We tested the Polar Grit X2 Pro watch. Here’s what we found

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Polar has long made some of the more affordable sports/adventure watches out there, but this year the Finnish company decided to take a chance and make a true flagship watch. It’s Polar’s ​​most expensive watch yet — starting at $750 — but the Grit X2 Pro has the most beautiful hardware ever in one of its watches. It’s just a shame the software can’t keep up.

The Polar Grit X2 Pro is billed as a “Premium Outdoor Watch.” It can be considered a direct competitor to Garmin’s Epix Pro line. It features a 1.39-inch touchscreen display with a resolution of 454 x 454 pixels. The case and bezel are made of durable and attractive stainless steel, while the screen is made of ultra-hard sapphire glass, known for its strength and scratch resistance. It’s water-resistant to 100 meters and includes Polar’s ​​latest Elixir sensor suite to monitor heart rate, pulse oximetry, and even skin temperature. For three months, I put the watch to the test by running, surfing, hiking, swimming, and wearing it 24/7.

Here’s what I found.

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Polar Grit X2 Pro Review

Libra: 2.8 ounces (including band)
Display size: 1.39 inch
Display resolution: 454×454

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$750 on Amazon $750 at REI

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Polar Grit X2 Pro in brief

Advantages

• Good looking equipment
• Accurate GPS tracking
• Excellent battery life
• Downloadable maps for offline use
• Comfortable to wear

Defects

• Navigating through menus and functions is not intuitive
• The software has some serious bugs
• Lacks an efficient multisport function
• Dear

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Aesthetics

The watch is beautiful to look at. The metal bezel looks absolutely great whether you’re wearing it on the trail or out to a fancy dinner, and I haven’t had any issues with scratches, despite climbing over boulders and accidentally throwing it into a backpack full of other metal electronics. The screen has a high maximum brightness, excellent contrast, and is easy to read even in direct sunlight. You can choose low or medium brightness if you want to save battery life, and you can also choose whether the watch face should be constantly lit or turn on when you lift your wrist to look at it or tap a button (which will save even more battery life). Personally, I set the brightness to high and turned off the “Always off display” option. Polar has a somewhat limited number of watch faces to choose from (and you can’t download more, unlike Garmin), but they’re attractive and can be customized to show you the information that’s most important to you at a glance.

User experience

From the home screen, swiping left or right takes you to various widgets for your activity, sleep, cardio load, week at a glance, today’s workout suggestions, navigation, sunrise/sunset times, weather, and media controls. They’re generally well thought out, displaying information in easy-to-read layouts. There’s even explanations for some of the metrics, which can be helpful since there’s a lot to sort through. The watch can make suggestions for training or recovery based on your sleep and workouts. It’ll also tell you if you’re overtraining or undertraining, and the workout suggestions will be tailored specifically to you. (Although the accuracy of this type of technology is still hotly debated.) I tested this watch out because I was just getting back into running after a knee injury. The suggested workouts tended to be lower intensities than I would probably choose for myself, but it helped me get back on the horse without re-injuring myself.

I’m not a huge fan of the way the buttons are configured. The watch has three buttons on the right side and two on the left, but I found that a bit unintuitive. For example, instead of the usual start/stop button for an activity, you have to start at the middle right and stop at the bottom left. Pressing once pauses the activity. If you want to stop it, you have to press and hold for another three seconds. I often found myself pressing the wrong button during an activity, which could be frustrating.

The menu system also took some getting used to, as did figuring out which features were available through the watch. Sometimes I’d find myself aiming for a feature, only to have the watch tell me the thing I was looking for could only be found in the app, sending me on another search. Unfortunately, the app isn’t exactly intuitive either, and overall, you have fewer customization options than you would with a Garmin or Suunto watch.

Activity Tracking

As for activities, the watch can store 20 different types of sports at once, which sounds like a lot, but I found it a bit confusing. Many activities have the exact same data fields, even if it doesn’t make sense. Surfing, for example, includes elevation data fields. Why? It would be really cool if it could tell the difference between when you’re riding a wave and when you’re paddling back and provide different metrics, which is what both the Apple Watch and Garmin multisport watches do. In fact, both of those watches will sync with Surfline, which will let you easily find videos of yourself surfing (if you’re in a location with a webcam). There just aren’t as many activities to choose from as its competitors, which have over 80 of them.

That said, if you’re specifically into running, the watch is actually pretty good. You can easily view live stats, maps, and control music, and it even has a few unique features, like Running Power, which makes it a kind of wrist-worn power meter. Running Power is a mechanical working rate, measured in watts, similar to what you’d get on a power meter on a bike. I also found Polar’s ​​recommended workouts to be good, and the coaching (which is available on the phone) was also helpful, which can help you set a pace and manage intervals based on time or distance. One really cool feature is that you can use the watch as a Bluetooth heart rate monitor (HRM), sending live data to other apps or devices, like Strava, MapMyRun, or stationary bikes or treadmills.

The watch’s heart rate monitoring feature also worked great, if not perfectly. I compared it to my trusty Wahoo Trackr HRM chest strap during a few workouts, and it was pretty even most of the time, putting it in the upper range of other smartwatches I’ve tested.

Navigation

One of the other headline features of the Polar Grit X2 Pro is navigation. The map is bright and colorful, and it’s easy to scroll and zoom with your fingers. It comes preloaded with very basic maps of North America, but you can download detailed maps of more specific regions through the Polar website. Just connect your watch to your computer to transfer them.

You can download routes via Komoot and Strava Routes, which work when you’re offline, which is convenient. But when using the navigation modes, this watch wants you to calibrate and then recalibrate the compass. This can happen not just on every hike, but sometimes multiple times on every hike, and involves rotating your wrist in various awkward positions until you appease the magnetic demons that live inside. Most other adventure watches never ask you to do this, so this is definitely a quirk. (It’s also a known issue with the Grit X2 Pro, which means a software fix may be on the way.)

Guided training

Polar Grit X2 Pro does not support importing workouts from apps like TrainingPeaks. This is a pretty big deal for more competitive athletes, especially those who work with coaches. You can export Your workouts to TrainingPeaks and Strava after they’re done, but you can’t import them. Both Garmin and Apple Watches make this pretty seamless. Polar has a few of its own preloaded workouts that it guides you through with animations, but if you need instructions, it takes more button presses to get to the right information than you might think, in the meantime the timer keeps running. The animations aren’t as nuanced as the ones you’ll find on Garmin or Fitbit watches. When tracking activities, you’re limited to four data fields per page (e.g. elapsed time, distance, pace, heart rate, etc.), which is fewer than most watches I’ve tested (the Epix allows for a maximum of seven). The numbers are large and easy to see, but I prefer the density of information over scrolling through pages trying to keep up with the pace.

Storage and battery life

The watch is also a bit more limited as a standalone gadget than many other flagships. For example, despite the watch having 32GB of storage, you can’t download music to it and play it directly through a paired set of earbuds, which is unfortunate. That said, if you’re playing music from your phone, the Grit X2 Pro lets you play/pause and skip tracks from your wrist, which is handy. Unlike other smartwatches, there’s also no mobile payment option — that’s depressing if you’re caught on a long run and need to grab a snack or grab a cab home.

I’m pleased to say that the battery life on the Grit X2 Pro is excellent. I kept the screen on high brightness and in gesture wake-up mode (i.e. the screen isn’t always on, but turns on when you raise your wrist or press a button), and I got an average of 10 days of battery life, which is in line with Polar’s claims. Of course, that’s the best-case scenario. If you do a lot of activities that use GPS, the battery life will be significantly reduced, but it still performed at least as well as my Garmin Epix 2 here.

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Polar Grit X2 Pro: Who is it for?

Ultimately, it’s a watch I really wanted to like, and I liked it enough to wear it for three months, but I never loved it, and the minor annoyances never stopped annoying me. In my opinion, the UI and overall user experience are inferior to other premium watches like the Garmin Fenix ​​or Epix. And at $750 (or $870 for the Titan version, which includes a leather wrist strap), the price was a bit hard to swallow for me.

The hardware is really great, though, and the watch is comfortable to wear. If you’re the type of user who puts aesthetics first, wants basic smartwatch functionality in an attractive package, and doesn’t mind the high price tag, this might make sense for you. But if you tend to prioritize functionality over fashion — and want even more features at a lower cost — you might want to look elsewhere.