Polar V800

The Polar V800 is a GPS watch that tracks a wide type of sports, from running and swimming to yoga, dance and CrossFit. The watch also tracks each day interest, inclusive of steps taken and calories burned.

Priced at $400, the Polar V800 is close to the high give up of the fee range for multisport GPS watches. it's extra expensive than the $299 TomTom Multi-sport aerobic, but inexpensive than the Garmin Forerunner 920XT, which sells for $490 on Amazon. blanketed in the V800's price is a coronary heart charge screen that tracks your pulse throughout workouts on land and inside the water. I tested the V800 over the route of a month, bringing the watch with me on runs, bike rides and swims, and carrying it around the residence at the same time as I went approximately my day. here's what i discovered:

The Polar V800 has complete features that make it useful for any athlete who participates in more than one recreation. it is also one of the handiest multisport GPS watches in the marketplace which could monitor your heart rate underwater.

however, the V800's boxy design isn't comfortable for people with slender wrists. And in case you're a metropolis dweller, then you definitely need to recognize that the tool can take a couple of minutes to pick up a GPS signal in areas with masses of tall homes round.

The V800 is available in  colorations: black with gray accents, and blue with red accents. those alternatives are refreshingly discreet as compared to the bright colorations you'll discover on each the Garmin Forerunner 920XT and the TomTom Multi-sport aerobic. however, the V800 failed to healthy effortlessly on my wrist (because of its boxy design), which supposed I failed to want to hold it on all day to song my steps or calories burned. whilst i used to be running out, I needed to fasten the band tightly on my wrist in order that it would not slide around on my arm.

The V800's display, or "training pc," is encased in chrome steel, and the watch face is made from Gorilla Glass (the equal hardy, scratch-resistant cloth that covers newer versions of the iPhone and many other cellular devices). those top class substances supply the watch a excellent look that's lacking from the more steeply-priced Forerunner 920XT, which is nearly entirely plastic.

The V800's show is shiny and smooth to examine each indoors and out of doors. to see the watch underwater, at the same time as carrying tinted goggles, all I needed to do changed into press the device's backlight button. all the watch's five buttons are smooth to press, even underwater, and i preferred that the most essential button on the watch — the one that starts and pauses a exercise — is pink in place of silver, so it stands out.

To get started with the V800, you will want to down load Polar's software onto your pc and create an account with Polar drift, the employer's portal for viewing information. you may also down load the Polar drift cellular app on your cellphone or pill. if you have the app, you'll be capable of sync records wirelessly from the watch for your cellular device. without the app, data syncing ought to be accomplished by means of plugging the watch into your laptop through the charging cable. In my enjoy, both strategies for syncing records labored nicely.

I did come across a few issues whilst seeking to charge the watch. The USB charging cable that comes with the V800 has a clip on one cease that attaches to a charging port at the back of the watch. It took pretty a piece of exercise to correctly connect the clip to the watch, and even after the clip become linked, the watch now and again moved off the charger with an unintended nudge.

luckily, I didn't need to rate the V800 very frequently. you can use the look ahead to 13 hours in regular GPS mode before it desires to be charged. Or, if you want the battery to closing longer, you may transfer to strength-store mode. on this putting, the watch will update GPS records less frequently, however you'll be capable of use the V800 for fifty hours before it runs out of juice. typical, the battery lifestyles of the V800 is slightly less impressive than that of the pricier Forerunner 920XT from Garmin, which could ultimate 24 hours in normal GPS mode.

at the same time as the V800 is generally notion of as a triathlon watch, it could song a lot more than simply running, swimming and cycling. you can tune the entirety from yoga to handball with this watch by editing your sports activities Profiles web page at the Polar drift website. creating custom activity pages at the Forerunner 920XT is more complex, and including custom interest profiles to the TomTom Multi-sport aerobic is not even an choice.

but, as compared to both the Garmin FR920XT and the TomTom Multi-sport cardio, the V800 became a chunk gradual at selecting up a GPS sign in an city environment. whilst the watch received a satellite tv for pc lock in only seconds after I tested it within the suburbs, I had to wait greater than  mins to get a GPS sign in midtown long island (an area with plenty of tall buildings).

The Polar flow app that accompanies the V800 does an amazing process of laying out your facts in an clean-to-examine layout. if you're using the watch as a every day activity tracker, you will be able to see designated information about how an awful lot time you spent being lively as opposed to sitting round. The app also shows ways in an effort to attain your daily activity goal. some of those recommendations had been a little silly (e.g., play darts for seven hours), but others had been greater realistic (e.g., jog for 50 mins).

I actually loved the way that the Polar drift website prepared my exercise data. The Diary tab on the website shows you a calendar along with your sports for each day of the month, laid out in a completely simple format. you may easily see how a great deal exercise you bought on a given day, and you can evaluate a precis of your complete week at a look.

The V800 affords superior metrics for runners and cyclists, inclusive of distance, pace, cadence, speed, coronary heart price and elevation. The handiest metrics missing for runners are vertical oscillation (motion up and down, or "bounce") and ground touch time (the amount of time your foot stays at the floor when you're taking a step). in case you want to song those metrics, you can do so on sure Garmin watches, which include the Forerunner 920XT and the Forerunner 620.

like the Suunto Ambit3 sport, the V800 simplest connects to external sensors, like coronary heart fee video display units, bike pace sensors and cadence sensors, through Bluetooth smart, now not ANT+ (an older wi-fi generation for transferring statistics from sensors to an eye). in case you have already got a gaggle of ANT+ sensors lying round, you'll need to buy new, Bluetooth ones to pair with the V800.

The Polar V800 is one among most effective  multisport GPS watches which can gather coronary heart charge information underwater. And not like the Suunto Ambit3 recreation (the opposite watch that could do this), the V800 actually indicates you heart price data in real time during your swim. With the Ambit3 sport, you have to wait till after your swim to look the coronary heart price facts.

however notwithstanding the V800's underwater coronary heart-rate-tracking talents, I nevertheless did not love using this tool in the pool. The watch turned into now not continually accurate at counting my laps, in particular once I stored my turns open instead of doing a flip flip. And the V800 also mislabeled several of my stroke kinds. as an instance, the watch notion i was doing backstroke when i used to be absolutely doing breaststroke.

entertainment/notion: 8/10

The Polar flow internet site seconds as a social networking site for Polar users. if you click on the explore tab at the web page, you'll see an interactive map that indicates the recent exercise summaries for Polar clients all around the global. The map is a outstanding device for identifying different athletes to your region, whom you may choose to "follow" for updates on their education. Polar customers who follow each other can also touch upon each different's published workouts, a high-quality manner to construct network, and a characteristic that some athletes would possibly find motivating.

you could additionally upload information from the Polar website to MyFitnessPal, a famous third-celebration health app. And in a latest update, the organisation gave customers the capability to upload information that the watch collects to Strava and TrainingPeaks,  websites (additionally available as mobile apps) that log jogging and biking exercises.