POLAR Unite Waterproof Fitness Watch (Includes Wrist-Based Heart Rate and Sleep Tracking)

I bought my first polar watch back in 2012. I like the weight/calorie/step feature and the various training modes. I do not connect to internet because I do my own program and this works well for me. I just want the basics to help me control my weight. Nothing else needed.

The only thing about this piece of crap that is marginally decent is the heart rate monitoring and even that has issues. The pairing to a phone, the syncing to the Polar App, the app itself, the way the band connects, the useless extras like Sleep Tracking and the useless but intrusive “blog” are all rubbish. I bought this in March 2022 and have been persevering with it for the past 10 months. I am fed up, sick and tired of dealing with it. The GPS feature is worse than useless. About 60% of the time, it fails to connect at all. The vast majority of the remaining times, it will lose connection during the ride resulting in erroneous distance and route information. I always ride with Strava and it, plus my analog cycle computer, always match. If the feature does not work. Fix it or eliminate it! The pairing the watch to a phone is an exercise in frustration. Syncing the phone to the polar app is usually an ok exercise but not always. Again frustrating. Fitbit has a way better mechanism for attaching the band. This is a poor mechanism. There is too many useless features like the Sleep Tracking stuff. I know if I had a good sleep. Further, it is not accurate. I will wake up rested and feel I had a great sleep and this POC will advise that my sleep was poor. Finally, I wanted a watch that would show my heart rate when I was in the middle of exercising. This POC claims to do so but does not. The screen goes black after a few seconds. When I am in the middle of climbing or sprinting, I can’t be flicking my wrist to see if this POC will bother to show my current heart rate. My old Polar FT7 constantly showed the current heart rate. The reason I bought this POC was I had had such good results with the FT7 and the even older one I had before that. Never again. I will buy an Apple, Fitbit, Garmin or anything else before I will buy another Polar POC.

I shopped around quite a bit for a replacement for my Amazon Halo which was my first fitness tracker. A lot of trackers have extra features that have nothing to do with fitness so I don’t need them. I was looking for accurate data and this seems to do really well. The battery only lasts about 3 days but that’s not a big deal for me. It only takes about 30 minutes to charge so I can just do it while I shower. I only wish I had spent more and gotten the Ignite with the built-in GPS. I didn’t think I would want that feature until last night during my team’s dragonboat practice. I needed to have my phone on me to connect to its GPS and I don’t like having my phone on the boat for fear of it getting wet. It tracked every moment, and I could go back and see the time, speed, heart rate and distance of every part of the practice on the map. Way freaking cool!! Oh whatever complaints people had about screen delays, they must have worked that out because I haven’t had that problem.

Got this watch instead of another chest strap monitor. I wish it could integrate with the Polar Beat app I’ve been use it for the last few years. Also wish the treadmill could get a signal from it like the chest strap version. Took a few days to get used to it but I’ve really come to like this watch. I use it to monitor more workouts that I didn’t used to bother getting the H9 out for. The down side is the battery life is pretty poor. Once or twice the screen was stuck blank and had to reboot the watch. The app likes to be fussy about connecting to sync data. A couple of times it didn’t have good skin contact and was reading the heart rate wrong, but that was more me learning to use the band correctly. Biggest complaint is the charger. Rather anything else but this flimsy charger. Which tonight decided to melt. I’m hoping the replacement charger gets here before battery level becomes critical. Really do like this watch and would buy another if it gets broken. BTW it comes with two watch bands which are easy to change out. I was afraid it would be a one size fits all kind of deal, which never fits my wrists, pleasantly surprised by how easy it was to swap the band over to the larger size.

I recently bought the FitBit Charge 4 for my wife and I as soon as it was released a few months ago. It was so sporadic with the GPS and was more of a entertainment device than actually helping me improve my health and wellness. She enjoyed the simplicity of it but even the steps were so off that it wasn't worth keeping. I was researching the Unite and Ignite but ultimately decided on the Unite since it was cheaper and when I do run outside I always have my phone on me for connected GPS.. The fitness metrics and heart rate are extremely accurate and the recommendations on my daily workouts with the FitSpark feature are worth their weight in gold. This is probably the lightest watch I have ever worn and I haven't taken it off since I got it. It is pretty stylish with a full color touch screen which has already been mistaken for an Apple Watch by a few people. The charging port is pretty unique as it clips right back into the watch and then you plug it in via USB. I also purchased a separate wrist band for this (as they are interchangeable) for when I am going out rather than having a sweaty band on me. I am pretty happy with this so far - my treadmill workouts have been pretty accurate and the HR is spot on.

UPDATED review: Within the first couple days of opening the box the watch screen blacked out while the battery was fully charged. When I would press the button it would vibrate to start training etc so it was apparently a screen issue. I was on the verge of sending it back but my husband reset the watch by holding down the button until the Polar logo appears and it resets. Now this is occurring more regularly and I have to turn it off and turn it back on. Not very happy about having to do that so often. The things I still like about this watch is the sleep data and easy to start training sessions with customized sport profile (I didn’t find my sport offered by other trackers). I usually lock the watch while in training mode so I don’t accidentally pause the recording. Discovered you can tell the time by pausing the training session and swipe to the side to read regular time. I like the heart and cardio data I receive during these sessions. Battery life is declining. I find I need to recharge about every 2 days I think. Depends if I record a long training session(s) on a charge. An active day for me is usually 3-5 hours of recording. Plus side is I have had no issues with manually syncing. The app is well designed and most of the data I want is on the watch face itself so I don’t go on the app regularly. Also, the breathing exercise is helpful. Surprisingly, I thought I would use the built in workouts more but they just lack appeal. I have no issue swiping left to right but swiping down to access alarms, screen lock, airplane mode etc requires finesse.

First, when choosing something like this, always check the manufacturer's web site for details. Don't just read the product description. There are usually even manuals. This listing implies that the watch has GPS. It doesn't. It uses your phone. That's not a bad thing unless you won't carry your phone with you. I think most of us carry our phone with us. Who am I? I'm a 66-year-old retired truck driver. I'm recovering from 23 years of sitting and holding a steering wheel 8-11 hours a day, one major surgery, and several minor procedures. I don't run. I don't cycle (yet). I walk, and plan to get back to weight training once I'm released to do so. I'm 5' 11" and I've weighed just under 250 pounds for the past 30 years, though I've lost about 20 pounds since June. I expect to get back up to walking at least 2 miles a day. I hope to get down to 200 pounds over the next year. I expect to keep my BP below 120. It was up to 140 earlier in the year. So, I'm old, fat, out of shape, and injured. Why the Unite? I wanted a heart rate monitor I could wear while walking. And, I didn't want to keep looking at my phone to keep track of how far I'd walked. It was that simple. I'll have my phone with me, so I don't need GPS. The Polar Flow app uses my phone's GPS to track route and distance. I didn't want most of the features of a "Smart Watch". I didn't want to pay for a subscription to keep track of what my phone itself is capable of tracking. I don't even understand why that's considered a service. It does allow viewing data using a browser, for free. Sleep monitoring is a plus. Simplicity is too. This is a KISS fitness tracker. So, if you want to brag about how great your Smart Watch is, or how expensive it is, this isn't it. It's not a fashion statement. It's a tool. If you want to monitor your fitness progress, this is a good choice. I've only worn it one day and one night, and I can already tell it's exactly what I wanted. I've been playing with "tech" longer than most buyers have been alive. I started programming a "personal computer" using hexadecimal Z-80 machine code in 1982 as a hobby. This was for my own physical health, not another toy. I wanted function, not to impress someone else. I'll update this in a week or two with my thoughts on how well it tracks my walks.

I bought this watch about a year ago and wanted to put a review out there because I just felt pretty disappointed overall and wanted others to have this information. The heart rate monitoring is very accurate, I tested it against my polar telemetry strap and it was pretty much spot on every time. The sleep tracking is pretty good, though like with anything of that nature it's better if you use it all the time, which I didn't because I hated wearing it all night. I never liked the way the wrist strap connected, it was just awkward but I did get used to it. The main things I disliked were the battery, the app and the way you select between different exercises. The app is cumbersome and hard to use, and VERY slow to sync with the watch so I rarely used it. Selecting between pre-selected exercises on the watch was clunky, you swipe left or right to pick things like "walking" or "stationary cycling" but it's so touchy that I would accidentally select the wrong one if I wasn't careful. Kind of drove me crazy. But the reason I'm now going to buy a different watch is that the battery just seemed to have issues all the time. I use this every day for my workouts and tracking my time walking my dog every night so it's heavily used - but hey, that's what these are for, right? So just a few weeks in to using it and then for the last year I noticed that some days, even after a full charge overnight I would put it on and it would just go black, no response. I finally figured out that I had to charge it again because somehow the watch was dead. Maybe it wasn't charging right or something? And when that happens it looses it's saved time and I have to resync it. Overall it's not a terrible watch and much cheaper than some of the other ones out there but unfortunately it just didn't seem worth the money with all the downsides. I wouldn't recommend it if you are going to use it all the time. Get something more expensive that will hold up and last.