Putting an end to a long absence, with perfect timing for the arrival of spring, the Nordic brand Polar has announced the new Polar Pace and Polar Pace Pro sports smartwatches, dedicated to runners and those who approach running.
Several months after the last launch, the Finnish brand Polar returns to formalize a new product that brings back the legendary brand of its chest heart rate monitors, the Pacer, through a new pair of sport watches called Polar Pacer (pre-orderable from today but available in May) and Polar Pacer Pro (already available for purchase).
Relatively accessible, with a price of 199 and 299 euros respectively, the two Polar Pacers are very similar to each other: on the chassis not too bulky on the wrist (11.5 thick by 45 mm in diameter) they adopt a non-touch color display of the ” memory in-display “, more readable outdoors but less energetically demanding, with a 1.2-inch diagonal, a resolution of 240 x 240 pixels, the always on display, protected by a Gorilla Glass 3.0, with which it interacts through the physical buttons.
Both Polar Pace integrate a customized processor which, together with more RAM than in the past, 5 MB, and 32 MB of storage, ensures a performance improvement over the company’s previous fitness trackers: to track sports modes, more than 130 ( including swimming with relative metrics, being waterproof up to 50 meters), there is GPS (Galileo, Glonass, QZSS), the Precision Prime heart rate monitor (which also helps in monitoring sleep), and the optical sensor for maximum oxygen consumption by muscle contraction (VO2 Max).
Among the common features in the sports field, the two Polar Pace include the training objectives, the Training Load Pro (from the training data it derives the cardiac and muscle load), the estimate of the residual physical energy, the training of the heart rate on guided runs, and the pedometer: in terms of health, there is also Serene guided breathing. Of course, paired in Bluetooth with the smartphone, they allow you to control its music, receive weather forecasts and push notifications, and allow you to share data with third-party apps.
Autonomy is also the same. Specifically, the battery, from 265 mAh, offers 7 days with standard use, which decrease to 35 hours in the training mode that uses the heart rate monitor and GPS active even if, by opting for the energy-saving training mode, you go back already at 100 hours. The non plus ultra is obtained with the clock mode: in this case, the user can count on 43 days of autonomy, or 1,032 hours.
Moving on to the differences, the Polar Pacer, made of plastic (in the colors Night Black, Cloud White, Purple Dusk, Deep Teal), weighs 40 grams and needs 20 mm straps, but with quick release: the initial test to which the wearable involves 15 minutes of normal walking on the flat. The Pacer Pro (in Carbon Gray, Autumn Maroon, Snow White, Midnight Blue) weighs 41 grams thanks to the fact that it adopts an aerospace aluminum frame, goes well with any 20mm strap, and has the barometer that, when running downhill or uphill, it allows you to measure the slope in order to monitor performance with the certainty of putting the right intensity into it. Its use starts with a real running test and, among other more specific functions, offers the Hill Splitter (useful for “comparing the statistics on slopes between different training sessions”), the Back to Start which helps to return to starting point, options for load management, turn-by-turn navigation by Komoot and Route Guidance.