Polar Tips Pacer Running Smartwatches for Beginners and Pros
Polar just added two new pieces of kit to its fitness-tracking smartwatch lineup with the Pacer and Pacer Pro, each designed with runners of different skill levels in mind.
The new Pacer will go for $199 and is available next month. This makes it one of Polar’s more affordable fitness smartwatches and serves as something of a follow-up to the Unite fitness watch it launched in 2020 to serve beginners. The Pacer Pro is available to order today for $299 and offers more advanced tools for runners.
Despite the considerable price difference, the two watches overlap in a lot of features and design. Each watch has five physical buttons for navigation and a color memory-in-pixel display for clear daylight visibility. Their displays are covered in Gorilla Glass 3, and their cases are sealed against water with a WR50 rating.
The watches have smarts enabled by a new processor Polar claims is twice as fast as that found in the Polar Vantage M2. This powers features like push notifications, weather, music playback control, third-party running app integrations, and all of the fitness tracking the watches offer. Despite the clear target on running, the Polar Pacer and Pacer Pro also can track over 130 different activities.
Both watches can use GPS and heart rate tracking to provide detailed analytics on runs. The Pacer is aimed at newer runners and offers a special evaluation tool that just requires the wearer to take a 15-minute walk. The Pacer Pro takes its analytics further with a built-in barometer to make more accurate running power estimates.
The batteries in the Pacer and Pacer Pro are geared for seven days of battery life. With the watches doing more advanced tracking, the battery will last 100 hours in power-save modes or
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