I haven't seen one Watch in Golds Gym Venice. That said, I've thought about using one in my own workout to time rest between sets, which I feel would be easier than having to manage my phone (which I could leave in my pocket). However, I've really been analyzing how I use my phone at the gym, and now consider a few things the watch won't replace. I find I do a lot of texting at the gym between sets, something I'm not likely to want to do via dictation on the watch in the middle of the gym. I'm usually on-call during the week with work, so I need to actually reply to some e-mails I receive. Ocassionally I do need to take calls at the gym, and it's hard for me to imagine having a speakerphone conversation on the watch in the middle of the gym. And finally, my guilty pleasure, I do tend to surf the web between sets, something I clearly couldn't do on the watch.
In the plus column, if a good watch interface for tracking gym stats were developed, I can see actually doing it on the watch. And then there's music control. I don't use headphones at the gym, as I generally like the mix they play at golds. However, I do watch others who are listening to music, and the watch would be invaluable to them, rather than twisting around to control the iPhone on their bicep, managing their wires to pull the iPhone out and change it, reaching behind their neck to adjust their Shuffle, etc.
I can't imagine any fitness tracker ever doing a good job with weight lifting due to the sporadic heart rate between sets and the frequency with which the heart rate monitor takes readings. If it were always on constantly monitoring it that would be one thing, but it would also probably drain your battery before the workout was over. Even if you were doing cardio during rests between sets, you wouldn't get an accurate measure of it to know if you were actually achieving your goals. So there's a lot of work that needs to be done on this aspect of the watch before it will be useful for weight lifters. And, they need to come up with a rep counting algorithm so you don't have to manually enter your rep count, though I can see no way around entering weight lifted, or leg reps. Maybe down the road they will develop ankle and wrist straps that will coordinate with the watch and measure movement on all of your extremities.
