Want a sports watch, don’t need anything too high end? Good thing there’s a healthy selection of affordably-priced options out there from Garmin, Coros, and Suunto alike. This time, we add another one to the affordably-priced list in the form of the Polar Street X.
Billed as an urban sports watch, the timepiece is designed for both city training and everyday wear, giving you a watch you can keep on whether you’re on a morning run, a workday at the office, or a nighttime lift at the gym. It gets all the features you expect from a modern GPS sports watch, all while coming in at attractive price point, making it a potentially great fit for many users.
The Polar Street X is a GPS sports watch sporting a 1.28-inch AMOLED touchscreen with 416 x 416 resolution and a full complement of sensors. There’s dual-frequency GPS for tracking your location in and around the city, along with an accelerometer for monitoring movement, a gyroscope for detecting orientation, a compass, a barometric altimeter for elevation, a skin temperature sensor, and the outfit’s Polar Precision Prime heart rate reader array. The only things you’ll in more expensive models that aren’t here are an SpO2 and an ECG sensor, but this already covers more than the basics.
It has all the key functionality for sports, sleep, and activity tracking that are available on more expensive Polar watches, so you can record your stats on more than 170 different sports, track different types physical activities and keep a detailed log of your sleep cycles. It also has detailed training and recovery programs, including training targets, season planners, and more, as well as outdoors and navigation features, including route and elevation profiles, trackback systems, and even turn-by-turn navigation. Do note, this doesn’t have offline maps (it’s largely meant for urban use, after all), so you will likely have to use it with your phone to get proper map-based navigation capabilities.
The Polar Street X comes with the usual assortment of smartwatch features, including different watch faces, push notifications, music controls, weather forecasts, and more. It also comes with a LED flashlight that, the outfit claims, will allow it to provide clear, reliable visibility in low-light conditions, with both white and red light, so you can use whichever one you need at any moment. The onboard battery can last up to 43 hours in performance training mode with the GPS running full time, while extending battery life to 170 hours in eco training mode and a whopping 10 days in smartwatch mode. According to the outfit, the battery is replaceable, too, although there are no details on how that can be done.
It looks ruggedly built, with eight screws around the bezel holding down the chassis, a scratch-resistant Gorilla Glass 3.0 lens, and a reinforced polymer body. Other details include 50 meters of water resistance, a build that meets MIL‑STD‑810H standards, large textured buttons designed to be operated even with gloves, bio-based polymer construction, 32MB of storage, Bluetooth LE connectivity, and a weight of 1.7 ounces.
The Polar Street X is available now, priced at $249.99.
