I’ll get one of those Garmin or Polar wristwatches instead.  Meanwhile, the Tuneband from Grantwood is my iPhone armband of choice, I recommend it!

One thought on “TuneBand armband for my iPhone 4”

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *