Polar Flow

It does what it says on the box. Accurate heart rate history. Exact distance and time and sensible guidance for training. All good.

After 6 months extensively using this app, the polar Pacer pro watch, and an H10, today I decided to sell all the hardware and discontinue using this app. Polar doesn’t fix issues in firmware. The watch HR sensor is significantly inaccurate. The H10 failed today again during a run to provide stable measurements, fluctuating wildly at the beginning and in the middle of a long distance run. New battery installed beforehand. The chest strap is only a few months old and disintegrates. I’m done with Polar. This used to be a great brand. But now it’s just throwing out products that aren’t at all as described, including photoshopped marketing images of their products.

Uploading data from my grit x pro takes so long

It’s doing everything I need it for and is easy to use and I’ve learnt some interesting things from it

Fascinating to have: total time out skiing, vertical drop, distance traveled and kcals plus a few other measurements. However as an aging old man my interest was to measure heart rate as I am aware that while skiing my hr goes way above ‘normal’ training most of which is on an Exercycle. First day max 149bpm - above my max for age. Learning curve v useful. As you age probably you should be aware of cardiac events related to ‘extreme’ exercise which in reality are only moderate exercise in a younger group ie our children when skiing! On other side - we are at altitude here 8600ft in condo. Sleep has not been good and the sleep app always gives a ‘very poor’ opinion about my sleep- had to take my watch off! This is a very useful, easy to wear and attractive watch. I bought Polar because an eon ago I used Polar chest hr monitors for running - it’s amazing how the tech has progressed!

Can you fix your app so that it can sync if iPad is closed. This worked in the past so why have you made it not work now.

Really good to pass the info from your watch but the appearance is weak, could have more info and better design. I alway connect on my computer to see the stats since the web platform has better design.

It doesn’t work with an iPad

Good data and some nice views of the data. Feels like a cheap app from a one man band though.

Many aspects of the polar flow devices and apps are superb as you will read in the reviews below. There are however a few work ons.... 1. Battery management, when you run out of battery the device just shuts down, unlike other devices it does no save your workout to that point so all is lost whether it is the watch or the chest strap that has lost battery. The watch also does not notify you of the status of the chest strap battery unless it is too low to start a session so you are always left crossing your fingers. This leads on to the second gripe... 2. You can’t edit polar flow stats: if you loose a whole training session due to battery or simply forgetting to start it! There is no way to add the work out to polar flow afterwards such that it counts towards your accumulated strain in polar flow essentially distorting the accuracy of the data for 28days! Most athletes have a pretty good idea of the trimp of any given session so the ability to retrospectively do this would be very useful. 3. Night time led. The lights for the heart monitor can be very bright at night when trying to sleep if you have a smaller wrist. The ability to switch this off and just use the metal sensors might be advantageous if possible. 4. Polar beat sync inconsistent, if you train with the heart strap alone using polar beat, for instance when surfing, a trimp is not always generated... once again impacted your strain stats 5. Cadence, the step or cadence measurement is only selectable for certain sports and not for paddling sports where it is useful for monitoring stroke rate. You have to game the app by telling it you are going for a run on the water... then switching it to canoeing later. Polar are missing a trick here as simple maths could give them the meters per stroke stat that interests most paddlers. 6. Feedback! Polar is a closed shop there is no portal for offering feedback or suggestions so you have to resort to ranting on the AppStore. :) Having said that when it all works it’s a cool set up and an excellent motivator whatever your training objective. Happy to expand on any of the items above if Polar want to get in touch or add a contact email address....