About a month after racing through the FCC website, Polar’s new fitness tracker is official. The Polar Loop 2 looks a lot like the wearable activity tracker Polar launched a few years ago but it packs a few new features.
For example, the Polar Loop 2 can display notifications from your phone or vibrate to alert you to incoming calls or messages.
The notifications are displayed on the screen using a series of 85 low-power LED lights, so you won’t be able to read more than a word or so at a time. But it can at least give you an idea of who’s making your phone ring.
Other features include ability to track your steps, distance, and sleep patterns and sync your data with a smartphone app. Th Polar Loop 2 will be available in black, white, or pink, features a waterproof design, and should get moderately longer battery life than the original Polar Loop, with up to 8 days of run time on a charge.
The new model is available now in pink or white. The black model should be available in September.
via Engadget
Don’t get it. For just $30 more, you can get the FitBit ChargeHR that also has continuous heart rate monitoring, as well as an actual watch that displays the time and day on the dial. In addition, it has a decent app and dashboard giving you metrics on the data it collects. The Polar website doesn’t highlight the app and dashboard part at all, and leaves you wondering what you’ll be able to see/do with the data.
As an aside, I can definitely tell it’s not a US-based company — because the English language website has screen-shots of the app, but they are all in Finnish! Go to the “Polar Ecosystem” section and it’s to the right of the headline “Polar Flow web service and app”.