Polar Vantage M VS Forerunner 235

The FR 235 is a solid running watch with other functions.

However for cycling and other activities you might prefer the Vantage M.

Love the 235. Have been using it for 2 years.

If you are a hard core HR monitor user, get the chest strap because the wrist sensor can be all over the place.

Other than that it's a great watch. Picks up satellite immediately, even in big building canyons.

I have a FR 235. It's great for running, it does have a cycling option but I've never used it.

My only complaint with it is the sleep monitor, it's overall useless compared to a fitbit. However, the sleep monitor really doesn't matter much at the end of the day, it's just kind of fun to look at.

235 is the best buy on the market right now. Garmin has a great UI and it's very easy to use for all types of running.

Polar's "Flow" website where you have to set up preferences and your watch is a bit more clunky and not as streamlined. I like the Vantage series, but I've had issues with both the M and V when comparing GPS distance and pace readings to other watches like Garmin and Apple Watch.

I sold my Garmin after using the Polar Vantage. I find polar flow's information more actionable and useful than Garmin Connect. This is a big thing to say since I've used Garmin exclusively since 2011 until switching to Polar only recently.

Both do the job on the whole. I have both.

HR on the wrist is suspect and the Vantage needs work on the GPS.

Flow is better than Connect for run analysis.

Both are good for season/workout planning and complex workout creation.

Vantage is better than 235 for bike eqpt compatibility BUT needs one or two more power metrics adding.

Vantage has a better battery

BUT the killer is that the Vantage M has no AUDIO alerts (although you can just about hear the vibrate alert on it) For audio alerts you need the Vantage V which has a better overall construction quality than either the 235 or M (and recovery metrics.)

best

the5krunner.com

Love the looks of the vantage M and the battery life at 30 hours with 1 sec recording is crazy. While running, can you make the screen a white background with black letters? Can't believe it doesn't have audio alerts. That is a killer.

Wow, eight posts deep on a GPS watch thread and no one's told us yet about the DC RainMan and his awesome website that is the absolute authority on running watches. If you don't watch one of his eighteen minute review videos before making a purchase, you're just pissing your money away.

I bought one of the FR watches (don't remember which one but I paid about $2-300 with tax) for my high schoolers a couple of years back. The investment made sense for us because our kids run together and they all got to use it. Cool features but after a while the little technological not-quite-there-yet gets to be annoying. We now use it as a $20 stopwatch.

The highlight of the entire experience was the product research and the hope/expectation that we would have access to data that we did not have before. Well, if GPS is only occasional and HRM is all over the place, that exciting new data is useless.

I've had a Garmin 235 for about 3 years now and been very happy with it for running. The GPS accuracy is excellent. I can customize the readout to what I want to see. Like all wrist heart monitors it still is questionable on HR data about 25% of the time. I hope someone figures out how to improve that technology because I don't care enough/ am too lazy to wear a chest strap.

I was a long time Garmin user but not anymore as I wanted BT Smart compatibility. So after some other watches I bought Polar M430 and hating it changing it to Vantage M. Some points from my initial months of experience, hope it's useful.

1. Wrist based HR is working properly only when it's neither cold nor very humid (or both). OR, when pushing hard. This could be due to my individual characteristics, but some support mails from Polar confirm it's a general issue. So I need a chest strap for any runs where I'm going above easy pace effort.

2. The black background is OK in daylight only. At night it's pretty much useless if you don't either push light button (good backlight but annoying in the middle of a hard interval) or raise the arm - but then the backlight is very weak and it takes 2 seconds for the watch to react. So no good functionality here.

Polar should release a white background setting immediately.

And/or release a "permanent backlight" function (as has the cheaper M430).

3. The watch lacks some basic functionality for advanced sessions such as the possibility to move to next session phase manually. Now if you set up e.g. 30 mins warm up for transport and warm up drills but end up ready after 20, you need to stand still waiting for 10 minutes. This is REALLY annoying as it's often not known how long time it will take to get to the track etc. (Again and stragely, the cheap M430 has this ability.)

4. The GPS is really weak, as already mentioned above in thread. I often get a 3% deviation (less). Polar confirms the GPS is significantly weaker than the Vantage V. It underreports even when I use it for bike sessions where - during my commute - I bike on really straight good roads for a long while. Strange.

5. The indoor distance measurement is a disaster. For me it underreports with 15% distance.

Other than that, the Vantage M looks great, feels really good to wear (very nice wrist band) and syncs quicker and more stable than most. Battery life is also good.

I'm overall OK with the Vantage especially as most of my concerns can be fixed with software releases (maybe even some GPS correction). But Polar needs to get their act together before long if I'm not ending up dumping this as well on the second hand market, moving back to Garmin.

Left me with...imagine that algorithm-driven data is actually predicting my training load, recovery and "should you train or not today" recommendations based on that data, if I was to listen to it.

You have a plan all set up and planned a training for a given day. After waking up your watch is telling you, you'd better take a rest day. Are there people actually doing that? If not, why should you invest in it? If yes...I hope the algorithm is correct.

As a Vantage M owner I’d say get the FR235. The GPS is a disaster. Yes, the HR reader is good but if you know what you are doing and have been running for a while I don’t think you really need it and the associated metrics on Flow. Also you can’t use a foot pod to improve GPS accuracy because it won’t give you a map/other metrics afterwards as you have to disable the Vantage’s GPS. Really a disappointment.