SM
The avuncular one
Okay, been playing with the polar v800 GPS watch. Lovely looking bit of kit.
Been testing it out against my trusted forerunner 220. Guess what, there are major discrepancies between the 2 devices. In games the polar is still reporting around .5 km less than the forerunner consistently. One of them is obviously wrong.
First up - running at steady pace with one on each wrist leaves them both nearly exactly the same. Very small difference over 5 km. so far so good.
Then I set up a course on the local pitch. First up some change of pace running. Walk, jog, high intensity run. Discrepancies start in terms of distance being recorded.
Then secondly set up 40m sprint. Significant differences start to appear.
When looking at the GPS data when synced to phone, the problem highlighted itself pretty much straight away with the 40m sprints (not so easy to see on the longer change of pace runs). The polar really struggled with sprints and quick change of pace.
Using the lap function for each sprint, alternating between watches to set laps on for each sprint, the other just running (if that makes sense - would be awkward to click lap button on both watches at the same time!)
The polar watch over the 40 m sprint was only recording 10-20m.
When running slightly slower, it performed better, but once sprinting it was really pretty poor. The forerunner gave a reading as you would expect for distance over the sprint. Disappointing showing from the v800.
One issue I noticed when I got home was that the battery was low on the polar even though it's GPS was set to normal mode. Will perform the test again end of next week when I had recovered from upcoming games with a fully charged polar just to make sure the result can be repeated and wasn't a feature of the polar to auto switch to power save mode when sprinting. Even though they are notoriously poor, I will also set my iPhone to record GPS also for a third reading of events.
I may even screen grab the GPS data so you can have a look yourselves.
Been testing it out against my trusted forerunner 220. Guess what, there are major discrepancies between the 2 devices. In games the polar is still reporting around .5 km less than the forerunner consistently. One of them is obviously wrong.
First up - running at steady pace with one on each wrist leaves them both nearly exactly the same. Very small difference over 5 km. so far so good.
Then I set up a course on the local pitch. First up some change of pace running. Walk, jog, high intensity run. Discrepancies start in terms of distance being recorded.
Then secondly set up 40m sprint. Significant differences start to appear.
When looking at the GPS data when synced to phone, the problem highlighted itself pretty much straight away with the 40m sprints (not so easy to see on the longer change of pace runs). The polar really struggled with sprints and quick change of pace.
Using the lap function for each sprint, alternating between watches to set laps on for each sprint, the other just running (if that makes sense - would be awkward to click lap button on both watches at the same time!)
The polar watch over the 40 m sprint was only recording 10-20m.
When running slightly slower, it performed better, but once sprinting it was really pretty poor. The forerunner gave a reading as you would expect for distance over the sprint. Disappointing showing from the v800.
One issue I noticed when I got home was that the battery was low on the polar even though it's GPS was set to normal mode. Will perform the test again end of next week when I had recovered from upcoming games with a fully charged polar just to make sure the result can be repeated and wasn't a feature of the polar to auto switch to power save mode when sprinting. Even though they are notoriously poor, I will also set my iPhone to record GPS also for a third reading of events.
I may even screen grab the GPS data so you can have a look yourselves.
