With more than twenty years of mountain biking experience, and nearly a decade of testing mountain and gravel bikes, Tom has ridden and tested thousands of bikes and products, from super-light XC race bikes through to the most powerful brakes on the market. Outside of testing bikes, Tom competes in a wide range of mountain bike races, from multi-day enduros through to hour races in the depths of the Scottish winter — pushing bikes, components and his legs to their limits.
When not riding he can be found at the climbing wall, in his garden or cooking up culinary delights. More Skype 8. Skype is software for calling other people on their computers or phones. Download Skype and start calling for free all over the world.
The calls have excellent sound quality and are highly secure with end-to-end encryption. More Polar Daemon 2. More QuickTime 7. QuickTime is Apple's cutting-edge digital media software for both Mac and Windows-based computers delivers unparalleled quality for creating, playing and streaming audio and video content over the Internet.
More FileZilla 3. FileZilla includes a site manager to store all your connection details and logins as … more info More UpdateStar Premium Edition UpdateStar 10 offers you a time-saving, one-stop information place for your software setup and makes your computer experience more secure and productive. More Microsoft OneDrive Under good conditions most of the watches are remarkably good, but when things get a little tough the differences become more apparent.
However, none of the watches have GPS accuracy that is good enough to be used for displaying your current pace. As a result, I've added the test results for various Footpods as they can be far more accurate than GPS, but more importantly they tend to have far less moment-to-moment variation so they can give a far better display of your current pace.
Note that my accuracy tests focus on the ability to measure distance, not the moment in time position, though the two are obviously related.
The table below is a simplified summary of the results, where a '10' would be a perfect device. For an explanation of the ISO terms 'trueness', 'precision' and 'accuracy', see below. The values used are simply 10 minus the value for trueness average and precision standard deviation from true.
The overall is the combination of trueness and precision. Repeatability is how consistent a watch is in providing the same value for the same course segment.
Important : Manufacturers do not typically release the type of GPS chipset used, so the information in this table is based the best available data, but it should be treated with caution. Simply taking a GPS watch on a single run does not provide sufficient data to reasonably evaluate its accuracy.
To gather the data for this test I ran the same route repeatedly, recording laps every quarter mile. The course is challenging for GPS, with lots of twists, tree cover, power lines, turn arounds and goes under a bridge.
However, I believe that it's reasonably representative of real-world conditions, and probably less challenging than running in the city with skyscrapers. For this evaluation I'll use the ISO definition of Accuracy as the combination of trueness and precision. We can look at trueness by measuring the average lap length and precision by measuring the standard deviation.
I use the traditional approach to standard deviation variation from mean as well as a modified approach that uses variation from the true value. It is more common in many fields to use "accuracy" to mean closeness to true value and "validity" to mean the combination of accuracy and precision. However, I feel that the meanings used by ISO are closer to the common usage.
If a company sold 'accurate' 12 inch pipes and shipped half of them as 6 inches and half as 18 inches, they would meet the traditional definition of accuracy, but few people would be happy with the product. In addition, I calculate a value for "repeatability", which is a measure of how likely a watch is to give the same distance measurement for a specific course. I calculate the standard deviation for each segment of the course, and then take the average.
A high repeatability score can mask poor accuracy and can convince users they have a good device. The table below shows summary data for each device. The count field is how many measurements I have for that combination of condition and device, with each measurement being a quarter mile distance.
I generally aim for over 1, data points to even out the effects of weather, satellite position and other factors. The Trueness is the absolute of the mean, though nearly all watches tend to read short. The standard deviation is provided based on the variance from the mean and the variance from the known true value. The average pace error is shown to give a sense of how much error you're likely to see in the display of current pace. This is an average error not a worst case. The data shown below is a summary the accuracy based on all the sections.
The "Accuracy Combined " column has an indication of statistical significance compared with the most accurate entry. I expected GPS watches to improve with time, but the opposite appears to be happening.
With the Garmin devices especially, you can see that the older watches generally do far better than the newer ones. I suspect this is due to compromises to get better battery life and smaller packaging and the cost of GPS accuracy. There are various things you will need to do in order to get the level of accuracy I found with Smartphones.
The accuracy of a Footpod is far higher than GPS, as well as more consistent and quicker to react to changes in pace. In practical terms, I've found that I always have to use a Footpod to pace a marathon or for critical speedwork. Trail running tends to be rather harder for a watch to measure accurately. There are far more twists and turns, and for a Footpod your footsteps tend to be uneven.
I realized how bad the problem was when running some mountain bike trails and my GPS watch said I'd only been traveling at walking pace. This prompted me to survey and evaluate the accuracy of various devices on these mountain bike trails.
The table below is preliminary data, but you'll notice how the results are dramatically worse than my usual GPS testing. The interval timer does support the ability to add both warm-up and cool-down portions, as well as to mix rest and work portions such as a distance-based work followed by a time-based recovery.
In this, you can create workouts with all sorts of structures. These structures can include goals like heart rate targets based on distance or time.
This area is divided into three sections: Quick, Race Pace, and Phased. Below is an example of a complex phased workout. Each of the targets then has associated heart rate zones with them. These are then previewed below:.
In my case, for this first phase I selected a warm-up target of any valid heart rate zone, which is why you see the range from 95 to bpm. In its current state the workout functionality is basic compared to other competitors, but functional for many workouts. The M follows in the footsteps of the V and includes a daily activity tracker.
This activity tracker allows you to monitor your daily step count throughout the day, which in turn also feeds into the total calorie expenditure. You can further dive into this information for any day in your history log as well, should you want to look back at some past day and see the breakdown of daily activity versus training log:.
Below is an example of yesterday using the desktop web view:. Meanwhile, the daily activity goal is shown on the left side as broken out into different categories in terms of how you can achieve it.
Overall the activity tracker on the M is good, but not great. Like the V and Polar Loop, the M includes smartphone integration that enables it to upload completed workouts via Bluetooth Smart to your smartphone.
Further, it also allows you to transmit daily activity information like steps, sleep and distance walked to Polar Flow via the mobile app. Regardless of which way you sync the data though, it all ends up on Polar Flow. The M today supports Bluetooth Smart heart rate straps, and in a future firmware update will also support Bluetooth Smart footpods.
On the heart rate side, you can use any Bluetooth Smart HR strap with the unit. However, if you use gym equipment and want to display your heart rate there the H7 strap is the way to go. This includes both current BPM, as well as zone information. All of this is configurable via Polar Flow online:. Note that without the footpod the unit will not gather running cadence information. The M works as a solid day to day watch.
You can set a single alarm, which can be configured as once, daily, or weekday only Monday-Friday :. In addition, you can change the default main screen of the watch to a number of different options, such as including or not including the current activity level:.
In day to day watch mode the unit will get about 20 days of battery life or 8 hours in GPS-on training mode. As noted earlier you can customize data fields for the M through the website not on the device itself. In doing so you can create up to 8 pages of fields, with each page containing up to four pieces of information metrics on them:. Auto laps will show up online afterwards however.
Both options will update the data fields on the unit itself. The easiest method for updating is simply by plugging into your USB port and then loading the Flow Sync software which will then update the watch as seen above. Polar plans to include free updates like the running footpod , but may experiment down the road with being able to buy additional features for a small fee, such as purchasing the Training Load function normally found on the much more pricey Polar V almost three times the cost.
It would allow folks to potentially pickup just the higher end features they want while in a budget GPS watch. As of September 25th, , Polar now supports exporting of workouts from Polar Flow.
For most 3rd party sites that are sport-specific i. TCX, as it offers the broadest compatibility with sensor data. Whack that button, which will then give you a menu option for the type of file to export to.
You can then take this file and load it into a 3rd party application. For the heck of it, I just selected SportTracks online variant. It will not work with 3rd party straps. This is something that Polar has done to hard-code it to their straps only.
Obviously, this is fairly stupid and is just vendor lock-in for no real purpose since all remaining M functions work just fine with any 3rd party straps.
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