Polar vantage V or M

joey100

Anyone using one of these? How do you find it? Have a cheap basic garmin and looking at a change. Have moved away from Garmin in cycling and haven't looked back so looking at alternative options for running.

Have had M since early 2019 and upgraded from M400 which I wore for several years before this. I find this better in every way except the accuracy of the heart rate monitoring when cycling where it clips the peaks when cycling uphills or when there is lots of vibration like bad road surface. When jogging (and continuosly monitoring during day) the heart rate it seems to work reliably and if the total accuracy was needed you would just use the chest strap but I haven't bothered. It's good enough and the fact that you can just start the execise without any preparations unlike with the strap (which I normally didn't wear as it was a pain) is great if you want to monitor your daily exercise like commute. The battery usually lasts for about 4 days with 4-5 hours of GPS usage over those days and with the continuos heart rate monitoring on, and alternatively pretty much a full day of exercise if you start with a full battery charge in the morning.

The watch keeps track of your activity over the past 30 days (I think) and will warn you if you overdo the cardio or don't do enough compared to the baseline over a shorter time frame of a couple of days. When running you are given the estimated VO2 after each run. The GPS seems very accurate.

The watch/phone combo works really seamlessly and is always kept in sync with the phone app without thinking. You can optionally receive phone notifications with a vibration when not in exercise mode and there is a configurable quiet time for it.

All in all I think it's a really good product.