Saturday, October 8, 2016

Polar V800 Experiences

After one year of moderate use of the watch (only for trainings, mostly for running) I started to feel somehow satisfied with it. The navigation is finally there and works more or less knowing its limitations, the Strava export works at least in 80% of the cases, open water swimming is also working most of the times and the GPS accuracy is good etc. One thing I still don't like is the Android application. The synchronization still runs for ages even for small workouts and the application is not preventing the phone to go to sleep mode. If that happens the Bluetooth connection is lost, which is ridiculous. But all in all on the software side after the big updates the watch was more or less usable for my purposes.

But a few days before I noticed that the plastic around the data connector started to break off for some unknown reason. I had some other problems with the connector anyway when I synchronized through the USB connector, because the plastic clip was not strong enough to touch the connector pins (I had to manually push it and hold it). It happened also when I cleaned off the corrosion (salt) around the connector...

At the moment I'm strongly considering changing to another brand. Until now I owned only Polar sport watches (RS100, RS800CX), but the newest generation seems to be too fragile and problematic and unfortunately not only on the software side. But let's wait for the results from Polar Care...

Update: Finally I got a completely new watch. I'm a bit disappointed, because the old one probably landed in a trash bin with such a relatively small and - in my eyes - fixable issue... This is a waste. They also wanted to charge me 25 EUR to change the battery in the heart rate sensor and for the new strap, which I don't understand, since it was not my problem, it was not broken and they gave me a new watch anyway. I didn't pay anything in the end. I'll keep the watch now and use it until I can, but this was my last Polar product for a while. Of course, the others have other problems...

Broken parts...

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