Polar Dashboards – An Explainer on the new ones
Polar Dashboards – An Explainer on the new onesThe Polar Grit X Pro (Titan) and Vantage V2 series both get two new dashboards packed full of useful info.
A dashboard would be called a TILE in Wear OS, a WIDGET on Garmin watches and for an Apple Watch 7 it would be a (secondary) watchface. Thus dashboards are a full screen of ‘something’ that looks like a watchface but your true watchface is the one you display all the time whereas a dashboard/widget is the kind of thing you flick to every now and then that also gives the ability to drill down into other related information. Got it? Good, let’s go 🙂
Must Read: Detailed Polar Grit X Review
Temporal Dashboard
I was trying to think of a single, all-encompassing word that covers sunrise, sunset, daylight hours and other similar information. Temporal seemed a good one to use
The small white triangle shows your position in the day. The yellow and blue bands it travels around indicates exactly where that is in relation to sunset/sunrise. If you look super-closely at the boundaries between the blue and yellow rings you will see the subtly different periods around sunset that incorporate dusk and twilight. And similarly the times around sunrise and dawn.
When you press the middle right button you get the precise times of the day ahead that match those upcoming sunrise/sunset periods.
Orientation Dashboard
This dashboard shows your place in the world.
The main dashboard screen shows your compass heading and elevation.
The centre-right button then gives access to an altitude plot over the last 6 hours, your GPS coordinates and a compass dial which can be locked.
It’s worth noting that any sports profile can have a full-screen compass as one of the pages and I guess most of the time you would use that.
Take Out
I like the look of the main dashboard screens though sometimes the contrast & readability could be better. I guess you wouldn’t use the secondary pages too much, the information they present looks messy to me.
My biggest gripe was the compass on the Grit X Pro that needed calibration numerous times every day.
Those minor points aside, these new dashboards add several existing ones and, overall, they cover most of the bases for the information you will need to support your workouts and adventures.
Must Read: Detailed Polar Grit X Review
Available Oct 20th: Polar Vantage V2 RED – $/Eu549, £449
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Compass needs calibration numerous times every day???
Does this mean I would have to do the annoying “figure eight” movements several times a day or the compass would be useless?
it’s not as bad as the figure of 8 calibration. it involves lots of tilting and then turning upside down. I’m guessing there’s a software glitch that requires it to be recalibrated so often (I have a beta unit)
for the location dashboard the watchface that shows the last fix GPS coordinates: how often this gets updated if not deliberately starting an activity but just using it in the watch mode? Do the watch update this in certain intervals or?
it can be manually refreshed at any time with the ‘button’ underneath the text that shows the location.
it is updated when working out with GPS
at some point after the last good fix, the numbers are entirely erased. I’m not sure on that timeframe, it holds the coordinates for at least 10 minute (just tried it)
it doesn’t seem to update the position info in the background at all ie there is no silent acquisition of GPS
however even getting a GPS fix at the start of a workout (without starting the workout) updates the info
thank you for trying out, very useful feature, brings the GritX Pro closer to a real ABC watch utility