After teasing this launch for a while, Polar has finally announced today the launch of its two new GPS running (and triathlong) watches: the Vantage M and Vantage V.

The Vantage V is the higher-end of these watches, retailing for $549, while the Vantage M is the mid-range option retailing for $279.

Both watches come with Polar’s brand new “Polar Precision Prime” wrist heart rate monitor, which combines optical heart rate measurement with skin contact measurement in order to rule out any motion artifacts that might disturb the heart rate signal and produce unreliable readings.

Since I have been training with the Polar M600 I was waiting for Polar to release something new.

Polar Vantage V

These are the main unique points of the Vantage V:

• Polar Precision Prime: new and improved wrist heart rate sensor
• Training Load Pro: quantifies the strain of your training session and see how you are recovering
• Running Index: provides an extimation of your VO2Max
• Running Program: allows you to train using Polar’s pre-determined training plans or to upload/modify your own
• Running Power: the first wrist watch to provide running power without using pods or other devices
• Sport profiles: the Vantage allows you to track 130 different sport activities
• Swimming metrics: automatically detects your heart rate, swimming style, distance, pace, strokes and rest times. Distance and strokes get tracked also in open water swimming
• Battery life: an announced 40 hours of GPS and HR rate tracking

Polar Vantage M

The cheaper Vantage M has these differences:

• No barometric altimeter
• No native running power, even though you can still get this data adding sensors
• Battery life from 40h to 30h
• No touch screen

Want to know more ?

The news of this release is very new – so we don’t have much information at our disposal right now. We are definitely buying them both and putting them through the paces for a while (we are testing/reviewing a LOT of GPS watches lately, stay tuned…).

Keep following us for the full review on these two units!