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).

Polar-A360-Garmin-HRMTRI-Swim-Comparison — Swim HR Data – Polar A360

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?

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reactionsok

4 years ago

i’m not seeing the stroke or length data – so is it little value here?

tfk, the5krunner

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Reply to reactionsok

it’s not an ‘athlete’s’ sports watch 🙂 . That’s one aspect I will cover in the review. It seems a great product to me for a certain market…all depends if you are in that market or not. For an athlete who, say, uses an ugly 920XT you might consider it for the other 23×7 hours of ‘prettier’ usage

tfaword

from their spec sheet they say it’s “water resistance: 30m” (page 62) and Polar nicely included a table what this means on page 64 saying there “Suitable for bathing and swimming”, anyway I don’t own one so didn’t try myself, please don’t make me accountable if this goes not as expected :-O
assume they used a smart way to shut down the USB port (similar as some smartphone today use to reach higher IPX ratings) if they don’t sense USB 5V voltages present means you actually don’t need the rubber cover present to get it secured for short circuits by water as long you don’t charge it (ergo bring the 5V USB voltage on) during same time with the water present