Polar devices with wrist-based heart rate measurement are suitable for swimming and bathing. They will collect your activity data from your wrist movements also when swimming. In our tests, however, we found that the wrist-based heart rate measurement doesn’t work optimally in water, so we cannot recommend wrist-based heart rate measurement for swimming. Next, let’s look at an interval run of sorts from yesterday. The basic structure was a 10-minute warm-up, followed by a 10-minute build, followed by a harder tempo section, then a bunch (12) of shorter intervals at the end. Here’s how that handled (Purple is Suunto Spartan Ultra with chest strap, teal is FR35 optical, maroon is M600 optical): It’s on Polar Flow that you can also setup training plans. These plans include things like plans for 10K races, which will include not just running workouts, but also core workouts in between the running days. Further, it’ll populate the calendar online as well as the scheduled workouts on your wrist. The grey ones below are the scheduled ones. The red ones are the completed ones.

Polar isn’t short of know-how when it comes to sports watches; its M400 GPS Running Watch was one of our all-time favourites. The M600 is altogether a different wrist-based wearable. The catch is that, while battery life and performance continue to improve every year, Wear OS battery performance is still broadly in line with what the Apple Watch can produce, rather than in line with the multi-week capabilities of non-AMOLED watches and the sweet performance of Garmin’s recent AMOLED watches. The Polar M600 is powered by a MediaTek MT2601 processor – not the dedicated Qualcomm Snapdragon Wear processor that's set to dominate the smartwatch platform in the months to come. Then you’ve got the charging cable. This is actually the same charging connector as the V800, though the V800 clip doesn’t work here.

Band

The inclusion of Android Wear on the new M600 means, in theory at least, that more features are available to wearers: essentially what you'd find on any other Wear watch, except, of course, that the Polar variant comes with its own dedicated fitness app, GPS and GLONASS, is waterproof with IPX8 certification (so is safe for swimming) and has a ruggedised silicon band making it perfect for sporty types. Worn every day, the M600 will diligently record the number of steps walked (and distance traveled), calories burned, your resting and active heart rate, and how many hours of sleep you get each night. So pretty comprehensive, then. If you don’t yet have a smartwatch designed for fitness and sports but you’re looking for one, take a look at the Polar M600 in the official Polar webstore.

Now on top of these, the new updated Wear OS by Google™ experience offers a bunch of new functionalities, allowing you to: In an interview with Wareable, Polar’s CEO, Sander Werring, hinted that the company is considering a return to Google’s Wear OS platform. The move would mark a significant change away from Polar’s recent focus on its own sports platform. Werring discussed CPU advancements and stated that Polar is “excited” about the potential of Wear OS. Polar’s last Wear OS device, the Polar M600, was launched in 2015, and Werring believes that the technology has now matured enough to make a new Polar Wear OS device a reality.Inside you’ll see the M600 sitting right there waitin’ for ya. Grab that out, as well as the charging cable and the very small manual – and here’s what you’ve got:

In addition, it wouldn’t be surprising to see Polar or even Suunto release a Wear OS watch this year. It would seem sensible that Polar would produce a running/fitness flavour of a smartwatch, whereas Suunto would more likely build on the maps and adventure side of its excellent Suunto 7 Wear OS watch from 2020. Turn the touch screen on or off (very useful in situations where you don’t want the display to respond, such as in water) I’ve been using the M600 with both iOS and Android phones, so I’ve got a pretty good idea of where it works well…and where it’s not so awesome. With that, let’s begin! Unboxing: As mentioned, the Polar M600 runs on Android Wear, and Polar promises an update to Android Wear 2.0 when it becomes available. Right now, it’s a rather standard affair, with the familiar cards-based approach to notifications. In 2023, we can expect the Wear OS watch hardware platform to become more widely available for third parties, following Samsung and Google’s exclusive hold on the market in 2022.While you’d expect Polar to get the fitness side right, it wasn’t necessarily a given – thankfully, it didn’t fail. At the end of your run you get useful metrics such as the Running Index score. This looks at your heart rate and pace and provides a metric to measure your progress run-by-run. As a smart-watch, it’s my first, so I can’t be too judgmental about that. So far as pairing, wifi connection, syncing etc. are concerned, it’s been a breeze, with very little input needed from me. I’ve just had the first run on my new M600. Since reading this review has been very helpful with the decision of buying this watch, I’d like to chime in with some comments about my experience. To put things in context, I’ve been using Runtastic on my cell phone before, with a no-name chest HRM, for both running and cycling.