Update from the tech world
It looks good and it works great – just what you need to motivate yourself
IT MIGHT bear a striking resemblance to its predecessor, the A360, but Polar has tweaked the popular old model and perfected it. The A370 does everything the A360 did, of course – it tracks your steps, calories burnt, heart rate during workouts and sleep.
It’s a beautifully designed tracker that looks as good on your wrist in the office as it does in the gym – so fitness fans who don’t like Polar’s bulky higher-end trackers will love the simplicity.
Despite its relatively compact size, the touch-screen display is large, bright and colourful enough to allow you to see your stats at a glance – simply tilt your wrist to “wake” the screen.
As with previous versions the data the tracker collects over the course of the day syncs up to the easy-to-understand Polar Flow app, which you can download to your smartphone or use on your PC.
Flow compiles the info into colourful pie charts and graphs to give you daily, weekly and monthly overviews of your activities.
Polar has managed to pack in an extra punch or two under the hood of this waterproof wrist-based tracker. The biggest change is continuous heart-rate tracking, which means the A370 can do plenty the first- generation model couldn’t: track outdoor runs or cycling distance and speed, give you heart-rate based insights into your activities and give you a far more in-depth look at your sleep patterns.
Another change that drastically improves the experience is the strap. Instead of a flimsy, clip-in clasp, the A370 now has a sturdy, watch-like strap, making it easier to put on – and keep on during rigorous workouts.
As for the workouts themselves, the A370 performs better than most wristbased devices when tracking training. When you perform functional movements that have you moving your arms around, other wrist-based trackers are prone to losing accuracy even if strapped on tightly.
Overall, the A370 is a great all-rounder – the perfect marriage of form and function.
At the time of going to print the A370 retailed at R2 750.