Polar Vantage 3 and H10 Heartrate Monitor review

Computers & NavigationOther StuffReview

by Hannah Dobson February 9, 2025 1

The Polar Vantage V3 is a hammer to crack a nut for me – it has so many functions that you really want to be on a proper training schedule in order to get the most out of it.

• Brand: Polar
• Product: Vantage V3
• Price: £519 (watch), £86.50 (heartrate monitor – £64.88 if bought with watch)
• From: Polar
• Tested by: Hannah for 4 months
• SQUIRREL_TEXT_13185699

The Polar Vantage 3 Watch

I’d previously written the Polar Grit X review back in 2022, a rugged watch designed for outdoorsy sporting types. This Polar Vantage 3 adds a few bells and whistles to the functions of the Grit X, in a slightly lighter weight and fractionally less robust package (the Vantage is only water rated to 50m, not the 100m of the GritX – hardly an issue unless you’re really into snorkelling). I also got the H10 Heart Rate monitor with the Vantage 3.

The Vantage 3 is, in many respects, very similar to the Grit X that I reviewed previously. The Polar Flow app that works alongside it doesn’t seem to have had any hugely notable updates, and the Grit X that’s now four years old is still working just fine. The Vantage 3 however includes some new sensors, giving you access to blood oxygen levels, overnight temperature, and an ECG read out. I think it’s worth noting again that the Grit X is still working well, and that updates to it and the app haven’t resulted in any annoying obsolescence or slowness over the years. Which is more than you can say for many electronic widgets these days, and perhaps gives some confidence to anyone investing in a watch like this.

Like the Grit X, the Vantage 3 has so many functions and display options that it can be tricky to discover what’s useful to you. There’s a 192 page user manual available as a pdf, or you can use the help function on the Polar website. I’m kind of surprised there’s not some sort of training course or new owners’ retreat you can attend.

The first thing to figure out is how you want your watch to look. There are so many options here – digital, analogue, different colours, different stats – that it’s a bit like trying to pick a ringtone back when phones started offering choices. What’s most noticeable about the Vantage 3 however is that its new AMOLED display is really easy to see, no matter what the light conditions. This was a genuinely useful development, in my opinion. In this picture here, you can see the difference between the Grit X (left) with backlight on, and Vantage 3 in its lowest brightness setting.

You can choose whether to have your watch set so that it’ll always show you the time, or on a more battery saving ‘only when needed’ option. In the ‘only when needed’ option, I found I could easily get the promised 10 days out of the watch without needing to charge it. With the brightness set to low, and a do not disturb setting overnight, I found the even the ‘always on’ display option would still give me a week or so of use before I needed to charge the watch.

The brightest display setting is perhaps most use in the sunniest climes, but I never felt the need to boost the display to that level, even out at Rampage in Utah. Perhaps blinding white snow might make such a bright display necessary?

The watch screen comes on when you lift your wrist in a ‘look at my watch’ motion, or press a button. I have found the lift to wake display somewhat unreliable, and the press-to-look inconvenient when riding along. This puts things in favour of the ‘always on’ display option, despite the extra battery use.

The ‘do not disturb’ function is useful to a point. Between whatever time you set it for, this stops the lift to wake, and turns off the display – so it’s not always on, even when you’ve got it set to ‘always on’. Instead, you need to press a button to see what time it is. It also turns off any notifications – so it won’t buzz if you’ve connected it to your phone, and it won’t give you any inactivity alerts. However, it would be nice if the do not disturb function was a little more tweakable. For example, I’d quite like to turn off alerts but have the time always visible – to me, the slight glow from constantly having the time shown is less disruptive to my sleep than finding a button to check the time, having the full glare of the watch face in my eyes, and then settling back down to sleep as you discover it’s only 4am.

The mapping function is an addition over the Grit X. There’s a basic map pre-loaded onto the watch, and it seems pretty quick to me for it to load up and figure out where you are and display an arrow the way you are facing. It’s detailed enough to see streets, but not paths, and you can zoom in and out using the buttons (not the screen), or scroll along the landscape using the screen. It’s perhaps a handy back up if you’re saving battery on your phone, but if you want to use it for route guidance you need to import it from komoot or Strava first. A bit of extra faff, and given that in any event I don’t want to be looking at my arm as I’m trying to ride along, I haven’t used it for navigation.

On a related note, the compass function seems a menace – it requires a series of movements for calibration which are like a physio workout/contortion if you try to do with the watch on your wrist. And no sooner have you done it, than it asks you to calibrate it again. If you don’t calibrate the compass, you’ll get a blue dot to show your location, without the directional arrow.

The division of labour between buttons and screen is not completely intuitive. Sometimes you expect to swipe or tap but instead you need to use a button. It’s a slightly odd set up, but the more you use a function the more you get used to the quirks of operation.

There’s a fair amount of difference between battery life on the different display options, but however you set it up I still think you get a really decent amount of time between charges. A working week is easily achievable, even when using the watch to record activities. The fact that you don’t need to charge it too often is especially good as the new charging cable seems very particular about where you plug it in. Like the Grit X, it’s a bespoke charger (and no, it’s not the same bespoke charger as for the Grit X), which I hate. I want to be able to plug some sort of standardised cable into my electronics, please. Whereas the Grit X charger had a USB A on the other end, the Vantage 3 charger has a USB C. No plug or adapter is provided. I found that all my USB C plug options would cause the Vantage 3 to charge very slowly – hours and hours and hours. Plugging it into my iPad or official Apple laptop plug proved the fastest, reaching 100% within an hour. Odd, and rather annoying. It’s also pretty easy to knock the Vantage 3 off its little charging port – make sure you set it somewhere safe to charge up so you don’t come back to use it only to find charging has stopped.

I have found the Vantage V3 significantly more comfortable to wear the the Grit X. It’s only a few grams lighter, and ever so slightly larger, yet the difference in comfort is noticeable. I have been able to ride and sleep comfortably with the Vantage V3 on – the weight saving really does make a difference to comfort. Which rather has me wondering: there’s now a new Vantage M3 available, with all the functionality of the V3, but in a slightly smaller (and cheaper) package and at the expense of some battery life. If you don’t do a lot of travelling and wouldn’t find more regular charging annoying, it seems worthy of consideration.

Functions I have found most useful are the weather forecast, inactivity alert, activity counter, sleep monitoring and nightly recharge calculation, boost from sleep, and energy used. The altimeter was entertaining rather than useful – sadly, it is not accurate on a plane.

That said, I’m not that swayed by the extra ‘smart functions’ of the Vantage V3. The ECG doesn’t actually give you any explanation of what it means. The SPO2 blood oxygen test doesn’t seem very accurate to me – I often struggled to get it to do a reading, and sometimes it returned a result that would have had me in hospital had it been accurate. The night time skin temperature doesn’t seem to bear much resemblance to my experience either – I can wake up drenched in menopausal sweat only for my watch to be telling me everything is fine. I sort of wonder if these are first-gen additions which might become more useful in time – perhaps becoming more accurate and offering you a prediction that you’re about to get sick?

Thanks to being more comfortable to wear, I was able to wear the Vantage V3 enough to see more benefit from the sleep analysis. Again, I’m not sure I’d always agree with how much sleep it thinks I’m getting – it seems to over estimate when I’m asleep. Indeed, one morning I was already up and in the kitchen making breakfast when my watch was checking if I was in fact awake already? Despite this, it does seem to do a reasonable job of matching up fatigue with its predictions, which can sometimes act as a useful reminder to take things easy (or, as a demoralising reminder that you’re burning yourself out because you can’t take things easy).

The Polar Flow App

Synching to a phone was most reliable when instigated in the app on the phone rather than at the watch end of things. I spent a time using the watch with an iPhone 12 mini, which proved a lot less keen on synching than a slightly more modern iPhone 12. If you’re an old phone user, you might find this frustrating. Once in the app, you can get a closer analysis of your activities, or look at weekly and monthly patterns – with a choice of display options.

The app offers more adjustments than you can make on the watch. In particular, you can change some of the features or functions according to which sport you are doing. So, you can have speed and compass shown in your mountain bike profile, but not in your road bike option. However, this seems like a deep dive into geekery that bypasses some more useful functions. For example, I ended up using the different cycling options (there’s cycling, electric biking, mountain biking, enduro, hard enduro, mountain bike orienteering, road cycling, road racing) to distinguish between different bikes I was using, rather than the activities. If – like many – you want to use your activity tracking partly to monitor service intervals or wear and tear, it seems like having the option to label your activity by bike used would be more useful.

Another missing function is the ability to edit an activity. If you forget to stop your watch at the end of a ride, there’s no way to remove the hour you record afterwards while you have a shower, eat a piece of toast, and think about cleaning your bike. I can’t help feel like more time spent adding some simple but useful functions to the app would be better than more gizmos on the watch itself.

There are about a zillion other functions, included guided workouts, fitness tests, meditations, reminders to eat and drink as you train… you could go all in, and use it for every aspect of your health and training plan. Or, you can pick and choose a few bits (in which case, you might find on of the other Polar watch offerings leaves you with more cash but fewer functions).

H10 Heart Rate Monitor

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I don’t have a whole lot of experience with heart rate monitors with which to compare this, and certainly nothing modern enough to do any comparisons of readings. But the H10 has connected quickly and easily with a range of apps and devices. As well as the Vantage V3, it’s also connected to Zwift via phone and iPad, and to a Coros bike computer. I’ve had no faff getting it to read my heartrate or connect. None of that wetting and licking sensors I recall from the past. Just put the strap on, and pedal. It’s worked with a range of different bra styles and doesn’t seem too particular about sitting in the exact same square millimetre of skin real estate each time.

It’s comfortable too. There are a few dimples of silicone to keep the strap in place round the back, the front plate is a continuous rubbery strip and the elastic is easily adjustable. The sensor itself is waterproof up to 30m but can be removed from the strap – it attaches using a couple of poppers – if you want to give the strap an intensive wash. The sensor uses a CR2025 battery, which should give you up to 400 hours of training before it needs changing. I’ve not done anything like 400hours of training, so I can’t comment on battery life. But I have appreciated how low-faff it is to connect to Zwift, and find the heart rate feedback very useful when gauging effort.

Overall

The Polar Vantage V3 is probably a bit of a hammer to crack a nut where I’m concerned – it has so many functions that you really want to be on a proper training schedule (and actually using all the data that it gathers) in order to get the most out of it. I’d also like to see the app given some attention to make the functionality a little simpler. But, the AMOLED display is excellent, and I’d definitely be looking for that feature in any watch I was buying. The battery life is also really, really good. And it’s comfortable enough to wear all the time. Whether you go for the Vantage V3 or one of the other Polar line up may depend on how much you want the potential range of functions this watch offers. However, I really like the Polar H10 Heart Rate monitor. The lack of faff or discomfort and its willingness to connect up to a range of devices gets it my vote, whether you’re going for the accompanying watch or not.

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Review Info

Hannah Dobson

Managing Editor

I came to Singletrack having decided there must be more to life than meetings. I like all bikes, but especially unusual ones. More than bikes, I like what bikes do. I think that they link people and places; that cycling creates a connection between us and our environment; bikes create communities; deliver freedom; bring joy; and improve fitness. They're environmentally friendly and create friendly environments. I try to write about all these things in the hope that others might discover the joy of bikes too.

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