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Polar's Vantage V3 fitness watch is a big upgrade that costs $600
Polar's new iteration of the Vantage watch, the Polar Vantage 3, is available for pre-order for $600.
Polar is bringing its fitness tracking tech to rival watches
Polar is now offering its fitness tracking tech on competitors' watches.
Polar revives the Pacer as a back-to-basics running watch
It's a running watch for runners, with an emphasis on high-quality data and no unnecessary frills.
Facebook's Polar app will let anyone design AR objects and effects
As part of its broad vision of becoming a metaverse-focused company, Facebook announced Polar, a free iOS app that makes it easy for just about anyone to create AR filters, effects and 3D objects.
Polar's latest flagship fitness watch focuses on workout recovery
Polar's Vantage V2 is lighter than its predecessor, and focuses on ensuring you're fit to start your workouts.
Polar’s new fitness smartwatch is geared toward beginners
The Polar Unite is a smartwatch and fitness tracker for those who want to get back into shape.
Polar’s latest watch promises 40-hour battery life with all features on
The Grit X includes a host of smart coaching tools for fitness buffs.
Polar's Vantage fitness watches now offer daily training guides (updated)
If you're planning to counter all those holiday dinners with rigorous exercise, Polar might have your back. It's updating its Vantage V and Vantage M watches with some particularly useful coaching features, most notably the FitSpark personalized training tool. As on earlier hardware, it provides a daily training guide that suggests exercises based on your history, fitness level and sleep quantities. You'll have a better sense of whether you should be burning calories with cardio workouts or hitting the weights instead.
Form's Swim Goggles display heart rate data in the pool
You might have thought Form already perfected the Swim Goggles, but the company is about to add another welcomed feature: heart rate tracking. Today, Form announced that it's teamed up with the fitness wearable company Polar to introduce the heart rate tech. Beginning in November, a free software update from Form will make the Swim Goggles compatible with Polar's OH1 and OH1+ heart rate sensors.
The tech elite athletes use
When a field of 127 runners lined up in Central Park on September 13, 1970, to run the first New York City Marathon, the only gadgets, per se, that could help them were a smattering of watches. A grainy finisher photo shows winner Gary Muhrcke breaking the tape with a watch band on his left wrist. Both of his hands are throwing peace signs. The only equipment required then was a pair of shoes, short shorts and enough grit to run 26.2 miles without collapsing. Today, running without a GPS watch is as much a protest against screen time and the intrusion of tech as it is a tactical racing decision. Some of us, meanwhile, can't imagine running without headphones. Then there's all the self-care. Vibrating muscle relaxers help athletes recover. Sport-centric social networks, like Strava, help us bask in our best workouts. Meditation apps help us calm down before bed while calorie counting apps track our macros. Even the most basic of fitness devices capture heart-rate data; on running watches, it will soon be standard. Speaking of sports watches, we have an entire buying guide for that, which we recently published as part of this outdoor gear series. But we were also curious about what it means to be better, faster, stronger when money is no object. We asked five elite runners, all of whom are flush with sponsorship deals and prize money, on what they use to train and how they protect their most important piece of equipment: their bodies. A couple of items on this list were universally recommended, namely the Hyperice Volt ($349) massage-ball gun (as I'm describing it) and NormaTec's compression boots ($1,295), both muscle-recovery tools. And, of course, plenty were eager to tout the wares of their sponsor partners. Here's what they're using.
Polar's latest watch knows if you're too tired for a full workout
Sleep tracking and personal fitness gadgets are nothing new, and even the cheapest knock-off wearables will do a decent enough job of monitoring the main criteria, so companies are constantly looking at ways to make their devices even more useful. Polar's latest watch, Polar Ignite, does exactly that by combining comprehensive sleep data with personalized training, helping wearers achieve optimal workouts.
Polar's latest watches know if you're maximizing your workouts
Polar has a way to compete against ever more fitness-savvy smartwatches: offer exercise tracking that's difficult to match. It's launching two fitness watches, the Vantage V (above) and Vantage M (below), that promise more insights for particularly committed athletes. Both include a Training Load Pro system that melds cardiovascular, muscular and perceived loads into a single metric that gives you a sense of just how effective your workouts are. You'll have a better sense of whether you're overreaching or need to ramp up the intensity. The pro-oriented Vantage V adds a Recovery Pro system whose daily and long-term tracking help you understand when your body has had enough rest.
Polar fitness data exposes homes of soldiers and intelligence agents
Strava isn't the only fitness tech company grappling with the security implications of its fitness tracking. Bellingcat and De Correspondent have discovered that Polar's Flow social platform can reveal the homes of soldiers and intelligence officials with little effort. As it shows all of a given person's published workouts on one map, you only have to find a sensitive installation (such as a military base or spy agency), pick someone who uses a Polar fitness tracker and then see if they have any workouts that end at a residence. Many of these people use their real names and tend to end workouts in front of their homes or hotels, making it easy to correlate their fitness info with social network profiles and other telltale data.
Polar unveils an affordable heart rate tracking armband
These days fitness trackers tend to multi-task as standard. The likes of the Fitbit Alta HR and the upcoming Gear Fit 2 Pro offer everything from sleep monitoring to calorie-counting -- with Samsung's wearable also reportedly boasting swim tracking. But, all those features can prove a turn-off for buyers looking to hone in on one specific task. If, for example, you just want to focus on your heart rate, why would you fork out $150 for a bunch of tricks you don't need? That's where Polar's new OH1 optical heart rate sensor comes in. The $79.95 wearable trims out the fat to focus on your ticker, and little else. And (seeing as Polar's been making top-notch activity trackers for years) you can probably bet it does that well.
Polar's new fitness tracker constantly monitors your heart rate
Polar's latest fitness band called the A370 is a multi-tasker like the company's older wearables, and at $20 less than its predecessor, it's definitely the better choice. It monitors your heart rate every five minutes, whether you're resting or exercising, unlike the A360 that only does so during workouts. The device can even tell when you're active, so it can give you tips to be able to reach your activity goals. If you run for exercise, A370's accelerometer can estimate your running speed and distance. It also tracks the calories you lose, as well as connects to Polar's weighing scale if you want to use it primarily for losing weight.
Polar's next fitness wearable is a smart shirt
In the good old days, the best way to get accurate body readings was to strap on a chest-worn heart-rate monitor and go out for a run. But companies like OMSignal and Hexoskin, among others, changed this by developing monitors that could be embedded in fabrics. It was this trend that led to the first and second waves of "smart" running shirts that we've seen at several previous CES shows. Now Polar, a company that made its name building chest straps, is getting in on the action with the Polar Team Pro Shirt.
Polar thinks there's room for another Android Wear smartwatch
It was inevitable that smartwatches would eventually consume "dumb" activity trackers like the Fuelband (RIP) and Fitbit. These days, almost any device that you can slap on your wrist offers you basic fitness and sleep tracking as standard. Similarly, most of these gadgets offer smartphone notifications and control of your smartphone's music playback. But as smartwatches have made in-roads to the world of fitness tech, there's been little pushback from companies like Garmin, Polar and TomTom. At least, not until now.
Polar launches its very own smart scale
If you make fitness trackers, then you probably need to make weighing scales, or watch as Withings or Fitbit steals your customers away from you. It's a lesson that Polar now appreciates, and after a couple of years producing simple fitness trackers, it's turned up at CES with its first set of connected scales, Polar Balance. The firm describes the unit as a "weight management service," and promises that using it will help shift those pounds you gained during the holiday.
Polar finally has a fitness tracker that can monitor your heart
As the optical heart-rate monitoring has improved, the technology has increasingly become a must-have feature for most serious fitness trackers. One notable holdout from this club was Polar, probably because it made a name for itself in chest-worn heart rate straps and, as such, had a little more to lose than other firms. With the launch of the A360, however, the company has finally decided to embrace the world of "strapless monitoring," although it's gone to great pains to say that its version is much better than everyone else's.
Polar's new Loop activity tracker sends stats to more apps
If you've been mourning the demise of Nike's Fuelband and want a bare-bones activity tracker, then Polar's got your back. The fitness company is launching a second-generation Loop that retains much of the look and feel of the original with a sprinkling of new features. The most notable is probably the smart notifications and alarms that we've seen come to the company's other high-end wearables like the V800. The company isn't specific about what you'll be able to do, but we'd imagine vibrating call and text alerts will be included as part of the package. Then, there's the news that the Loop 2 will come with inactivity alerts, and will buzz you Jawbone Up-style, if it thinks you've been sat idle for too long.
