Product Review: Polar A300 Heart Rate Monitor and Fitness Tracker

 

I received this as a gift last Christmas back in 2015. I have been mostly satisfied with it, aside from a couple of issues I will highlight below.

Pros:

I find that the battery life lasts a long time, I can go about a week and a half (or more) of workouts every day when it is connected to the heart rate monitor strap, plus the general use before the battery gets low enough to recharge it.

The menus and setup are very easy and user-friendly. If you have ever had a prior version of a polar heart rate monitor, then you should have no problems getting this configured.

Some of the setup, like the alarm (which causes the unit to vibrate on your wrist as opposed to beeping) can be set up through the watch or the polar flow app on your phone or tablet.

When the device connects to the polar flow app (see below) it is very useful to see your progress.

The watch band can be replaced easily. I have tossed many heart rate monitors simply because the band broke and it was easier to get a new one than have the band fixed. Now the unit itself pops out of the band, and you can get a replacement band should you need one and not have to replace the entire thing.

+++Update+++ The watch band that came with it originally finally broke in January 2018, after pretty much daily workouts from the time I purchased it.

It has an inactivity warning which causes the unit to vibrate if you have been sitting for too long (usually around an hour of being inactive), telling you to get up and move around.

It can pair with the polar balance scale to easily track your weight.

Cons:

It does not have a removable battery in the watch itself, so once it loses its ability to retain a charge then you presumably have to send it to Polar or take it to some authorized Polar retailer to have it replaced. It is not as easy as unscrewing the back and replacing a 2025 or 2032 battery.

The watch and the app (at least on my phone) do not always connect. When I Samsung Galaxy Core Prime, I constantly had to unpair the watch and phone and re-pair them to get the Bluetooth connection to work so the data syncs with my phone. I have not, aside from one time after downloading a firmware update, had an issue with syncing data to my desktop computer (when the watch unit accurately captures the data) via the USB cable the unit plugs into in order to charge. I ended up doing a factory reset (which did lose all my data up to that point) and then it worked okay again. I have updated the firmware since then and have not had the issue with it not syncing via the cable, but the issue pairing it with my phone continues to this day and is the reason I took a star off. I should note that I have never had a problem pairing it with the polar balance scale. It takes a few seconds to make the connection via Bluetooth but has never failed to pair with it.

+++Update+++ I have since bought an iPhone, and have much fewer issues with the syncing than I had with the Android phone. There are times when the watch does not connect to the app, but I just have to restart the process to get them to connect. I have not had to unpair and re-pair the watch and phone ever.

The sleep tracker is spotty. Most days it will work, but there are other days where even when it captures the other data just fine, it will have no data for the sleep monitor.

This is a fairly good, reasonably priced heart rate monitor. It does not have all the bells and whistles that some of runners or triathletes will want, like GPS, but you are not paying for that. If it were more consistent with the pairing with the phone app and never had issues syncing data I would not hesitate to give it 5 stars, but there are enough glitches like that I could not give it 5 stars. Overall, however, even despite the cons it does have I am satisfied with it.

Product Review: POLAR FT60 Heart Rate Monitor

 

The first generation of the FT60 was a decent to good heart-rate monitor. It has a lot of functions that the less expensive polar monitors do not (at least at the time the first version of this came out), such as a Bluetooth connection, workout tracking capabilities, and the ability to track weight with the polar balance scale. It does require the use of the chest strap which, in the era of Fitbit, Apple Watch, and similar devices that have even more functionality than this, is definitely a drawback. Especially since it can sometimes be a pain to pair with the chest strap. There are a few big drawbacks to it, however.

First, the menus can be a pain to navigate and require pushing the buttons over and over to get to what you want.

Second, the watch strap is very flimsy. I went through three of them in a short period of time. Basically, the unit popped out of the watch strap (which you have to do to charge it). The strap was made of cheap silicon, and eventually at least one of the holes for the buttons would tear, and once one did the one next to it would soon follow, and then you had to replace the strap. Luckily you can find replacement straps for a reasonable price, but the quality control (again at least on the first version) was not great.

Third, the charger was totally proprietary. When you take the unit out of the watch strap, the bottom of it protrudes and that plugs into the charging cable. So, if you misplace the cable you are screwed as you cannot just plug a micro-USB cable into it. There were also times when it would not charge and you had to drain the battery all the way down until it shut itself off in order for it to start charging again.

Lastly, it was a total pain to pair with the Polar App on an Android phone. When I first had the watch I had an Andriod phone and this rarely ever paired with the phone through the app to get the workout information into the app on the first try. Once I switch to an iPhone it paired with the Polar App just fine, but for whatever reason, I constantly had to close the app, unpair the watch from my phone, re-pair the watch with my phone, then open the Polar App again to get it to work.

So, when everything worked the way it was supposed to, I really liked this. But, when things went off the rails, it was a pain. Hopefully, the newer models fixed some of the issues I experienced, but I would definitely avoid getting the first-generation model of this.