My wife plays a lot of tennis, and I bought the Babolat racket for her for Christmas. Great idea, but it's implementation is awful, primarily because the software is complete crap. We're using it with Mac/Android, so maybe the Windows/iPhone version is better, but the software problems are pervasive and make it pretty much unusable. We called Babolat about it and they were completely unhelpful--their support staff didn't seem to be trained to deal with anything other than physical rackets. This is all fixable--but fixing it would require a company that's great at building rackets to learn how to build great software... unlikely, and there's no sign that it's going to happen. A device like the Smash (or other separately wearable tech) is more likely to do the software right.
Beyond Babolat's bugs, there's a deeper issue: it shows you a lot of data... but it's not clear that that data is actually useful. So 24% of your hits are on the upper quadrant of the racket... so what? Is that good or bad? If bad, what advice would a coach give you to improve? This drove my wife crazy: when we occasionally got her racket to sync properly she was rewarded with a flood of numbers that meant nothing to her. Smash's video says it will "make recommendations like a coach would"--which is what you actually want, so hopefully they are able to deliver on that promise.
Beyond Babolat's bugs, there's a deeper issue: it shows you a lot of data... but it's not clear that that data is actually useful. So 24% of your hits are on the upper quadrant of the racket... so what? Is that good or bad? If bad, what advice would a coach give you to improve? This drove my wife crazy: when we occasionally got her racket to sync properly she was rewarded with a flood of numbers that meant nothing to her. Smash's video says it will "make recommendations like a coach would"--which is what you actually want, so hopefully they are able to deliver on that promise.