POLAR Unite Waterproof Fitness Watch (Includes Wrist-Based Heart Rate and Sleep Tracking)

First, when choosing something like this, always check the manufacturer's web site for details. Don't just read the product description. There are usually even manuals. This listing implies that the watch has GPS. It doesn't. It uses your phone. That's not a bad thing unless you won't carry your phone with you. I think most of us carry our phone with us.Who am I? I'm a 66-year-old retired truck driver. I'm recovering from 23 years of sitting and holding a steering wheel 8-11 hours a day, one major surgery, and several minor procedures. I don't run. I don't cycle (yet). I walk, and plan to get back to weight training once I'm released to do so. I'm 5' 11" and I've weighed just under 250 pounds for the past 30 years, though I've lost about 20 pounds since June. I expect to get back up to walking at least 2 miles a day. I hope to get down to 200 pounds over the next year. I expect to keep my BP below 120. It was up to 140 earlier in the year. So, I'm old, fat, out of shape, and injured.Why the Unite? I wanted a heart rate monitor I could wear while walking. And, I didn't want to keep looking at my phone to keep track of how far I'd walked. It was that simple. I'll have my phone with me, so I don't need GPS. The Polar Flow app uses my phone's GPS to track route and distance. I didn't want most of the features of a "Smart Watch". I didn't want to pay for a subscription to keep track of what my phone itself is capable of tracking. I don't even understand why that's considered a service. It does allow viewing data using a browser, for free. Sleep monitoring is a plus. Simplicity is too. This is a KISS fitness tracker.So, if you want to brag about how great your Smart Watch is, or how expensive it is, this isn't it. It's not a fashion statement. It's a tool. If you want to monitor your fitness progress, this is a good choice. I've only worn it one day and one night, and I can already tell it's exactly what I wanted. I've been playing with "tech" longer than most buyers have been alive. I started programming a "personal computer" using hexadecimal Z-80 machine code in 1982 as a hobby. This was for my own physical health, not another toy. I wanted function, not to impress someone else. I'll update this in a week or two with my thoughts on how well it tracks my walks.

Es como esperaba

The only thing about this piece of crap that is marginally decent is the heart rate monitoring and even that has issues.The pairing to a phone, the syncing to the Polar App, the app itself, the way the band connects, the useless extras like Sleep Tracking and the useless but intrusive “blog” are all rubbish.I bought this in March 2022 and have been persevering with it for the past 10 months. I am fed up, sick and tired of dealing with it.The GPS feature is worse than useless. About 60% of the time, it fails to connect at all. The vast majority of the remaining times, it will lose connection during the ride resulting in erroneous distance and route information. I always ride with Strava and it, plus my analog cycle computer, always match. If the feature does not work. Fix it or eliminate it!The pairing the watch to a phone is an exercise in frustration.Syncing the phone to the polar app is usually an ok exercise but not always. Again frustrating.Fitbit has a way better mechanism for attaching the band. This is a poor mechanism.There is too many useless features like the Sleep Tracking stuff. I know if I had a good sleep. Further, it is not accurate. I will wake up rested and feel I had a great sleep and this POC will advise that my sleep was poor.Finally, I wanted a watch that would show my heart rate when I was in the middle of exercising. This POC claims to do so but does not. The screen goes black after a few seconds. When I am in the middle of climbing or sprinting, I can’t be flicking my wrist to see if this POC will bother to show my current heart rate. My old Polar FT7 constantly showed the current heart rate. The reason I bought this POC was I had had such good results with the FT7 and the even older one I had before that. Never again. I will buy an Apple, Fitbit, Garmin or anything else before I will buy another Polar POC.

I have used Polar HRM (chest strap) for many years and finally got tired of the straps not working so I decided to try this watch and I am glad that I did! There’s a lot to learn about this watch and all of its functionalities and my advise to new users is the play around with it and read the manual to figure out what it can do. It’s pretty easy to use but you have to set it up on polar flow first. I originally just set up the watch and then downloaded the app and the watch and app were not syncing then I figured out that polar flow has to be used regardless. Even though the manual says you can set up the watch on the watch- you can’t. So now I have the watch, the app ,and polar flow and when you sync all 3, at times you will get different readings on all three. That is annoying. Not sure why you need the app and flow, yes flow is more detailed than the app and perhaps even better to read but its just one more thing I have to figure out. I do like how you can customize your training preferences and change the views for your workouts on your watch; exp WALKING I changed the view so that I see calories, HR, time and distance. You can only make those changes on flow - this is actually an awesome feature now that I think about it. You can also delete and add workouts. The watch seems pretty spot on in terms of accuracy. The only major thing I despise is that there is a significant delay to turn on the watch from its resting point. I find I have to raise my arm multiple times to get it to wake up. Another thing I don’t like is that there is a delay when it calculates your calories during your workout. Again I have to move my arm up and down several times to get it to update and that is a pain. The face size is a little big since my wrist is so small but then I guess if it were any smaller one might have a hard time reading the text. Not a big deal. Not sure I will use this watch as a fashion watch because of that but now that it calculates step I have to say I have gotten addicted to surpassing prior days numbers so I will have to wear the watch in order to do that. All in all the watch is a great buy! The pros definiently surpass the cons.