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Polar Vantage V3 | new for 2023? Opinion

Polar Vantage V2
Polar Vantage V2

Polar Vantage V3

More: Polar Vantage V3 Review

The Polar Vantage V2 was released in October 2020, so a 3-year release cycle implies a new top-end Polar is due very soon. Perhaps as soon as the week after the Apple Watch on 13 Sep. I don’t have a V3 or knowledge of one so this article looks at the reality of what Polar is likely to be able to introduce.

A couple of years ago Polar sent out a survey asking for the opinions from existing owners on what features to include in the next-generation Vantage V3, that gave some hints as to what Polar was considering and I’ve also included the results further below from a poll on this site which I know Polar will also have seen.

via @wlcik

Q: What is the Vantage V Series?

It is important to understand the ethos of Polar’s Vantage sub-brand as the next generation V3 needs to sensibly follow what has come before. I asked Polar, and the ‘V’ doesn’t stand for anything but it is the prefix for Polar’s premium multisport watch. Here, I mean premium in terms of

    • premium Pricing
    • premium Features
    • premium Build Quality
    • superior heart rate offering for the prescription, monitoring and analysis of fitness.
Polar Ignite 3 AMOLED…just sayin’

Q. What is the market opportunity?

Recent 2023 stock market performance figures from Garmin strongly imply that the covid boom period is over but that the market potential is still huge. Leisure activities continue to be more important to a healthier, younger generation and triathlon sports remain popular.

Significant numbers of people are getting more prosperous and countries in Asia are becoming ever-more important geographic markets.

Individual markets can be sliced and diced in many intricate ways but the gist of it is that significant numbers of people exist who want to spend relatively large sums of money on sporting tools to support and guide their efforts in sport. There are lifestyle elements to all of this and there are significant crossovers to how our technologies get ever smarter and ever-more integrated.

Vantage V3 represents a significant opportunity for Polar to get people to upgrade from their V2, Grit X and M-series watches. Polar does have a large and loyal European customer base however it will find it difficult to attract equally loyal customers away from their Garmins.

Marketing 101

If you divide up the total market into chunks of people who behave in similar ways and really understand them, then you know what you need to put in your product to incentivise them to buy it. Maybe you call them Weekend Warriors or Wannabee athletes or Mamils or whatever.

But if you work in a tech company then you will find you have to deal with a lot of tech-focussed & powerful people within your company. They’ve just invented something like ‘a better touchscreen‘ and they think it is an obvious move to sell the benefits of that tech, perhaps to people who don’t really want or need it. To an extent, Garmin has already fallen foul of this by justifying higher watch prices with wellness and smart features, selling to people who only want a watch to wear during sports.

There are always arguments like “Tech can create new markets” and there is certainly truth in that. However, there is also the tech that has led some companies down the wrong route and away from the customers that could have made them richer….let’s see if any future Coros Pace 3 has AMOLED (IDK)… that could be a prime example of what I am talking about.

whoop 3 The Scale of the Market Problem

Fitness, smart & sports watches represent a vast market with many individual opportunities.

Polar is interested in the athletic sports & fitness watch markets between $150 and $500. V3 would slot in at the top of that price range somewhere and, in reality, would target different flavours of runners and some triathletes. Polar’s other watches target the low-end running market and indoor gym/fitness markets.

At the low end of that price range, the market segments are hugely competitive and at the top end, Garmin has the high-price/high-feature argument well and truly won. Surprisingly, at the cheaper end of the market, there are relatively inexpensive products that have many smart features and/or many competent sports features.

‘Somewhere in the middle’ requires good marketing, a good product and a dose of good luck. In that middle ground, you might well come across Apple which has awesome marketing, an unbeatable SMART product and it doesn’t need any luck. Or you might come across Coros churning out features on a weekly basis or you might come across an older, discounted Garmin that still has more features than your current top-end product.

There is no obvious gap in the market of any size.

The dilemma that Polar and Suunto face is that they will never, ever, ever compete with the features of the Garmin Epix/Fenix 7/965. Never. So they will take a different tack or strategy. Any such strategy will rightly make them focus on specific opportunities but a further problem for Polar is that Garmin, despite its conservatism, is a nimble company that can easily react within a year to an emerging opportunity…if it wants to.

Polar Ignite 3
Polar Ignite 3 AMOLED…just sayin’

Reactions to the Problems

Problems are, of course, merely solutions just waiting to happen.

Before we get onto specifics, here are some broad ways forward

  • Research the most wanted features and introduce 2 or 3 of them to a very good level of execution
  • Target specific multisport niches/segments and do them really well
  • Lower the price, that strategy might work for the likes of Coros with the feature-packed Pace 2 and we’ve already seen Suunto slash higher-end model pricing in some countries in 2023. But is that right for the top end Polar Vantage V3? If it’s $100 cheaper will it sell that many more units?
  • Go smarter, more smart features from a Wear OS strategy might work for the successor to Suunto 7
  • Boost margins by offering customised aesthetic options like Suunto – it can be easier to customise change straps, materials and colours than add a new feature (Polar already does this to a degree, Suunto/Garmin do it better)
  • Focus. Tidy up, simply make everything they’ve implemented work completely properly. Excel at something else.
  • Pretty it up. People like pretty. Prettiness is a vital feature for a watch that is intended to be worn 24×7 and also important for people who just want to look good in their expensive lycra when exercising.
  • Introduce more physiology metrics – people like to learn about themselves, even if it’s based on inaccurate or irrelevant data (in the poll below we see SpO2 ranks highly, is that useful for a multisport watch?)
  • Invest in a different kind of marketing. If you look at WHOOP, it’s clear that you don’t need the best tech to perform EXTREMELY well. Perhaps it’s best to invest in someone like Ryf or Farah. Better still get some of the mega-rich endurance sports superstars to invest in your business and they will then go off and be ambassadors for you (a la WHOOP)

and so on. But you can hopefully already see neither one simple strategy nor one new feature is a solution to the problem.

Plus many of those broad ways forward need to be considered in terms of the cost of implementation, the availability of internal coding resources, the time to market and more besides. Garmin has 1.5 BILLION dollars of cash in the bank, it must have 100s strong R&D/development teams, and they’re already working on that new feature that will pop onto the market in 2025.

Polar/Suunto just don’t have those kinds of resources and that is a key limiter.

In a way, Suunto has it harder than Polar. Suunto 9/BARO is specifically competing with the Garmin Fenix, which is the best adventure multisport watch…ever. Navigation features are even harder to get to market than raw sports features and, to make matters worse, there are myriad ways that people want to use navigation, I could list 10 or 20 navigational must-haves that Fenix competitors don’t have. As we have seen, more lowly prices and featured watches are exposed to competition from new entrants like Coros…Garmin Fenix CANNOT be taken on by a new entrant, it’s literally impossible.

Some Simple Answers that, of course, are beset with difficulties

People like checklists of features. One person needs this feature and another person needs that feature. For each feature you fail to include, your target market becomes smaller. (Death by a thousand cuts)

Features can be hard to implement in terms of time, money and labour. Once you have ‘features’ at the same level of breadth and depth as Garmin then you create a formidable barrier to entry that is next-to-impossible to surmount in any meaningful way. Remember that.

The solution?

Polar to return to Wear OS hints CEO

Everyone knows the solution. It’s an app store of some sort. That’s why Hammerhead Karoo 3 could become bigger than Wahoo Elemnt ROAM, that’s partly why Polar tried the M600 and why Suunto now has a quite decent app ecosystem with SuuntoPlus. An app store lets you build your feature set with the help of third parties, even the mighty Samsung has bowed to the inevitable and moved to Wear OS. Yet the ‘obvious’ app store solution is more than just a feature and is hard to implement, it may even require existing tech to be rebuilt from scratch…IDK. Even then the Wear OS app store doesn’t necessarily give you excellent SPORTS or NAVIGATIONAL features to the same level as Garmin Fenix, although the sum total of all Wear OS app features might beat the Fenix feature set…you’d just have to toggle between multiple apps…a lot.

That said, Polar might not have the resources to create a proprietary app store, perhaps not enough apps would be developed in any case and therefore Polar’s ONLY option to get help from 3rd party developers and pre-built features is from Wear OS, which they’ve already tried and which doesn’t lend itself to serious sports usage because of battery life limitations.

A final point to add on that, a bike computer is a ‘physically big’ device and can more easily accommodate a larger battery. On the wrist, Wear OS would need a MASSIVE battery to create a device with 20 hours of GPS recording time. Interchangeable batteries or batteries incorporated into a strap might be novel solutions to the battery+size conundrum but they create further issues themselves – eg would a replaceable battery be water and dirt-proof?

Our own biased advice

Someone like me might suggest improvements that are biased toward my sporting experiences and uses, for example, to re-invent a Garmin watch with a twist eg along the lines of

  • Become the most accurate sports tool (oHR and GNSS…but that is HARD)
  • Do running properly and become the go-to running watch…track mode, Zwift-treadmill mode, trail mode with tile-based map overlays to support route-following in a race
  • Do triathlon properly with a running focus – FE-C trainer control, ANT+ sensor support, transition automation, proper customisable multisport profiles, proper swim,

Unfortunately that ‘twist’ would be added to Garmin’s feature portfolio within 6 months. Back to square 1.

Someone like you might suggest a social and security focus with features around challenges (you need a community first), location sharing, fall alerts, music and the like. Someone else would proffer other pearls of wisdom. Garmin already has those pearls and has already made a necklace out of them.

The point here is that we often give answers to solving our personal problems. Even if Polar made some of these changes we would probably have something else to add to the to-do list the next day.

My Solution for Vantage V3

My solution for Polar would be to make a bold move rather than fiddling with Vantage Gen 3 features, perhaps something like this list which also includes some points that stray wider than the scope of V3

  1. Technical Competence: a leading-edge dual frequency GNSS chip to nail positioning as best as can be done matching Garmin/Coros/Suunto
  2. Athletic Competence: Track mode + ??
  3. Prettiness: A display that has smaller bezels
  4. Prettiness: AMOLED screen – sure it’ll use more juice but people running marathons will still be fine. It’s not a problem for Polar’s target markets for V3.
  5. Prettiness: 3rd party watch faces
  6. Physiological Competence: Beef up the physiology feature set. (Polar already licences its algorithms)
  7. Ambassadors:  Get some serious brand ambassadors who are athletes rather than F1 drivers (I love F1, BTW) people like Patrick Mahomes (too late WHOOP already have him)
  8. Athletic Competence: Simply do running features properly (perhaps the job of the Pacer Pro), and make every running feature a complete feature (how many companies initially supported Stryd but never allowed proper calibration #pointless #annoying). Polar has always tried to do ‘running’, less so recently as it has scrambled to release as many new features as possible with its limited resources. Lots of people run and always will. Competing for the runner who buys Garmin Enduro is easier than competing for the triathlete who buys a Garmin 965. Triathlon is too complex to do completely properly and mandates ANT+ support which Polar seems intent on never supporting
  9. Competitive Competence: Think who is more vulnerable & least nimble, Garmin or WHOOP? Direct your next product toward their customers, knowing that Verity Sense is technically better than WHOOP is an interesting place to start
  10. Medium Term: A recovery ring is a very good idea, even if it’s only for nightwear. You know what HRV and recovery are already. You were leaders there 10 years ago when only you, me & Firstbeat had heard of it!
  11. Long Term: In the absence of your own plans for a proprietary app store, you know what to do. You probably have some in-house expertise in Wear OS but perhaps don’t put that on a Vantage V3 😉

Hey, that’s my 2c. And I think we will see the underlined/bolded bits on the V3.

I guess I don’t know that much about Polar compared to any single individual who works there. But my sense is that Polar needs to start to gamble a little more with a portfolio that includes slightly riskier product ventures. Some might fail, and one might be the next WHOOP.

Please feel free to comment or criticise below. Or just look at the poll PLEASE REMEMBER that results are skewed toward the kind of person that reads this post and visits this site. Although I reckon that’s probably similar to the kinds of people that would be interested in a Vantage 3!

Recommended Reading: Polar Vantage V2 Review

 

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51 thoughts on “Polar Vantage V3 | new for 2023? Opinion”

  1. funny that people who seriously write BS like “Fenix.. best watch ever” (he really said ‘ever’ for Fenix6 and then again for fenix 7 ????) in the same realm thinking that other sport brands need urgently support for an proprietary dying and garmin owned standard like ANT, wonder did you also recommend Apple to use ANT to be able to survive in the fitness market? According your clever logic for Polar able to survive they must have a Garmin proprietary wireless protocoll on board … just utter nonsense. Stick to industrial standards and please no proprietary garmin shit.

    1. Scary Thought
      the fenix 7 pro is probably now the best ever.
      Scary thought
      fenix 8 will be better in the future when it is released.
      every single triathlete at my club uses ant sensors.

    2. didnt I say best sports watch ever?
      apple watch would be the best smart watch

      @scary, i wouldn’t say ant+ has 100% adoption amongst triathletes but it’s very high amongst serious triathletes. in reality apple has overtaken polar if you include casual triathletes in the mix.
      @tobias (@saynoto…. @6krunner @tfa). if apple were to target serious triathletes then, yes, i would recommend they adopt ant+. however 1) they never will actively target serious triathletes 2) they almost certainly won’t adopt ant+. I’ve also made your ID consistent across all your posts. happy to change it to something else but please could you keep it the same? ty!

    3. Until the Fenix 8 is out, the Fenix 7 Pro is the best sportswatch ever and most people who try to dimish the value of ANT+ have little to no idea what they are talking about.

  2. I am very happy with my Vantage V2 with SHIFT-Adapters. Of course I am looking forward to a V3 with AMOLED-Display, although it isn‘t really necessary, but it would look nicer.

    To add another point: Some thing that never changed over the years is Polar Flow. I think there are lots of improvements to be done her. For instance fitness/freshness/form, adaptive training plans, automatic FTP-calculation, export fit/gpx-files WITH termperature-data, mark an activity as „race“, maybe track of gear, etc.

    And, please NO WEAR-OS!! Vantage watches are smart, don‘t blow them up with apps etc.

    1. yep, pretty much with you on those points.
      AMOLED: as I’ve found on my FR965, the screen is super nice as are some of the garmin grpahics/charts etc. but AMOLED needs a quality watchface and garmin lacks there. Polar is even worse ATM.
      some people don’t like some of the aesthetics of flow but i don’t mind it at all.

    2. For me polar flow is one of the reasons why I still love Polar.
      I would like that Polar makes it possible to have all the features in Polar flow at the web (eg to correct sleep time you do have to use the app, also to see all sleep metrics).
      This also would be a differentiation to Suunto, where there is only the app

  3. I’ve been waiting since 2014 for Polar to change their thinking: back to a software that allows – like much earlier – to have corrections done in my workouts.
    I want – like before – to correct laps (run time, distance etc.), delete laps (that I stopped by mistake) etc.
    Polar Flow was neutered back when it was introduced. (Remember PPT5’s great, sports-oriented evaluation technology!) I don’t want mass-market functionality, I want custom functionality. Polar Flow displays a lot, a lot based on automatic, but that is often not good in terms of content. THAT must be able to be corrected!
    There is far too little reference to real functionality in the wishes for a V3! That starts namely with the software called Polar Flow.

    CONCLUSION: What good is a watch if the software does not perform?

      1. Third-party manufacturers? Out of the question. Just because Polar is unwilling or unable, I don’t buy more software.

      3. Okay, free – I don’t care. 🙂
        I don’t want any more stuff. Only because of a Polar watch that doesn’t come with proper software. Then Polar should leave it alone and take Flow off the market.

      4. My approach with sporttracks 3.1 was that it was my control platform. as i changed brands and devices they, in turn, fed into my system that I knew well and trusted. All i then had to worry about was the ease with which i could collate accurate raw workout data. my software did the reporting and analysis.

        the product was discontinued. 🙁

  4. Another important addition:

    I had big problems with the OHR of the Vantage V2. During marches over many hours, the OHR went crazy. For hours on end, the clock would show values around 180 (in real life, the values were between 99 and 110), until these values suddenly dropped back to normal. And here, an extremely important function in Polar Flow is clearly missing: the ability to manually correct these crazy values.
    In general, Polar must offer the possibility to manually correct errors in the heart rate recording with the Vantage 3, because especially in the area of intensive and long workouts, incorrect heart rate values will drag the analysis of the software into the depths and everything else with it. Then everything makes no sense and the Polar stuff becomes a toy.

    1. that’s a trickier issue general issue around raw data correction. again i used to use other software (sporttracks) whenever that was necessary. now i use fitfilerepair tool but that still wouldn’t solve your problem in Flow.
      the solution is to get a tool that properly captures the raw data and that means not capturing ohr on the wrist. Polar OH1 will be fine for you

      1. The tricky problem should not be solved by me, but by Polar. That is my only concern. Polar is the manufacturer and has also shown in the past that it can do things that make sense.
        I don’t need or want another extra tool. Where is this going? That after buying a product I need a tool to solve the product defects? Maybe I then need another tool to solve the problems of the tool that is trying to get the original product under control? Absurd world we live in.

        I don’t want an OH1 either. FCK OH1! I want proper software. Polar can do it, I’m sure of it. And I expect that for the V3 – if it really comes.

      2. yes the longstanding problem should be solved by polar, Garmin, Apple, etc but solving ohr accuracy on the wrist is extremely difficult. none of them with their masses of resources have done it. that’s just the reality
        so you change the capture method, change the brand or change the tool or…don’t change and live with it.

  6. i have huge respect to polar for the introduction and development of the heart rate monitoring therefore i am quite loyal to the brand however the V2 is slow and not responsive. the touchsreen is nearly useless.. hard time understanding, why they would bring a feature that would do nothing but annoy. i would be pretty happy with the same feature set but a faster V3, and brighter.

    1. as mentioend in the article.
      they would bring a new tech feature because someone in the company thought that they could push tech rather than responding to a customer need
      i would agree with your broader point that USABILITY is a pretty essential feature.

      1. Exactly this. I do not need a bigger screen because I don’t like the bezel size; I want to actually see the numbers on my wrist clearly when I’m in the pain of fast running. Having more than 4 fields at a time on the watch would be useful. The ability to do the same in the web app as well as in the mobile app. Improving existing features > adding new ones.

      2. yep, when you get a bit older and your eyesight deteriorates it will also be great to have those same 4 numbers displayed a bit larger.
        pretty much everyone’s eyes deteriorate and triathlon, at least, is very much a middle -age sport (when it comes to buying things like V3)

  7. I don’t really have a problem with the V2 as is, it would be nice to have a brighter screen, and since i’m old now it would be nice to have a bigger screen (less bezel!).
    However, I do not like wearing it to sleep though, it’s just too big and not very comfortable. There is no use in a sleep tracker if it keeps waking you up!
    I think a ring could be a great addition to the Polar stable, it would also mean that I can wear a ‘nice’ watch when I want to and still keep my 24 hour Polar data valid.
    Maybe even a Verity Sense like device to do the same thing, make it as small as possible and i’ll sleep in it, probably less development with Verity sense as in it’s current form it already records data when required.

    1. In fact, lets ask them to make a supercharged Verity Sense that has all of the features mentioned for the V3 but that we can screw a display onto, or Bluetooth the data to the Flow app on our mobiles.
      The display could have multiple ‘battery’ options so really slim for most people, to thicker for people who need 24 hours or more recording time.

      1. supercharged Verity: hmm. i suspect the other idea was a better one 😉

        I still keep speeding through Staines every now and then and think of you! hope all is good.

  8. I will not buy a watch without ANT+ support. Connecting my power meter to the iPad (android tablet) and your watch unfortunately requires ANT+ since your power meter Bluetooth transmission is already taken by the tablet. No ant+, no go! But even if polar include ant+ the rest of the V series watch would have to be flawlessly executed when it comes to the user interface. Offline music, maps, lots of health metrics and guidance. Hot buttons for quick access to alarms, timers stopwatch for just regular use. Maybe throw in a light as in the Fenix 7pro series. I own a Garmin forerunner 955 and there’s very little I’m in want of. It’s lightweight and has all the sports feature and customization you can dream off. Arguably polar and Suunto make better looking watches but their software lacks so much of what Garmin offers that it’s hard to pick them over a Garmin watch. I am not a loyal Garmin customer and I look closely to all the new offerings on the market to see if there’s anything they do better than Garmin and offer all the features my FR955 has. I’m not an AMOLED display kinda guy. I lean more towards using something that resembles a classic watch than a phone on my wrist, but I do want the features, and there’s nobody that does sports watches better than Garmin as of right now.

  9. Reminds me of the downfall of blackberry. Pioneering the whole smartwatch idea, falling behind inventions and competition and finally dropping out.

    I sincerely hope that polar comes up with a better strateg to the situation compared to RIM 15 year ago 😉

    More competition is good and a market dominated by just a couple of players will enevidently lead to stagnation and quality reduction over time (just as most market with small competition)

    That being said, I always have a softspot for Suunto and Polar. If they come up with a good watch, I would always go that route rather than Garmin with all its halfbaked wellneas features

  10. Thanks for the poll, it’s really interesting to see that the things I care about (better adaptive training plans or third party training plans, and especially specific target paces not only 5 zones) are well behind health and wellness metrics that do not matter much to me.

  11. I dont want V3, I think noone want.. We all want Polar v900, succesor to v800! Look at v800- realtime HR underwater, top notch GPS, charging during activity, diary on the watch with plenty of info, great standby time. Polar losed track of their customers. Ok, nightly recharge, fitspark, hillsplitter is ok but 5 days battery life? Sluggish, messy ui/ux?
    And my biggest complaints – their soft update policy. Ignite3 with more features than flagship v2/grit pro? No update for more than a year for flagship devices? Even suunto updates their watches longer! Can you imagine Garmin or coros not updating fenix7 / vertix2 for a YEAR?

    1. Simply seconding this, the v810/v900/v8++ whatever, would have been a killer, and still could be if they committed to such a quality product.
      The problem was they changed hardware base, thus all new code, firmware, etc, at the same time implementing an all new (and far inferior but less power hungry) GPS chipset without the space/design considerations for the antenna and core processing needed to make it halfway decent (others (Garmin, later Coros) were just as bad on day 1 of using Sony, but they figured it out likely due to having enough processing power, and algorithm engineers, to “post-process” the crap feed from the chipset into something usable. (And at least one eventually gave up, a-la Garmin moving to airoha (sp?)(thank goodness).
      Poalr took 3+ years to overhaul everything, and incorporate the OHR (which worked incredibly well in the m430, so it wasn’t something that needed a redesign, just incorporation into a “v810” for example).

      Polar needs to adopt that chipset, or heck, go back to sirf (I haven’t looked to see if current models have reduced power enough to make it competitive now)… that simply worked, not just in the v800, but the m600 and m430 all had excellent GPS even compared to anything on the market today.

      Contrary to some naysayers, ANT+ is a necessary competitive edge for Polar at this point, if they only want to compete against Coros and Wahoo, okay, maybe not, but it’s still a large selling point to a significant number of people (not just triathletes but people with indoor home-training setups using computers and trainers that might run out of BT pairing abilities before establishing all connections).
      And while ANT+ was an invention of Garmin, it is now an open standard with a standards organization, which Polar IS A MEMBER OF!!! So it’s not like there is any barrier to entry, maybe it’s a $1/unit license fee? (No idea, but it’s in multiple of their HR sensors, so….)
      They need a bulletproof, crash/reset proof (read reddit, many of hte current gen are experience sporadic spontaneous reboots, often mid-workout (losing your data and sometimes it’s a factory reset meaning you cant’ simply start over, you have to setup the watch first before doing anything). I’ve had that happen on three examples of the current models, and many others have posted this. v800 that i use still for most of my workouts during the week, hasn’t rebooted/restarted itself since around 2018 as best as I can recall and not since before the last FW update whenever that was.

      Anyhow, “next-whatever” needs to be crash-proof above all else. I loved the look and feel of my GX Pro Titans (had 2, wife and I both, she gave up quickly on hers, I swapped to hers when mine kept rebooting (maybe once a week or two it’d restart, one day I woke up to a black watch and after pushing a button was greeted by the Polar factory setup screen)… hers seemed more stable, but did it also after about week 3 of my wearing it (she’d already sent back a Polar Pacer Pro prior to this)… and that was the last straw, if I can’t trust my watch to not reset (or even to not wake me up, had I depended on it’s alarms to wake up), then I certainly can’t trust it for a triathlon or marathon. FIX IT POLAR!

      1. yeah it comes down to super-core features like: it works; it records my workout basic stats. even garmin fails on that with the 965 sometimes (even though my mid-workout crahes might be caused by errant ciq apps)

      2. Exactly exactly this. This is why Ive held onto my M430. I simply cant trust other devices that have reports of reboots and other buggy software issues that never get fixed.

        Whatever Polar launches now better be as bulletproof as the older watches, else its definitely time to move on. To what? I don’t know because nothing seems to be reliable these days

      3. It wont be better than v800, my info is just a better version of ignite 3 – so amoled, spo2, better battery life, better navi (maps).

    2. V800. Best Polar watch ever. When my original died with the battery, Polar wanted nearly £200 to replace the battery. I bought a hardly-used V800 replacement on eBay for £80 rather than its new model so-called equivalent. I tested an M model. And a Garmin 965. They didn’t even have countdown repeat for track work/fartlek, etc. All Polar needed to do when they decided to bring in replacement models was introduce a lighter, round, smaller V800 face & a few software tweaks. I exchanged emails with Polar customer support. It was clear that none of them had been within a mile of an athletics track & were hell bent on giving the customer what the techies had developed rather than what the customer/athlete really wanted. They genuinely didn’t understand what I was seeking. They couldn’t explain why I could only change programs via the laptop, not on the night via the watch. I tried to explain that I don’t actually run with a laptop strapped to me, it would likely slow me down a tad. I owned a 20+ year old Polar that was better for track & interval work than the M series. The only reason for sticking with Polar is Flow, because I can’t be bothered relearning with Garmin.

  12. What I would really love, is Polar Flow integration with other devices. E.g. you buy Polar watch, you get it for free. You want it to use with your Garmin watch – pay monthly/annual fee. Similar to Final Surge or Training Peaks. Why? I loved Polar Flow, when I had a Polar watch. Its metrics, representation of past workouts, adherence to target, season planner and training load for me were way more readable than various Garmin’s reports. However, sadly, watches are downright scarce on features (for my personal taste, yes).

    Not gonna happen 🙁

  13. No espero mucho del Polar Vantage V3. Imagino que le pondrán la pantalla del Ignite 3 y poco más. Sin música y sin mapas. Una pena ????.

  15. I’m the very happy owner of a Vantage V2.
    The comparison with Garmin doesn’t make any sense to me.
    If you want the temperature of your liver while you are running above 40° Celsuis then go Garmin.
    If you want a wonderful activity tracker with a lot of input on your health go Polar.

    What I would like on a V3 is one thing (not two billion things.. one) its’s a GPS that really works.
    I have the comparison both with my phone and with a Wahoo Bolt, the result is very clear, Polar has a serious antenna problem.
    When the weather is clear the data is more or less good, when the weather is not clear .. it’s totally bulshit and in both cases there are a lot of drops. In the same situation the Bolt is perfect.

    I have the comparison of both Polar and Wahoo because I bike a lot.
    I have a H10 I use for weight training, and long rides, but as I wear my V2 all day long with heart rate enabled, I use it as an external sensor with the Bolt for short rides.
    In order to do that I need to record on the polar so at the end of the ride I have both datas, Polar and Wahoo…

    1. suunto, garmin and coros have gone with the new dual frequency, multi band gnss chipsets. you’d kinda assume that Polar will be next.
      this current range of gnss tech, IMHO, is as accurate as it realistically will get in the foreseeable future.
      when cycling it should be an excellent level of accuracy

      1. I hope you’re right, because the V2 is really lacking under this aspect (all others are very good for me, especially with Polar Flow (both app and wbesite).

    1. yes,
      nice find, i think that is just registering the Trademark classes rather than stating its precise capabilities. a trademark may not even turn into a real product.

      i wouldn’t have thought that polar is able to get a certified device for some of those classes in 2023: “skin conductivity, sweat composition, blood flow, lactic acid, glucose, “. if they could it would be a game changer and the sensor would surely be worth squillions of dollars (that’s a technical phrase)

  18. Fenix x the best sportwatch, maybe that is, but it is so ugly. Compare it with a Polar Pace Pro and you know what I mean.
    For me the Pacer Pro is perfect. Easy to use and it’s not a smartwatch. For smart I have a smartphone.

  19. Polar apesta al igual que ese grupo de telegram que no dicen más que paridas de otros relojes porque Polar sigue sin sacar un reloj decente jajaja y el más tonto el panchito ese jajaja

  20. Polar apesta al igual que ese grupo de TGram que no dicen más que paridas de otros relojes porque Polar sigue sin sacar un reloj decente jajaja y el más tonto el panchito ese jajaja

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