(FORTUNE Magazine) – Adidas spared no brain cycles in putting together what it is billing as the "world's first intelligent shoe." A team of engineers and designers, including a robotics expert and a former Lockheed Martin aeronautical engineer, spent four years measuring, designing, testing, and perfecting a sneaker that would constantly adapt its cushioning to help deliver a perfect run. The result: Adidas_1 (the underscore, I suppose, is to prepare for a day when this intelligent shoe will be sending and receiving e-mail), a $250 marvel that features a 20-MHz chip, a magnetic sensor, and a motor and cable system lodged in each arch, heel, and midsole. The setup enables the shoes to gauge a runner's compression about 1,000 times per second and adjust to stabilize the cushioning no matter what he (and so far the shoe comes only in men's sizes) is running on.

It's a brilliant solution. There's only one question: What problem is it solving?

I'm a casual runner--nine miles a week if I'm lucky--and my complaints revolve around being winded or being unable to keep my shoelaces tied. Unscientific polling of everyday runners--Adidas's target market for the 1's--turned up no one who complained that his shoes were "just too dumb." But then, sometimes people don't know they have a problem until being told. Figuring that I might be in that group, I took the shoes out for a weekend of testing on various surfaces and terrains.

In Palo Alto, I hit the Baylands Nature Preserve and cruised over what a park guide said was a trail of pavement, decomposed granite, and crushed oyster shells. When the Adidas_1 senses the need, it changes the firmness of the cushioning in midair every fourth step. That gradual adjustment makes it hard to detect any altering of the ride, so I used the shoe's side buttons to manually lower the cushioning of the left shoe while raising the right, expecting to experience what it might be like to run with a peg leg. Instead, the change just made it feel as if my left foot was dragging.

In Manhattan, I took the shoes out on a trail composed of what appeared, under casual analysis, to be pavement, decomposed dog poop, and crushed litter. This time I lowered both shoes to their softest levels, and immediately the run became more labored. In both tests, when I left the shoes on the default setting, my run was great. But was it my imagination or was it the electronics at work? And as for styling, the only second look I got while wearing the shoes came from the X-ray screener at San Francisco's airport, who insisted that the Adidas_1's be swabbed for explosives.

It's too soon to say whether these--the most expensive sneakers on the market--are the future of footwear. My guess is that more likely they'll be the Segways of the shoe world: brilliantly engineered, easy to use, but of dubious necessity. --Daniel Roth