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One of the healthiest exercises you can engage in is walking. Walking may not sound like much exercise, but do it for 10,000 or 20,000 steps, and it is really a great way to boost your metabolism, enhance your bone density and lose weight. Because walking is so beneficial to health, I like to review equipment that assists with walking as exercise, so when I came across a pedometer recently from Oregon Scientific, I decided to pick it up and review it.

The Oregon Scientific Digital Pedometer with Pulse Meter, model number PE826, costs about $30. The package claims that the pedometer has an infrared sensor that measures pulse, distance walked, time elapsed and calories burned, and it has a 12- to 24-hour clock. It supposedly counts up to 99,999 steps and stores up to seven days' walking and calorie data.

If all that had turned out to be true, this would have been a great product. Unfortunately, despite the fact that I am quite technically inclined, I was completely unable to get this Oregon Scientific pulse pedometer to measure a single footstep. The device read flat zero no matter what I did to it. The only thing I could get to work was the pulse meter, which did appear to operate correctly, showing me that at the time of measurement my pulse was 62, which is higher than usual for me but probably because I was angry at the device.

I followed the instructions from start to finish, including the calibration and set-up. The battery was working fine, the buttons were working fine -- it's just that the unit wouldn't measure my walking steps. I tried walking on a flat surface, I tried jumping around, I tried shaking it in my hands; nothing would make this unit register a single footstep.

When this kind of thing happens with a product, the next step is usually to go to the manufacturer's web site to find some answers, so I went to the support web site listed in the documentation for this device -- www2.organscientific.com/service/support -- and expected to find a section of frequently asked questions or support resources, but instead my browser was redirected to the product catalog page, which was of no use whatsoever. The only support resource I could find was a downloadable version of the very same manual I had been reading that encouraged me to go to the web site to find support in the first place: a stupid, endless loop.

But don't fret. The Oregon Scientific digital pedometer may not be entirely useless. It does have a clip on the side that clips into your belt or clothing. This can be used as a $30 paperclip to keep office papers together or an elaborate desktop paperweight to make your office workers think you actually engage in exercise.

As a pedometer, this Oregon Scientific product is completely and utterly useless, and while it seems that it cannot measure my footsteps with any aptitude whatsoever, it does seem successful at helping me measuring one thing, and that's the number of times I will review Oregon Scientific products in the future: zero.

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