Review in a minute
The Polar Pacer Pro is definitely one of the best running watches in its price range, a perfect watch for serious runners and a decent tool for outdoor athletes.
With its built-in GPS, it can track your runs and provide accurate information on pace, distance, cadence, elevation, mileage and more in the Polar Flow app. Race Pace looks at your training history, your target time and the distance you are aiming for and gives you a recommended pace. The Flow app provides detailed information on elevation gain during runs, heart rate and other metrics, and while it’s difficult to export data to compare one workout to another, you can dive deep into individual workouts.
Other sport profiles have more features, such as B. counting strokes in swimming (both in the pool and open water) and performance in cycling. The watch has plenty of GPS credentials, tracking routes in stunning detail and being able to get you back to the starting point of your trip like other GPS watches, although this is done via a simple arrow as the watch can’t display maps in colour.
Other tools include accurate sleep tracking, which allows you to determine your Nightly Recharge score, or recovery level, and assess whether you’re ready for a challenging fitness session. If you love endurance training, especially running, the Polar Pacer Pro is excellent for its price as it offers a variety of fitness metrics and breaks them down into simple, actionable advice. Highly recommended.
Polar Pacer Pro: price and availability
The Polar Pacer Pro costs $299.99 in the US, £259 in the UK and AU$495 in Australia. It can be found on the Polar website (opens in new tab)and many third-party companies stock the watch, such as Amazon and Australia wildfire sport (opens in new tab).
Polar Pacer Pro: Design & Screen
- Clear, bright 45mm screen
- Simple and intuitive five button design
- Companion app ergonomically designed
The Polar Pacer Pro is a very well designed watch with a bright 45mm, 1.1mm thick Gorilla Glass screen that is easy to read in bright conditions. I certainly never had trouble glancing at it on sunny runs to check my progress and it glowed well in the dark. Improved backlight management means the watch can adjust the nits output to save battery life.
The rest of the watch is just as well designed, with Polar’s signature five-button approach, identified by the bright red “OK” button framed by up, down, light, and pause or menu buttons . Being used to Garmin’s similar five-button functions, it came as a bit of a shock that different functions were mapped to different locations: For my first week, I kept hitting the wrong button to pause runs, despite hardly ever using Polar for it can accuse something.
Once I got used to it, cycling through various stats on the watch was intuitive and easy to do. The basic watch face remains, while the bezel of the watch shows daily activity, Nightly Recharge Score, recommended daily workouts, weather, and weekly activity totals. The design of the Polar Flow app is similarly ergonomic. It’s easy to access all your key data at a glance, and tapping each one opens more detailed charts and metrics.
The watch is well designed, comfortable and durable. It’s not overly bulky despite its wide face, sits well on the wrist and its silicone strap is comfortable.
Polar Pacer Pro: Features
- Limited smartwatch functions
- Amazingly detailed fitness and running metrics
- Many other multisport modes
While you can access weather and basic notifications features, the watch isn’t a full smartwatch: there’s no way to download third-party apps, run games, or view content that isn’t a display of a stick function running an exercise.
This is a performance tool and does not replace a more well-rounded smartwatch like an Apple Watch. It can control the music on your phone so you don’t have to use your handset while you run, but it can’t save tracks to internal storage.
But enough of what it can’t do: what Polar offers is an advanced suite of health and fitness features. A few were highlighted earlier in the review, but this is clearly a watch for runners. The level of detail you pull from your run data rivals data from competitors like Garmin: calories burned, broken down by the minute, detailed maps of your routes, hills climbed and power exerted during your runs (the latter of which Garmin can only give you with an additional heart rate monitor ). The only thing missing is an exported 30-day training report to tie it all together.
Heart rate zones allow you to monitor and adjust the intensity of your workout. Whether it’s running, swimming, cycling, dancing, or skiing, Polar has a sport profile for you, and many include specific metrics such as: B. Stroke count in swimming and power in cycling. You can also customize your own profiles, although these are treated just like any stationary sport in terms of calories burned and heart rate zones.
Get simple, actionable advice from this watch: Polar Pacer Pro can recommend cardio and supportive exercises like stretches, and display each move and routine on your watch for additional guidance. Your sleep tracking feeds into a Nightly Recharge Score, which can provide clues that you’re ready for a tough cardio session or that you need to keep things light. You can enter calorie intake with the tank feature, which also sets reminders to eat more carbs to fuel your race, or drink more water.
Polar Pacer Pro: performance
- Excellent tracking accuracy and training recommendations
- Decent battery life
- Nightly Recharge Score is a little blunt
The Pacer Pro is fast and accurate. I compared the Polar Pacer Pro to the GPS on my phone using the free MapMyRun app, and the pace and duration from Google matched the Polar Pacer Pro almost exactly (apart from the extra 10 seconds it took me to start with messing around with my phone to stop the chase ). It’s my benchmark and I’m happy with the accuracy of the watch even though it lacks the multi-band GPS of more expensive watches like this Garmin Forerunner 955.
I tried the Pacer Pro’s Race Pace and TrackBack feature while running in an unfamiliar environment over a weekend and was quite impressed. The only gripe I had with TrackBack is that it shows a plain arrow instead of your position on a full-color map and I once missed my turn, although it was easy to identify and double-click. I imagine it would be of great use on a trail rather than a winding road full of dead ends. Music was easy to control on the go, whether I was using Audible or Spotify.
The battery life, which was advertised as a full week, lasted around five nights before requiring a charge. It’s not quite the full seven days as claimed, but there’s plenty to do – and do it with multiple runs using the watch’s built-in GPS.
I’ve learned to dread the “Night charge compromised” message on the watch face when I’ve had a bad night’s sleep: I’m not the lightest of sleepers, and the burnt orange message ended up causing me more stress than it was worth.
It’s a useful reminder to rest and prepare properly, and the app gave some handy tips on what workouts are right for my rest levels, but a couple of times I’ve stopped wearing the watch simply because I’ve had enough of the negative feedback . Every fitness tracker has this problem, and there really needs to be a gentler way to provide feedback on your sleep.
However, FitSpark’s workout recommendations were more useful. I’ve used them before on the Polar Vantage V2 and they’re great for giving you extra guidance when you want to switch up your training or don’t have a plan to stick to.
