Polar A360: Goes Swimming // review to follow later

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This week is an easy week for me. So what does that mean? Yep, you guessed it LOTS of really HARD re-tests. Sigh.

But even more days off as well ! 🙂

After a hard January all the work seems to be paying off.

Thursday night marked my first swim with the rather pretty Polar A360 (specs). I suspect that the intended market for the A360 is *NOT* swimmers. But it did say water proof to 30m so it just had to go and get wet.

The A360 was thrown in at the deep end (pun intended) with a VO2max session which went well (thank you for asking).

I was surprised that the touchscreen worked at the end of the various sets. But it did.

I was surprised that the overall trainingload for the session based on HR/TRIMP was ‘about right’ . But it was (+5 TRIMP).

I don’t imagine the A360 is intended for HIIT either but this swim was in Z5 as you can see. OK to be fair my HRs for Z5run are higher still and there may be problems there – we’ll see.

I hadn’t updated to the latest firmware, doh, so I don’t think it fair to show a comparison HR track to Garmin’s HRM-TRI yet (I will). However the track you can see was a reasonable representation of reality. There was some lag in the readings compared to the HRM-TRI as others have experienced with this same, old firmware version.

Overall I was pleasantly surprised. The added bonus is that the watch/smartband/activity tracker is still working despite the chlorine.

Detailed review to follow. Maybe in 2 weeks. February in any case.

WARNING: I’m not sure the A360 should be bought and used as a swim watch. Occasionally swimming?; maybe. I’m just saying that I went swimming with it. OK?