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2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44
Unexpectedly for its fans, Polar presented a fitness watch with a lot of deviations from the company's general line. A very interesting novelty has come out.
The Polar lineup has been expanded with the M series, which covers almost all the needs of amateur athletes. It's easier to say what is not in the new product:
- Altimeter. The watch will not be able to measure altitude in the mountains and cycling climbs, as flagships of all manufacturers and the V800 model from Polar do.
- ANT +. This short-range protocol for plug-in sensors has long been discontinued by Polar, and this is no exception.
Now let's figure out what is actually in front of us.
Software
The watch runs on Android Wear. This expands the range of applications beyond sports and makes the Polar M600 a complete smartwatch. For example, the top-end V800 and the previous flagship of the M400 line can only receive notifications from phones via Bluetooth. It looks strange and hardly applicable. For me, so for sure. Good or bad that your sports watch is smart is up to you.
The manufacturer claims that the watch will be able to live for two days with an Android phone or one day with an iOS phone. Why such a difference is not clear. We are also promised 8 hours of continuous workout on a single charge. Full "iron" or "ultra" will not work out.:)
From my experience with the Polar A360 wristband, which is also equipped with an optical heart rate sensor, I can assume that you can connect a Polar H7 chest strap to the M600 and save a lot of battery power by turning off the optics.
The interface should run fast, judging by the short review by The Verge:
In general, Polar has a reputation for buying some watches and getting others over time. That is, Polar very often releases a raw product, but over time it becomes a reliable assistant with a mountain of cool features that you didn't really hope for at first. So, it is worth treating the first reviews of the software with restraint.
Iron
The main innovation of the Polar M600 is the 1.3-inch touchscreen. The pixel density is 260 ppi. The picture looks sharp, but the resolution is still less than that of the same Apple Watch (330 ppi).
How the screen behaves in the sun is also not clear yet. It's nice that it is protected by Gorilla Glass 3, which means it doesn't scratch much.
The watch is equipped with GPS and GLONASS and can record not only your running, but also cycling and swimming in open water (IPX8 protection).
The heart rate sensor that the watch is equipped with is unlike anything else. This is not a dual-LED Mio Alpha, not a Polar one from the A360, and not the same as the one on the Apple Watch. This is a new sensor with six diodes, and we will determine its quality in tests later.
The watch has a power button and a front button for quickly starting workouts. You may have seen such a solution in the Adidas miCoach Smart Run watch. It was convenient there, it will be convenient here too.
It's nice that Wi-Fi support finally appeared, which means that syncing workouts without a phone with Polar Flow is the best part of the entire ecosystem of the company.
The cost of Polar M600 is $ 329 "there", but how much "here" is not yet clear.
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