Polar Vantage Update 5 – Slightly Delayed

The problem is that all companies invested in that disastrous new Sony chip are at the mercy of Garmin, who is the only company big enough to be able to put pressure on Sony to come up with improvements. As long as Garmin is content that their devices offer good enough GPS, we’re stuck with what we get. I really think that the culprit of the VV is its housing. I also had the M, and its GPS was leaps and bounds ahead. Also, with Update 4 my VV introduced nasty outages. Since I use a Stryd I don’t notice them during my runs but afterwards when I look at the map and would see lots of dead straight connections between points where it apparently lost connection. My M430 and 935 on the other wrist are totally fine, so it’s not about GPS signal but a reception problem. The tracks my Vantage V lays down look like a child’s scribbling. Yesterday I unpaired Stryd from the VV and after the run metrics sure enough were completely off. The 935 showed 7.22km at 4:11min/km (from Stryd), and Vantage 6.5km at 4:37min/km (from GPS). That’s completely unacceptable from a device as expensive… Read more »

Polar’s Race Pace is like Garmin’s old Race Pace, i.e. you set a distance, and time, and the watch will show you whether (and by how much) you’re behind or ahead, together with distance left, current pace, and HR.
PacePro is more sophisticated as it let you split your race time beforehand manually, and it can even automatically do grade-adjusted splits if you apply it to a route.