Polar A370

Polar is a company known, historically, for making heart rate sensors and hardcore GPS tracking watches - but its new fitness tracker, the Polar A370, is far more mainstream.

It can track your exercise (with the help of a phone), tries out some smartwatch features with notifications, and will monitor your heart rate whether you’re sat in an office or running in the gym.

Compared to the old Polar A360, you now get the addition of GPS tracking of runs (through your phone, not on the band) and 24/7 heart rate sensing.

However, use these extras and the Polar A370 doesn’t last very long between charges. And for  more basic activity tracking  it doesn’t give you as immediate a fix as the Fitbit Alta HR.

It’s got the right bits, but it’s also quite expensive at $179.95/£169.50/AU$299, and with tough competition at the price is it worth your money?

Design and comfort

• Smart but relatively large and chunky design
• Watch-like rubber strap

The Polar A370 looks almost exactly like the Polar A360, its predecessor. In pictures, it also appears similar to something like the Garmin Vivosmart 3 or Fitbit Alta. However, it’s actually much larger.

The width of the band and the length it extends either side of your wrist are significantly longer than the Vivosmart 3’s. Its silver-on-black look may appeal, but next to some of the competition it’s a little ungainly.

Like most bands, the Polar A370 has a rubbery strap and a plastic module in the middle.

It’s a curious middle ground between a simple fitness band style and that of a proper runner’s watch like the TomTom Runner 3. Unfortunately, the effect is that of an earlier-generation wearable.

The Polar A370 is also not the most comfortable band around. For exercise, you need to do up the watch-like strap fairly tight in order to get a good heart rate reading, but as such it tends to leave some pretty serious indents in your skin thanks to the strap’s contouring. At times it also gets a bit itchy by the buckle.

As with any observation of this sort, your body may react differently, and these quibbles are relatively minor. Worn a little looser the Polar A370 feels fine. The Fitbit and Garmin bands certainly win in the comfort stakes, though.

Screen

• Low-res display with classic unsightly LCD pixelation
• Good outdoor visibility but not always-on
• Nice touch-friendly glass surface

One of the slightly unusual elements of the Polar A370 is that it has a glass display covering, just like a phone. There’s no mention of any brand-name toughening, like Gorilla Glass, but this should make it take on scratches less readily than plastic.

Glass also improves the touchscreen feel, and the touch display is the main way you operate the Polar A370. It feels much like a smartwatch display, and the software is also more responsive than a lot of fitness trackers. It may not move as fast as your fingers can flick, but it’s smooth and fairly quick.

The display is also set to turn off when dangling by your side, which may irk some, but you can alter this to be always-on (although it'll come at the battery price).

Other elements of the Polar A370 display aren’t so impressive. Virtually all fitness trackers have either no screen at all or a small, low-resolution one. 

Most of the time it’s not an issue, but this band has a slightly different issue that makes it less attractive to read.

It’s a color LCD of 80 x 160 resolution. The problem is not that you can see pixelation, but that you can see between the pixels, with a little border of black around the RGB sub pixels that make each visible ‘dot’.

In a $180/£170/AU$300 device, it’s a cheap look. As this is an LCD, with a backlight rather than individually lit pixels, the display doesn’t meld into the surround either.

It’s not a pretty screen even if it is much more colorful than most, but in pure practical terms it’s fine. 

It has the brightness to deal with very bright days without becoming all-but invisible and the backlight automatically adjusts to ambient light conditions - so in terms of raw usability, the Polar works well there.

However, in terms of the way it looks there's just a feeling that - especially for the price - this could be better.

Features and interface

• Simple interface
• You need to dig down for step counts
• Four watch faces

The Polar A370 has a simple interface you navigate using the touchscreen. Annoyingly, there’s no touchscreen gesture that can bring the band out of sleep mode and turn the screen on.

To do this you have to either use a wrist flick gesture or press the button on the side. Using the wrist maneuver is slow and a little unreliable, and the side button is a bit too stiff for an easy press. Unless you hold the other side of the band, it’ll be pushed across your wrist: a little usability fail.

All of this matters because the Polar A370 does not have an always-on screen, so 98% of the time, the screen will be completely black, displaying nothing.

It also makes poor use of its watch faces. There are four customizable faces, including digital and analog views. However, they only display the time. Almost all fitness bands with a screen let you see your daily steps and the time on one screen for an easy update on how you're doing fitness-wise.

The Polar A370 makes you flick down to the My Day option and tap on it to see how many steps you’ve taken. As small a gesture as this is, it’s something you’ll need to do several times a day if you actually want to actively use a fitness tracker. It gets old.

Flick up and down from the watch face and, other than the time, you’ll see screens for heart rate scanning, the Settings menu and Training. The latter is what you’ll pick whenever you want to track a specific activity.

The Polar A370 interface is simple and pretty clean, but the way it doesn’t give you a ‘home screen’ that tells you most of the information you need to see day-to-day is a big misstep.

Fitness tracking

• GPS-via-phone or on-watch accelerometer tracking
• Wide range of activity categories
• Phone notifications

The Polar A370 has a curious mix of fitness features, adding parts often not seen in basic fitness bands but leaving out a couple of core parts common to most.

Neat extras include the ability to piggyback off a phone’s GPS connection to fully track walks and runs, all-day heart rate scanning and the ability to use the heart rate sensor as an ANT+ sensor with other apps and hardware.

The first, GPS tracking via phone, is the most important. As long as you have a phone with you, you’ll get readings somewhat similar to those of a GPS runner’s watch.

However, while we’ve found the final readings to be reasonably accurate, the Polar A370 continually seems to send vibrate messages telling you it has lost and found GPS signal, or lost connection to your phone. This is without moving the phone, or with any obvious phone battery-saving measures to blame.

This will likely vary between phone models, but shows how the connection is managed is not that smart.

When running on a treadmill, there’s a dedicated mode that switches to using accelerometer data instead of GPS. As with the other modes the visual focus while you run and look at the watch is very much on heart rate readings rather than pace/distance, though.

There are extra modes for things like weight lifting and group exercise, and even the likes of Latin dancing, horse riding and rugby, and you can even create your own ones. 

However, with no rep counting, this is mostly to let you organize your sessions in the app rather than actually adding any meaningful data.

Other than offering a specific label to mark them out in the exercise history, the main thing they do is to switch GPS on or off.

What depth there is here is all about GPS tracking via a phone. There’s no step-counting altimeter, for example. In this sense, the Polar A370 is oddly close to a GPS-free smartwatch, which can use apps to connect to your phone’s GPS.

The Polar A370 has phone notifications too, another taste of smartwatch functionality. You need to enable these in the band’s app, but you’ll then get virtually every heads-up your phone can provide including WhatsApp, and even when Spotify changes tracks.

Some pruning of these notifications is advised, and once again you do this in the phone app, where you can block notifications you don’t want to see.

These updates on your wrist are rather thin as well. While you can see the first few words of messages and emails, there’s no way to dig deeper and see the rest of the text on the band. We don’t expect, or want, to read full emails on a fitness band, but it would be nice to be able to read a full WhatsApp message.

Performance and app

• Fair HR tracking
• Patchy GPS phone connection
• App is clean but not particularly motivating

Boot up the Polar app and you’ll see a big pie chart representing your day, split up into chunks of exercise, sleep and inactivity. Some might find it weird that there's no step count and distance travelled right in front of you, but the overall effect is one to give you a more holistic view of your day rather than just some numbers.

There are ‘points of interest’ bubbles peppered throughout the day, which you can tap for more info. These might be for activities, show sleep stats or tell you your lowest resting heart rate reading of the day. The A370 monitors your heart at regular intervals all day long, which is helpful when trying to see if you're getting fitter.

To get a look at some more familiar stats you just have to scroll down. Here you’ll see your steps, distance, calories and time spent active. The Polar A370 also doles out inactivity stamps, like black marks, which are shown here too.

If you want a bit more detail you have to open up the main menu, which has links for the sleep and training sections.

Sleep tracking offers the standard graphic splitting up the hours into sleep and motion, spewing out a sleep time figure and a judgement on how fragmented your sleep is. It's stuff to be expected, but it will give you a good insight into how you're sleeping and being able to give feedback each morning is nice, as it makes you feel like you're having more of a part to play in improving sleep.

All your tracked activities end up in the Training section, labelled with whatever mode you selected. The info for each is laid out in a clean and matter-of-fact manner.

There’s a bunch of bold stats at the top, like average heart rate, distance and pace, followed by a heart rate graph and, where applicable, a map showing your route.

Despite all the Polar A370’s nagging about losing GPS signal or connection to the watch, the routes we’ve recorded have actually been reasonable aside from the odd cut corner, presumably caused during a GPS drop-out.

Heart rate accuracy is fair, but we’ve noticed a few problems. The Polar A370 tends to routinely slightly overestimate the heart rate by a few bpm, and struggles with low intensity exercise like slow walking, tending to report a too-high heart rate some of the time.

It does a decent job when it really matters, though, during fairly intense exercise.

During a 6km run with a couple of interval-style rests to check if the Polar A370 would respond correctly by showing a decrease in exertion as soon as we dropped the pace, reliability was fairly good, barring one very brief unexpected drop in HR with no dip in exertion.

The Polar A370 is no replacement for a chest strap heart rate sensor, but Polar does seem to have significantly improved heart rate readings since the A360’s launch.

What hasn’t improved is the motivation and fun level of the app. There are no challenges or major social elements beyond sharing some of your stats on social networks. It’s a fine, clean way to look over your stats, but not much more.

This isn’t necessarily a big problem, though, as the Polar A370 app also lets you connect to other services: Strava, MyFitnessPal, TrainingPeaks, Nike+ Run Club and Google Fit. You can also make it sync your activities to your Google Calendar.

Battery life and compatibility

• 2-day battery with everything switched on
• 3-day battery without phone notifications
• iOS and Android supported

Polar says the A370 will last four days of fitness tracking, “continuous heart rate and 1 h of training per day.” Our experience has been somewhat worse than this, though.

With notifications enabled, 24/7 heart rate sensing on, GPS tracking of two 20-minute exercise periods, non-GPS tracking of a 6km run and a half-hour of HR tracking some drumming practice, the Polar A370 only lasted two days.

Coming from reviewing the Garmin Vivosmart 3, which lasts five days of solid fitness tracking with notifications, this is rather disappointing.

You’ll be able to get better stamina by switching off some of the features - phone notifications being an obvious drain - but we expect better from a tracker without native GPS or an always-on screen.

Battery charging is rather slow too. You charge the battery using a micro USB port on the underside, hidden by a rubber flap when not in use (which we're big fans of - no need for a proprietary cable you might lose). 

Charging seems to take a good couple of hours. Given this is a premium band with just a 110mAh cell, couldn’t this be quicker? This could be caused by the choice of port though - as we've noticed that some of Polar's dedicated running watches, like the A430 for instance, charge incredibly quickly but have their own cable.

The Polar A370 gets along with iPhones running iOS 7 or above and Android with Android 4.3 or newer. It will also sync with PCs and Macs using the Polar FlowSync software.

Verdict

The Polar A370 is a fairly pricey fitness band that does a bit more than just counting your steps. 

It can GPS-map your runs, walks and cycling with the help of a phone and lets you break up different sorts of exercise into categories, so you don’t just see a blur of entries when you look back at your activity history in the app.

There are also phone notifications, making this a smarter band than many other trackers. However, it also lacks some of the fitness band staples like an always-on clock display and good battery life. 

With all the features switched on the Polar A370 barely lasts longer than a smartwatch.

Who’s this for?

The Polar A370 is for people who want to map their runs but can’t stand the bulk factor of a GPS runner’s watch, even a smaller one like a TomTom Runner 3 or Garmin Vivoactive HR.

It's also for those that like the idea of tracking their fitness throughout the day and want some good quality metrics that show them in a complete view how well they're exercising and sleeping over time.

Should you buy it?

Stuck between the worlds of smartwatches, basic fitness bands and GPS exercise trackers, the Polar A370 can dash between several roles. It’s fine in most, but the fairly poor battery life when it’s doing the lot makes it a little high maintenance.

The Polar A370 isn't everything it could have been. Fortunately there are lots of other options, such as the three below.

Garmin Vivosmart 3

This is one of the Polar A370’s big rivals, in that it’s a) a higher-price band and b) not a Fitbit. The Vivosmart 3 has better battery life than the A370 and is significantly smaller. It also has a proper rep counter feature, something the Polar lacks.

There’s also a stair-counting altimeter. It doesn’t have the phone-connected GPS feature of the A370, but we’d suggest if you’re that bothered about it, why not get a watch that has its own GPS?

• Read our full Garmin Vivosmart 3 review

TomTom Runner 3 / TomTom Spark 3

If GPS run tracking is your aim, why not buy a full runner’s watch? The TomTom Runner 3 and Spark 3 are more affordable sport watches with phone-free GPS for true running freedom.

They are larger than the A370 but work much better as actual watches thanks to their always-on screens and far superior battery life. You’ll get up to three weeks’ use as a watch, and 11 hours’ GPS.

• Read our full TomTom Spark 3 and TomTom Runner 3 review

Fitbit Alta HR

The popular Fitbit Alta HR is far more attractive and a lot slighter than the Polar A370. It also lasts just under a week rather than a few days.

What the Fitbit Alta HR lacks is the GPS phone connection you get here, instead using the accelerometer to measure distance itself. It also lacks full phone notifications.

• Read our full Fitbit Alta HR review

First reviewed: August 2017