Polar is known for its tough GPS-enabled running watches, but lately, it’s moving into the smartwatch market. The Polar M400 smartwatch is essentially a running watch with GPS that can also sync up with your smartphone or tablet to display your activity statistics and fitness data.
The M400 not only tracks your pace and the distance you’ve covered while running, it also works as a 24-hour fitness tracker that counts your steps, calories burned, and how long you slept. The smartwatch will also send you customized goals for training, estimates of how you’ll perform in your next race, suggestions for improvement, and tell you how to navigate back to your starting point if you get lost running in remote locations.
Since the Polar M400 has Bluetooth connectivity, it can sync up with your phone or tablet to give you more detailed statistics and analysis of your performance. You’ll also see more in-depth suggestions on what to do to optimize your next workout. At the core, the M400 is completely focused on fitness. Unlike most smartwatches, it doesn’t try to replace your smartphone, but acts more like a very intelligent fitness tracker.
Polar says the battery will last for 9 hours if you’re using the GPS, but when the GPS is turned off, you can get as much as 24 days of battery life. If that’s true, Polar’s M400 might just be one of the longest-lasting smartwatches — let alone wearables — on the market. It also has a pretty decent design. It certainly looks like a sports watch, but since that’s what most buyers will be using it for anyway, it’s not too big a deal.
The Polar M400 is available in black, white, and now red, for $200 on the company’s website. If you want to monitor your heart rate too, you can buy the H7 HRM chest strap, which pairs with the watch for $50 more.
Updated on 08-15-2016 by Christian de Looper: Added information about device now being available in red.
The OnePlus Buds Clip are a new pair of open-ear earbuds built around a simple convenience. They join Sony’s LinkBuds Clip in the growing ear-cuff category, but either OnePlus bud can go on either ear.
Sensors recognize how the earbuds are being worn and route the audio channels accordingly. There’s no label to check before putting them on, and the feature also works when only one bud is used.
We buy fitness bands and activity trackers to keep tabs on our exercise, but it is easy to forget to start tracking or switch modes when moving between different activities. For Fitbit and Pixel Watch users, that could soon become a lot less annoying, as Google is rolling out a major upgrade to automatic activity tracking that can recognize more than 100 types of exercise, up from just 10 before.
Google first showed off the improved tracking earlier this month alongside the Fitbit Edge. It is now coming to Fitbit Air and the Pixel Watch 3, 4, and 5, and Google claims the added context behind the system makes workout detection nearly twice as accurate while cutting missed activities by more than half. Fitbit Edge will support it too.