Heart rate measurement suddenly stopped working. Polar support doesn't want to know.Arvosana 2/5
I have had my Ignite for about a year and a half. There is a lot to like about it. Nice elegant design, Small and light. Price is pretty good, Great battery life and a lot of good features. I bought it to track sports with GPS (cycling, running) and to measure wellness things like sleep, using the heart-rate function. There are some things in the basic design of the software that could be improved (the Polar Flow app is ugly and difficult to use, the pause screen shows no data such as km ridden / run etc.), but basically I was really happy with it up until about 6 months ago.
But then the heart rate measurement started to go wrong. After a year of working pretty fine. I can now be sitting calmly on the sofa and the watch shows I have a heart rate of 140 bpm! So now the daily activity tracking and calorie burn is useless and the sleep measurement no longer works. I also can no longer use heart-rate zones for training. I can still use it as a watch to tell the time of course and the GPS is still fine.
I contacted Polar to make a warranty claim and the first thing they did was to send me a long email that ended with the line:
"Your device is not faulty – it shows you exactly what it reads based on your subcutaneous blood flow. As a technology, OHR measure is not yet quite on par with ECG measurement. Note that you can pair your Polar device with an ECG sensor (H7/H10), if you prefer ECG.".
This is despite my explaining that the heart rate measurement had suddenly got a lot worse and of course in their ads for the Ignite they make a big deal about:
"Advanced wrist-based heart rate. Polar Ignite tracks heart rate with the Precision Prime™ sensor fusion technology."
Polar support offered me the option to send the watch at my expense to their service centre to be checked out. Given how they are already so confident that the watch is not faulty then this seems like a really bad idea! I could forgive a faulty device, but not the blame-the-customer attitude that "this is not broken, it is your fault for trusting the wrist heart rate".
End result: I am now working out whether to get a Garmin or Apple Watch next and am firmly saying goodbye to Polar devices!
niilo