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completely fu*ked off with my polar
Britspin
Posts: 1,655
in General Chat
This is of no help to you, but to share your pain I feel the same about my Garmin forerunner...18 months of use & the mode button fails, out of guarantee & I have to pay for repair/replace with reconditioned unit. This has not had heavy use I don't race with it on or use it every training session (my Polar I do both with & have had for years), the mode button has to be used & a 18month fail suggests a faulty button, but Garmin are adamant that I should just pay up & shut up.
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However... I also have one of their wireless hrm/cadence/cycle computers etc. No matter what I do the speed sensor only picks up around 50% of the time meaning I often have no idea how fast I am going and never have any idea how far I have been or what my average is. Having speed cadence hrm and average speed all on one screen is ideal, but it never works properly!
Sorely tempted to take it off and re attach my trustly old Cat Eye
I switched from Polar to Garmin, largely because of the maintenance issue, but also price.
I attempted to change my own battery in the Polar - it was more fiddly than I expected. It wasn't until some time later that I realised I had lost sound... not a great loss.
While I'm generally pleased with the Garmin, the HRM is a bit erratic. It will often "oversample" and start showing double/triple readings. I assume it is software bugs rather than a transmitter issue. This does undermine it somewhat as a useful training tool (for example, my HRMax is about 185 - but on a descent on the bike, the Garmin had me at over 220 - It could have been that I am petrified of descending.. ).
I'm very seriously considering a 310XT - but don't want to be an early adopter. The other brand that I am starting to seriously consider is Suunto (why do the Fins make the best HRMs), but this is also a lot more expensive than the Garmins.
What I like about the polar is the ubiquity of third party support - i.e. the gym equipment, my Tacx Flow, all work the polar strap.
But, the IRDA data transfer really is crap, in fairness, it should use bluetooth or something similar...for that price...
I haven't bothered with it in the water, I have just left it on my bike and started the timer when I come out of T1. Usually it's easy to add your swim time and guess the T1 time....who looks at the watch during the swim anyway? And, I am usually at the swim start I am more worried about my position and not getting kicked in the face than starting my watch...
I had however a LOt of problems with my old S625x - it just didn't pick up me heart rate reliably, I'd be running/cycling along and it would be showing zero....
New chest sensors and sending it back to Polar twice didn't solve the issue either, it did my head in. I'm not sure why I bought a new Polar actually, probably 'cos the new 800 looked so cool.
My RS800 does sometimes say that the wearlink battery is low, but when I look at the "product details" in the software it shows up as being full....I would however neither expect it to be full nor empty..suspicious.
I want to buy a power meter next year, was thinking about the CS600 with Power, any opinions on that?
HRM doesn't work in water and the sensor select order is run then bike then "none" (which I use for swim). Surely the sensible thing would be none-bike-run?!... This means you have to fiddle mid-transition/bike/run to get the correct sensor. Oh for a nice button combo that does "enter/exit T1 - auto select bike sensors" and "enter/exit T2 - auto select run sensors"... I'm no expert, but surely someone at polar/suunto/whoever has considered that maybe this would be a killer feature and have triathletes handing over their credit cards?
When I find such a watch I'll consider getting one (I'm assuming it'll be mega expensive because it has this simple feature), but until then I'll battle with the polar.
Or they could be a club sponsor, free 310's for all members?
The polar seems much more responsive at picking up run pace and unless I'm on a new route, I really don't need to see a map of my usual training run. The archaic infrared pc link is also a joke, which is a shame as the polar records a lot of interesting data.
If the polar hrm worked under water, did footpod/bike speed sensor as well as gps (it's mostly there with this as gps is availble but with a separate sensor so not great for run and bike), had the magical transition button and had a USB interface I'd be a happy man. All the better if it counted pool laps for me. I don't ask for much
Conehead, hopefully they'll listen and some of the features we all crave will start to creep into the watches.