Polar M430 review: Brilliant function over functional form

When you think about fitness wearables, you’re likely inclined to think about the Fitbits, Garmins and TomToms of this world. If you were for some reason in a situation where your life depended on your ability to name companies that manufacture fitness trackers, like some terrible Saw spin-off, you may stretch as far as Apple and Samsung. And yet, despite being in the game since the 1970s, I’m not sure Polar would come to mind fast enough to save you from a messy, if unlikely, demise.

That’s unfortunate, because we’ve just taken delivery of two such trackers, and they’re both very good indeed. Jon will be on hand with his review of the Polar A370 soon, but in the meantime, I’ve been putting the Polar M430 through its paces – or, more accurately, it has been putting me through mine. In short, it’s a brilliant running watch that requires serious consideration, but it isn’t without its drawbacks.

Fortunately, almost all of these are visible from the pictures below.

Polar M430 review: Design[gallery:2]

And that’s because the Polar M430 has a (watch) face that only a parent conglomerate could love. This is a fitness tracker that somehow manages to make even the TomTom Spark 3 look svelte and that’s device that makes prison ankle tags look discrete.

What you’re looking at is a large monochrome 128×128 display with a thick, black bezel around the edge. It protrudes a good 12mm from the wrist, which doesn’t sound like very much – until you remember that most smartphones are under 8mm thick. It’s really chunky, in other words.

Indeed, it’s tempting to think that Polar just accepted defeat on making it look appealing: the rubber strap encases the whole thing, permeated with holes for breathability like a Trypophobia sufferer’s worst nightmare. It isn’t hugely comfortable, especially when worn tightly enough to measure heart rate well.[gallery:3]

There are five buttons, placed non-symmetrically along both sides of the screen, which makes it look more Tamagotchi watch than a serious athletic tool. Completing the look, our review sample is the kind of neon orange that the makers of Tango would consider obnoxious. Perhaps the expectation is that other runners will see you coming – at the very least, other road users could reasonably assume that the shopkeeper did.

I’m afraid that in terms of looks, it’s hard to find a single redeemable feature on the Polar M430, although some of the damage is mitigated if you buy it in black, grey or white.

Polar M430 review: Performance[gallery:4]

Fortunately, there are very good reasons for this and the Polar M430 is a triumph of function over form. As a fitness tracker, it’s one of the absolute best I’ve used. So yes it’s bulky, but do you know what that means in practice? It means a battery that seems to defy the laws of physics and GPS tracking accuracy that puts the Samsung Galaxy Gear Fit2 on my other wrist to shame. While the Gear Fit2 was swearing blind that the three 5km park run races I’d done were between 4.48 and 4.8km each, the Polar M430 had the figure at 5km on the nose every time.

That’s a pretty damned good start, nailing two of the common bugbears that dampen enthusiasm for running watches at the cheaper end of the spectrum, and many will be happy to trade off style for utility.

By the same token, the five button design is a triumph: touchscreens are all well and good, but everybody knows they become a painful mess when they get even slightly wet. These five buttons, on the other hand, are simple enough for anyone to figure their way around the watch’s core functionality within five minutes of playing with it.[gallery:6]

The middle button on the right-hand side activates, while the ones above and below it scroll up and down respectively. On the other side, the bottom right always goes back a screen, and the top left toggles the backlight on and off. In other words, all your functions are easy to access even mid-run.

And it may not be pretty but that big monochrome screen shows a lot of useful data on it while you’re running – and if you want more, just tap the buttons up and down to see a new screen: it’s all very intuitive. One of my favourite features is that the action button allows you to toggle when a lap is complete, meaning you can not only compare your last five minutes but also see how you’re doing compared with your last lap; almost invariably worse, in my case.

Once it’s measured one lap, the Polar M430 also offers an estimate of when the next one should be, although this was usually slightly off in my experience, so I preferred the manual approach. While in day-to-day step-counting use the watch receives notifications directly from Android, these are mercifully muted when in training mode – which I see as a smart move.

Let me come briefly back to that sensational battery life. Admittedly, the constant heart rate reading is off by default but, even so, you’re looking at a battery that will last over two weeks and that’s including a couple of half-hour sessions leaning on the GPS. The official figures say 20 days of normal fitness tracking or eight hours of solid GPS use. That puts every tracker I can think of to shame.

There are two black marks against it. The first is that it doesn’t give you much of a warning as to when it’s running low. In fact, on one run, I pressed the button to start, only to be told that I should charge the watch first, which I would have done, were I not two minutes from the start of the race and five miles away from the charger. The second point is related: that charger is proprietary, so good luck finding anyone with a spare if you need one in a pinch.[gallery:9]

While it’s pitched at experienced runners, there is one feature that will appeal to newbies who want to throw themselves in at the deep end (if you’ll excuse the mixed metaphor). Fitness Test is given plenty of prominence in the menu and, while this sounds like it’s going to run you ragged for five minutes, it actually asks you to lie still while it measures your VO2 max level.

Of course, this is never going to be as accurate as a lab-conditions VO2 test, which requires you to wear a mask and run on a treadmill until you can run no more, but it does at least give you a general idea as to whether all your hard work is paying off (my fitness was measured as “moderate”, since you ask).

Polar M430 review: App

The Polar Flow app continues this simple, straightforward style, neatly dividing things up into activity and sleep. The former gives you more detail of your run than you can get on the watch itself, providing a map of your route and some insights into lap times, pace and cadence. Every run is neatly displayed in a feed, which you can disperse with the result of every fitness test, so you can directly see how effective your regime is proving to be on your overall health.

As everyone agrees that a good night’s sleep is correlated to athletic performance, sleep tracking plays a big part of the app. For full disclosure, I did find the watch a bit too uncomfortable to wear to bed every night, but I used it enough to get an idea of what it’s all about, and it’s not doing anything too revolutionary. In short, it tracks arm movement in the night to see when you’re wriggling around and monitors your heart rate to see when you’re relaxed and thus likely to be in a deep sleep. The results seemed to correlate pretty closely to the night in question, but it’s nowhere near as reliable as a dedicated sleep tracker such as the ResMed S+.

The app is great overall, but what’s better is that all of this information is replicated on the web for you to log in and check at any time. This is especially handy for checking running routes on the bigger screen, without the inherent fiddliness of a touchscreen. It’s also home to a rather neat, if immensely buggy, experimental feature called “Relive”. Here, you can go to any run, and it will create a short video montage of your run, complete with a jaunty soundtrack showcasing your various statistics blended with the map of your route and Google Streetview photos of the sights you saw along the way. Precious memories, like this glamorous view of Tooting:

But I did say it was buggy, didn’t I? Yeah, Polar thought that wasn’t in South West London, but Mongolia.

No wonder my heart rate was so high; I didn’t know I’d covered that much ground.

But, overall it’s hard to find fault with the app, except for things that are beyond its control. Namely, that not as many people use Polar Flow as use Fitbit, say, which means that the friend feeds will likely look a little empty.

Still, the app easily lets you connect it to others including MyFitnessPal, Strava, Nike+ and Google Fit. Cleverly, you can also add Polar training results and Polar training targets to Google calendar – a genius way of ensuring you can’t escape your fitness goals.

If I had a gun to my head and someone asking for me to find fault (my reviews editor, Jon, say) then I would point out that making you pick between metric and imperial measurements is a slight shame but that’s only because, while I measure myself in feet and inches, I measure my 5km races in, erm, kilometres. If you’ve ever tried to convert miles into kilometres after 20 minutes going flat out, you’ll know why this is an issue.

Polar M430 review: Verdict

I have two opinions about the Polar M430 and bear with me because they’re a bit contradictory.

The first is that, as a day-to-day watch, it fails. It’s ugly, it’s bulky, its monochrome screen is far from beautiful and it’s uncomfortable to wear for extended periods. This isn’t like the Fitbit Ionic, Garmin Vivosmart HR+ or Samsung Gear Fit2, all of which you can wear all the time without issue, and that makes the sleep tracking, step counting and notifications less useful. If you’re not wearing it all the time, then what’s the point?[gallery:14]

But then I think of it as a running tracker and I can’t find fault with it at all. Of all the running gear I’ve used, this is possibly the best in its price bracket. Why? It’s incredibly accurate, it’s easy to use on a run, it displays the information well and the battery lasts for weeks. The extra features, such as being able to tap a button to mark a lap and getting your runs added to Google Calendar are just gravy on top.

So, it really comes down to what you’re looking for. If you just want a wearable for race day, this is hard to beat. If you’re looking for a dressy smartwatch that also happens to track running then you should look elsewhere. But, be advised, it’ll likely do a worse job than this. If running is your life and your budget is £200… well, I’d say your search is over.