Gadgetory

hey everyone this is Jimmy wooden shims review room it's been almost a year since I've reviewed the polar loop and at that time polar was one of the few known to the average consumer to offer heart rate monitoring with 2015 upon us companies and I think consumers are really seeing the benefits of heart rate tracking through the biggest brands Fitbit and eventually jawbone offers readings right on the wrist while Garmin sells a separate chest strap a polar was nice enough to offer me a unit to test so today we'll see how the polar m400 performs and go over some of its features I'm helping the average consumer make a purchase decision welcome everyone to jim's review / starting with the physical features the m400 comes in black or white the black version does give a look of being more Fitness focused while the white looks a bit more fashion-forward but you can decide on what looks good on you regarding the aesthetics the been barely attracts any dust which is always a plus for me now the band itself is moderately stiff compared to other bands in the market but wearing this is comfortable at first the band was a bit stiff to slide through that locking buckle but after a week or so either I became more accustomed to this and/or the materials used are more pliable in general it's easier to put on and take off now and the reason why I bring this up though although it's water resistant up to 30 meters allowing you to bathe and swim with this some people do take it off daily every morning or nights when they do shower now working out with weights bending and flexing my wrist back and forth here or running showed no signs of discomfort for me now looking at the back of the band there's a stainless steel plate with your charging port located up top polar does include a wire to charge the m400 but one great thing that I've noticed that not many other bands have at the moment is a micro USB connection for charging and syncing now most bands comes with its own proprietary connection and if you lose that supplied wire you're basically done but speaking of batteries the m400 claims up to 30 days battery life if you're just using the watch and daily activity tracking features now this does have GPS built-in which I'll discuss further shortly but if you have or are using the GPS and a compatible heart rate sensor polar claims up to eight continuous hours of use now from my personal testing and using a seven day time frame just to give you an idea I ran four out of those seven days a mile in each run and each run with rest at the end here lasts about 15 or 10 or 15 minutes or so now on day seven my battery level indicator had shown 50% of the battery had been drained so from this experience here the m400 should last about 14 days for me specifically I compared to many other mainstream bands on the market even those without built-in GPS the m400 is still very impressive as the average for other bands is still around five to seven days now let's move on here looking at this from the front the buns on each side are nice metal stainless steel buttons what soft and feedback when pressing in but works every time nonetheless the tapleft toggles the backlit screen offering visibility in low-light situations but in direct sunlight the screen polar utilizes still works very well now the bottom-left button is your back button and once you hold it down does initiate your watch to sync with your device's via bluetooth and speaking of compatibility this works on iOS 7 and Android 4.3 and higher now I did confirm this worked on my iPad air 2 with iOS 8 on the other hand though my Samsung Note 4 smart phone refused to show some data for certain days which was a little bit odd though now as of this video I'm currently on Android 4.4 which I'm not sure if it's Android or the phone itself that's giving me this issue and hopefully it's just a one-off matter but back to the buttons here top rights and lower rights are really your navigation with the center button as your action or Enter key and to quickly demonstrate here's how to start a workout you press enter and while I'm setting up or selecting my workout you notice the band will start looking for that GPS signal and if you already have that chest heart rate monitor strapped on to you the beats per minute will start to show shortly now running cycling other outdoor and indoor activities are preset in here with mountain biking last and also like to running as it seems to be the most popular exercise and once that GPS signal reaches 100% you basically start the recording now on screen here you have real-time pace with your average pace next with the bottom showing your distance traveled now moving on to the next screen the time you've started and how long you are on your current lap now if you want to count your lap times or do splits press the Enter button once and lap number 2 basically starts now pressing down the navigation button one more time here and you'll see elevation changes which is great and then the following screen here details how long you were in each heart rate zone now you can see if during your particular run if you've been really hitting it hitting that fat-burning zone you can say or as high as hitting your cardiovascular goals you can definitely see on the screen and basically compare and contrast now pressing one more time shows real-time HR information then one less press here will show your distance pace lap time and again real-time HR now if you need to pause a workout press back quickly and to zooom press enter.now the last one here and not least of course to finish your workout hold the back button for three seconds and the one of the reasons why there is some overlapping data on some of these screens it's because the screen stays on the entire time while you're working out you just need to find which information is the most vital to be displayed now going through the menu and showcasing its features and your main screen by default you have the time that's again shown 24/7 with a progress bar shown below now pressing down once on the navigation shows a slightly more detail about your daily activity next up here is your diary once clicked reveals linear dates in small squares indicating a workout registered in this case here the top shows how much activity I cheat for that day with a recorded run below now clicking on them brings you even more information on the particular run time and distance due how long you were in each heart rate zone calories burned a percentage of which calories were actually fat burning and your average and Mac space on the filing screen is an indication of your speed zones which monitors your speed or pace during a recorded workout with the GPS functionality if you're specifically targeting a pace to either keep your heart rate up at a certain level or if you're training let's say for a 5k the watch will tell you where you need to be again in regards to speed the office can be manually changed to suit your needs through the watch settings now the last one here in the list are your lap times that you can compare if you do toggle a lap during your workout and that's basically it for the diary section as you can tell this band shows much more data right on the wrist than most other bands offers but backing out here before discussing the polar flow app you have settings where you can customize your sport profiles the two most important settings are to your HR zones for each activity you perform as it doesn't have to be the same across the board and changes to your speed zone settings which again is great if you're training to run a race now the other settings you can adjust is the watch face itself and this is the one that I want to discuss you have the option of changing the main screen with any one of the three that I have shown here the fourth is the default one that you've already seen so far but through the watch settings you can set up an alarm to go off once or basically Monday through Friday or go off every day though there was not an option just to have certain days to go off and although it's great to have an alarm or the alarm feature it's actually a small audio beep that goes off it's not a vibrating alarm that we've seen on so many other bands in the past so just a heads-up on that I know some do value a vibrating alarm very much the audio outlets sometimes doesn't wake me up but getting out of these settings menu the next item here is a fitness test which i think is great to include this will measure your cardiovascular fitness at rest Poehler measures everything you've entered into the system age height weight plus your heart rate variability and with this test it measures how well your body works at transporting oxygen through the body now in turn it gives you that vo2 max level with indications if it's low moderate very good or even at an elite level but besides all that jargon here it's a great way to see on a monthly basis how your internal health is doing of course you can do a Google search on what vo2 levels are for more information nonetheless time I want to discuss our timers now this is really unique as this does really help anyone training for a race or just trying to beat their own pace with this watch being like a coach selecting an interval timer you can set up two countdowns either both being the time or one time and the other distance basically once you've completed a duration of your first timer you'll hear an audio beep from your watch and the second timer starts to countdown which you can use as your recovery time to start walking or you can basically do the opposite and in the beginning of the run or basically a jog or an exercise you can basically use it as a warm-up period and after that beep goes off then you can initiate and start your actual workout so I know that's a lot of information right there but you can see the m400 is really Fitness focused with very good tools to help train you not only in distance and pace but a great emphasis on heart rate zone training as well which I do recommend everyone to do a google search if you're unfamiliar with HR training in general now let's get into the app and let's see if it's any good from the get-go you have this huge activity wheel which records and illustrates a 24-hour day from midnight to midnight below the wheel are indications and how much you've laid down or slept sat stood locked or ran for and if you look at the corresponding colors below you can see that throughout your day and the wheel but with that being said one of the perks of polar in general this and summer of their other bands offers automatic logging this will automatically sense those aforementioned actions most bands even if they do offer it just automatically knows when you're awake when you're asleep and maybe just moments when you work one quote active now this will no different intensity levels on a finer scale as shown on the screen now from my testing for the most part it's very accurate it's rare though but on one or two days it shows a few minutes of me resting or sleeping and again it's a very small portion of my day out of an entire day where I'm probably sitting at my desk editing video recording my voice typing away doing you know what I do on YouTube and on the website and again it's a very small portion of my day and I'm pretty sure it might be a small hiccup it doesn't impact my overall health logging but I do admit and we have to acknowledge it's not a hundred percent there now as for everything else even when I didn't manually record a run and just let the band sense my workout it does pick up my runs pretty well with about a minute or two and deviation most likely four times I'm done running or standing still getting a drink now the orange triangles are times when I'm not active or basically inactive for too long and the band popped up a reminder on my wrist for me to get up and move and anytime you see this heart symbol on the wheel here that's a workout that I manually recorded using the watch recording feature tapping on that breaks down even more information about that specific activity with a lot more HR information being provided now as for HR tracking the chest HR strap are usually very accurate even nonpolar branded ones but testing the h7 here comparing this with my mio alpha 2 optical sensor which I proved in that review to be my best and most accurate wrist HR tracker the h7 did very well you can see on the chart here the deviation is very minimal on average being about one or two heartbeats in difference maybe just one little hiccup towards the end here but overall very very consistent in a very smooth band even can compared to the best wrist tracker that I have now going back and moving down below your daily progress bar is shown again with information you can tap to reveal what you need to do to reach your goal for that day very good information providing considering it gives you physical workouts that you can perform or even as something simple as an hour of cleaning then below that is self-explanatory with calories steps active minutes and a total sleep obtained click on information with read labels allows you to toggle different information such as distance shown here or basically the rest feature despite lacking a graph you can see your sleep quality now moving down once more are in activity indicators that we've seen on the activity wheel earlier up top in the last here is your weight that you can manually enter on a daily basis the last bit of information is your calendar up top which gives you weekly and monthly charts that way you can compare and contrast if you're improving or not over time and that's basically everything I think for the m400 that I think are essential I know this is a very long review but honestly the m400 does a lot of very useful features that I wanted to show that's there are some slight misses though or here and there that I do admit like the lack of the vibrating alarm is sleep being shown during the day again it's very minimal but it is there nonetheless and for some reason some syncing issues with my personal smartphone but I'll be honest there's more many more positives that I see of this thing that the negatives are basically overshadowed so I hope this review helped you in some way again be sure to add make gyms reviewer on to Facebook Twitter or Instagram to see behind the scenes content or even information that I can get before it reaches mainstream media again this is Jimmy with Jim's review room you guys take care and I see you the next one bye