Alex Wise Photography

Occa­sion­ally I like to post things com­pletely irrel­e­vant to my pho­tog­ra­phy and this is one of those posts.

Since my local gym closed I’ve taken up run­ning which is hell but I’m slowly get­ting bet­ter.  I always enjoyed watch­ing the heart rate mon­i­tors on exer­cise machines at the gym and when I began run­ning this was some­thing I missed, so my search for a heart rate mon­i­tor begun. Instantly the Polar F6 appealed with its abil­ity to log and keep track of train­ing ses­sions at a rea­son­able price (around $150AUD deliv­ered through eBay). There is also other brands but their long term reli­a­bil­ity was ques­tion­able so stick­ing with the more Polar brand was decided.

The rea­son I post this is not to review the Polar F6 but just some gen­eral thoughts which may help oth­ers con­sid­er­ing the product.

I was drawn in by the F6 being able to store and upload train­ing ses­sions and as a result have mixed feel­ings with the Polar per­sonal trainer inter­face. Firstly, I enjoy all the details that the inter­face gives you, but am dis­ap­pointed it does not allow data to be exported for offline view­ing which may cre­ate prob­lems if the web­site was to ever become per­ma­nently offline. But as I said I do like what the web­site offers in terms of set­ting train­ing goals and view­ing long term his­tory which is nice to see how you’ve progressed.

Month view of com­pleted exer­cise which can be adjusted to a week based view.

Total work­outs since own­ing the watch, this makes me happy haha.

This and the screen­shot below show the detail which can be obtained when click­ing on an indi­vid­ual exer­cise session.

Above is the train­ing ses­sions which I’m yet to use.

For upload­ing data the Polar F6 relies on the user to own a micro­phone to receive the incom­ing data from the watch speaker. Per­son­ally I find this really frus­trat­ing and usu­ally takes a few attempts before the data is prop­erly uploaded.

Would I pur­chase this again? Yes it serves my needs per­fect but I just wish there was an offline inter­face and the trans­mis­sion process didn’t involve a micro­phone due to its unre­li­a­bil­ity. I must plug the eBay seller ‘Polar-bestof’ for their excep­tional ser­vice and gen­uine items, when order­ing I acci­dently ordered the female ver­sion of the watch and after 10 min­utes of pay­ing for the item the seller had already given it to the courier for deliv­ery. Any­way he recalled the item and changed it for a male watch and was a com­plete gen­tle­man about my order­ing error. The ebay list­ings for this seller are avail­able here.

I hope this post helps someone