This is the FOURTH standalone portable interval countdown timer that I’ve tried, and it may well be the last…I plunked down the thirty one bucks (with shipping) because I wanted to be able to save multiple interval workouts instead of having to suffer the tedious chore of reprogramming it every time I want to do a different kind of workout.

First off, this timer is a notable improvement over the previous two iterations by Gymboss: the first one had a plasticky cheap feel and died as soon as it came in contact with a little spilled Gatorade in my gym bag. It was a total nightmare to use, with the most convoluted and idiotic GUI ever, compounded by instructions that must have been written by some Chinese sweatshop supervisor who failed his English language class. The second Gymboss had a much more pleasing rubbercoat exterior, seemed more sturdy, and seemed slightly less confounding to use.

This one, the third generation, is almost ten bucks more expensive but worth every penny, IMO: the instructions and GUI are still not quite ideal, but far improved over the last two generations, and the beauty of it is that once you store all of your desired workouts (I have: Tabata, 2:1 rounds, 3:1 rounds, 10:10 rounds, etc.), you never have to go back through it again—well, at least not until your AAA battery needs to be replaced, because I don’t think there is any temporary memory that would retain your workouts.

Secondly, ease of use even aside from the memory storage is much improved—but I would STRONGLY recommend that you go to the Gymboss website and download the full instructions from there, because the included instructions are still not great.

Third, the button layout is weirdly intuitive compared to the previous versions…and having the buttons a different color from the case was a (doh!) good idea.

Before I bought this, I had been using an Everlast Interval Training Round Timer which unfortunately stopped working when it fell off my arm just before a marathon. Even before that happened, it was not nearly as fun to use as this one, and its tinny boxing-bell chime was very annoying…I’m almost glad that it died, now that I have this Mini Max!

the first interval timer i’ve ever owned, so this will reflect that.

i love the look of it and it is definitely chock full of features, albeit no backlight. it is NOT easy to understand and use until you really read the directions and are used to how it works. mind you, don’t adjust it when you’re in the middle of a workout!

overall, i think it’s added quite a nice dimension to my workouts. already have noticed my workouts have become more efficient and i push through a bit harder knowing it’s a set time limit.

great product, steep learning curve.

Very disappointed, at the top of the instruction sheet it states “After 5 minutes of no use the timer will automatically turn off. However, if left in stopwatch or clock mode, timer will not turn off on its own” This is not correct the gymboss turns off automatically in stopwatch mode and you lose your stopwatch data, this makes it useless as a stopwatch. I spoke with gymboss directly and they said oh, that’s an error. I have had my gymboss for months and they still have not corrected this error in their online instructions