DeerRun is launching a new flagship treadmill called the Apex Titan 1 to compliment their portfolio of other exercise treadmills including the Flex and Sleek series. These “smart” treadmills also include a “PitPat” app service which allows users to compete online in a series of games. The games are limited to what are available on the DeerRun app and are mainly racing competition games with no other controls other than the speed at which you can run on the treadmill.
The DeerRun treadmills are quite affordable, ranging from $149 to $1400, with a good number of models in the $300 range.
Shown above is a DeerRun treadmill connected to the DeerRun app running on a phone set up on a tripod to the right. The phone is also mirroring its display on a big flatscreen TV in front of the treadmill. This seems like an awful lot of setup and an awful lot of screens. The vertical phone screen app looks terrible on the TV since it’s only using maybe a 20% stripe of the display down the middle. It’s like looking through a keyhole. If this app was supposed to be displayed on a TV screen, it should have been designed with landscape mode compatibility in mind.
When a game is running however, the full landscape orientation of the phone screen is displayed on the large TV screen, so that’s good at least. The flagship Titan 1 treadmill already includes a big screen mounted to the front of it, but apparently this cannot be used for PitPat games. It only displays stats, which should probably also be displayed on the game screen. It seems kind of wasteful to have a big screen on the treadmill, a phone screen mounted to the side, and a big TV screen mounted in front. Why can’t all of this run on the screen that comes with the treadmill? Wouldn’t that make more sense? It must connect to the phone anyway in order to communicate the running speed. The press release says that these were “Built With PitPat, Not Bolted On”, but it certainly looks like it was just bolted on with some app on a phone that needs to be connected to a TV in order to play. At least make the screen built into the treadmill mirror the phone screen when the phone is plugged in.
Here’s another view of the DeerRun Titan 1 where two children are playing the racing game. A racing game for running is definitely something children would like, however as you can see above, the children are too short to see the video game on the TV screen in front of them. The big “stats only” screen built into the treadmill is blocking their view of the game. Again, why not put the game on the screen that’s built into the treadmill?
Despite not using the built in screen for games, the DeerRun Titan 1 is a pretty impressive treadmill and includes an incline motor that will raise the angle to up to 48 degrees. It also supports speeds up to 12.5 MPH (20 KPH), and a 400 LB maximum user capacity.