I’ve section hiked parts of the Pacific Crest Trail, did a trip through the Olympic National Forest, and have backpacked for years (starting in the Army in the 1970s) but more of my hiking experience is from day hikes in the Washington Cascades. I’ve climbed Washington State’s two highest mountains, but am not hugely into mountain climbing. I live in a rainy area, so rain doesn’t stop hiking plans.

My current base pack weight (no food or water) is about 19 pounds (8.6 kg). I’ve recently started using a hammock instead of a tent when my wife isn't along.

Specifications

I believe Nike has discontinued this model, hence the manufacturer’s description is not available online. From the instruction manual: "Your Nike ACG Ascent / ACG Ascent Compass watch will provide quick easy access to a variety of essential information. Features include a digital compass (ACG Ascent Compass only), a thermometer, a barometric weather forecaster, a super-sensitive altimeter using Nike’s Zero Drift Technology, as well as timing information and multiple alarms. Your watch incorporates Nike’s Turtle Shell Construction (tough on the outside and soft on the inside), designed to withstand all the rigors of backcountry exploration, while being comforting to the wrist."

Manufacturer’s website: www.nike.com

Weight (measured): 2.2 oz (63 g)

The watch is able to display all units (altitude, temperature, barometric pressure, etc) in either U.S. standards or in metric equivalents.

Water resistance is listed as 100 m (328 ft), also given as 10 ATM.

Materials:

Crystal: Mineral Glass
Case: Plastic Resin
Caseback: Stainless Steel
Strap: Polyurethane
Buckle: Stainless Steel

It came with a one year limited warranty ("free of defects in materials or workmanship").

Overview

This was purchased for me as a gift in September 2003. I had expressed to my wife that I wanted either an altimeter or an altimeter watch; none of the other functions was important to me, other than just the basic watch functionality.

My initial impression was favorable; lots of functionality I could wear on my wrist, and the unit looked nice enough. I wasn’t enthused about the integrated watch band. It’s a rubberized type that’s integrated in a way that seems near impossible to replace. It’s a sort of rigid design that holds a rounded (wrist-fitting) shape. Fine when on my wrist, but ofttimes I carry a watch in my pocket, where this is less comfortable, and I had some fear that the rigidity could make the band more prone to breaking.

The controls ("user interface") consist of four main buttons labeled in small letters just outside the watch face as "adjust", "recall", "toggle" and "mode/next". There are also two smaller buttons labeled "light" and "data". I’ve never used the "data" button, but the others all seemed reasonably intuitive after a little practice. Finally, there’s a little leveling bubble for use in compass mode.

The design is reasonably subtle, various hues of grey, with a little Nike "swoop" that (even) I don’t find overdone.

On the back (the part that faces my wrist) is inscribed some possibly useful data, including depth of water resistance, materials it’s made of, country manufactured in (China), and what I presume to be a serial number.

The back and the part that surrounds the glass face are both metal, as is the clasp, while the band is some sort of fairly stiff rubber. I’ve managed to collect a couple of scratches on the mineral glass face, but I really don’t notice them in use. I do sometimes have to tilt the watch to avoid glare in order to read it. My wrist circumference is about 7.5 in (19 cm), and I buckle it on using the 6th hole from the end on the wrist band out of 12 holes total. While I suspect this unit would look a little large on a slender lady’s wrist, I believe it will fit a wide range of people.

Apart from the minor glass face scratches, the unit seems to be pretty durable. If I look closely at the metal surrounding the face I can see little nicks or marks, but nothing that bothers me. Despite initial concerns, the rubberized band seems to be holding up well.

Field Conditions

I've worn this watch on long (8-day) and short backpacking trips as well as a lot of dayhikes. I've encountered moderately hot temperatures (90's F, mid-30's C) in places such as the Grand Canyon, and cold snowy conditions snowshoeing and cross-country skiing or visiting a Canadian Glacier. I only tend to bring this watch when I anticipate significant elevation change, but that has nevertheless meant inclusion on all-day bike trips, scrambles, a number of "uphill" day hikes, and even the odd car trip. I believe I've worn the watch in these conditions on the order of 90 days in total. The lowest altitude encountered was sea level on a beach hike, and the highest while I've owned this watch has been around 10,000 ft (3050 m) or so.

Functionality

The watch has a number of functions, only some of which are useful to me personally.

Time

The most basic functionality of a watch. I’ve not done precise measurements, but in the few years I’ve owned it I believe it’s kept accurate time. Unlike, say, the clock on my car, I’ve never found the need to adjust the time on this watch. When in ‘time’ mode, the digital (numeric) display is easy to read with hours and minutes given in larger numbers than the seconds.

Compass

I do sort of like having a compass on my wrist, though I think I’ll always carry a lightweight traditional compass too. There’s a little leveling bubble to improve accuracy; I don’t know how necessary this is, but a downside is that it adds a little complexity as you tilt your body and wrist trying to get the unit level. You have to hold a traditional compass level too, but it’s easier to manipulate the angle when it's in your hand rather than on your wrist.

Until I looked at the manual just now I wasn’t aware there was a way to plug in the magnetic declination, i.e., I’ve always just assumed that I was seeing magnetic and not true north and mentally adjusted accordingly (note that the instructions say that the compass should be recalibrated after a battery change). Annoying is that after switching to compass mode you get about 20 seconds to see the direction (degrees and cardinal direction, no arrow), turn your arm or body to find where north is or whatever you’re inclined to do, and then it stops giving a compass azimuth and you have to push a couple of buttons and wait and relevel to get another 20 seconds. This is a power saving feature. I appreciate any power saving feature on this watch (more on that later), but the implementation here seems awkward.

Weather Prediction

I personally think this is more of a gimmick, at least for the typical consumer. I, at least, don’t have the experience to be able to tell whether the little sun or cloud icons are meaningful, but multiple times a simplistic reading of these icons has been a false predictor of near-future weather. I think one needs some knowledge about use of barometric pressure to predict the weather.

Temperature

You can get a temperature reading, but its utility is limited --- it’s substantially affected by your body temperature if you’re wearing the watch. How good is the thermometer otherwise? Some crude testing against a couple of analog (mercury) thermometers suggests that it might be reading 3 - 5 F too high (roughly 2 - 3 C). Neither version of the user manual says anything about calibrating the thermometer. I offer this with reserve; my two mercury thermometers didn’t precisely match each other either.

Altitude

This is the key functionality for me, and I like the fact that there’s a mode where you can show the altitude in large numbers with the time showing below in smaller numbers, as well as another mode where those two are reversed. These are my two favorite modes, I use one or the other almost exclusively. I’ve never owned or used an altimeter before, but as I suspect is common one sets the altimeter at a known elevation, and barometric pressure differences allow calculation of altitude relative to that. Setting the current elevation is pretty easy: push and hold a button for a moment, then adjust by 5 ft (about 1.5 m) increments either up or down, and the process is pretty quick.

Nike talks about their "Zero Drift" technology. To quote: "Zero Drift Technology improves the reliability of your Nike ACG Ascent and Nike ACG Ascent Compass by distinguishing between weather related pressure changes and pressure changes due to altitude change." They don’t say how they do that, and my experience suggests that the term "zero drift" is optimistic. Sometimes I’ll set my altitude at the beginning of a hike or climb and check it again when I get back to the same spot and I’ll be within 5 or 10 ft (1.5 - 3 m). Other times I’m substantially off, 100 ft (30 m) or more. Ditto if I set at a known lower altitude and then check at a known upper altitude, sometimes I’ll find a discrepancy of as much as 100 ft or so. I’ve not done intense analysis of this, but I don’t rely on super fine accuracy. So long as the user recognizes the limitations and practices with it, an altimeter is a very helpful navigation aid in conjunction with a topo map (and possibly a GPS). From my limited experience, this one seems fine.

The altitude isn’t constantly adjusted. I’ll sometimes hike for a fair bit before it will suddenly adjust upward 40 ft, or 60 ft (12 m, or 18 m), or something like that. I suspect that it’s updating based on a time interval (perhaps to limit battery usage), but I’m not certain. If I stand still long enough it will catch up at some point.

Data, and Ski-Run modes

I’ve never used either of these modes; I’m somewhat of a geek but even to me these seemed too complicated to remember how to use, particularly in terms of what they seem to offer. I wish there was a way to tell the watch to remove these from the watch navigation cycle (each push of the mode button advances to the next mode in a loop).

Alarm and Countdown Timer

Setting an alarm and using the countdown timer are straightforward. I rarely use either, but I find that I can quickly figure out how to do it intuitively. There are essentially four control buttons on the watch, and once I'm in the right mode, very little experimentation will typically tell me how to work functionality that I rarely use. So kudos for the watch "user interface" design being sufficiently intuitive.

Backlighting

It’s pretty easy to remember and use the special button to temporarily turn on the backlight to see what time it is at night, but I still sometimes end up inadvertently changing the mode when half-asleep and groping in the dark to read the time.

At 2.2 oz (63 g) the watch is on the heavy side, at least compared to the light and cheap Casio watch I normally wear (a Rolex person I’m not).

When changing modes the watch makes a little "beep". If the user wanted to operate it in a quiet space with other people around, I suppose that could be distracting, and I found no way to disable that sound.

Trouble in Paradise

I was moderately happy with this watch for the first year or so, and then the battery ran low. The watch is always fully "on" --- there’s no way to put it into a low power mode, and I’m guessing that it’s constantly sampling barometric pressure and thus sucking up the juice. Anyway, sometime I think in late 2004 the battery went out --- a year or maybe just a little more after I got it.

Worse, it wasn’t clear to me at the time that the battery was low, the altitude just didn’t change anymore (I think there was enough battery power remaining so that other watch functions were still working). I think this is poor; if I had really been depending on the altimeter for some reason I would want to know that the it was no longer reliable. Maybe I just failed to see the indicator; the instructions say that a battery icon alerts you when it’s getting low and begins to blink when the battery is almost drained. If that happened, I don’t recall it now. All I know is that my personal experience was that the altitude just wasn’t changing as I climbed several hundred ft (say, 100 to 300 m) and at first I wondered if the watch was broken or I had inadvertently gotten it into some weird mode or something. There is a battery icon that appears briefly whenever the mode is changed; it's not something I was looking for, however, and so in actual use I didn't notice it when it counted.

After that it sat around my house for some months unused (I was annoyed, and didn’t feel inclined to replace the battery until I really wanted an altimeter again), and I seriously thought of just buying another altimeter.

I was particularly thinking about this because you can’t just go out and buy a replacement battery and install it yourself, something that wasn’t clear to me when I got the watch. Nike talks about how the unit is sealed to be water resistant; not water proof, just "water resistant to 100 meters". That’s not of huge value to me; the most water I expect to run into is a heavy rainfall or splashing on it when washing my hands. Mildly water resistant but with an easy and cheap to replace battery would have been better for me.

In fact, Nike doesn’t even handle the replacement, but leaves it up to a third party. After a lot of groping around on their web site to figure this out, I had to box up my watch, mail it off, and pay $18.95 for the privilege. It did come back pretty promptly and has been working fine since then. I will never again buy a device for which I can’t just buy a replacement battery and install that myself. I’m not impressed by the argument about water resistance. Based on a comment on their support site, my guess is that Nike themselves has since recognized this as a design issue to improve in future models.

It was challenging to find the specifics of just where to mail the watch in for battery replacement. There are multiple Nike-related websites and not a lot of "support" information available online. I was also unhappy when I read in the documentation for the watch that the battery life is given as 1.5 years ... so I’ll get to do this again all-too-soon. In contrast, the very cheap Casio watch I use in normal life has been running for years and years; I tend to lose these (Casios) before I ever have to consider replacing the battery.

Things I like:

Multi-function in a small package
On my wrist these multiple functions are always available at the push of a button
Sufficiently intuitive user interface, i.e., I can figure out how to work things without carrying instructions

Things I don’t like:

Unit is always "on", drawing power and thus has limited battery life
Altimeter silently stops working when battery runs low
Must mail unit in and pay about $19 for battery replacement
low-utility web support and challenging web navigation
Limited and somewhat confusing instruction manual

For all the negative issues, overall this unit works fine, and offers a number of options. I’ll probably keep it many years and mail it plus some money in every couple of years for a battery change, as the alternative is to pay a lot more for a replacement product that might not be perfect either!

Read more reviews of Nike gear
Read more gear reviews by Brian Lewis

Owner Review by Brian Lewis

All material on this site is the exclusive property of BackpackGearTest.org.
BackpackGearTest software copyright David Anderson