A recharge score also provides a handy way of showing just how effective your night of snoozing was in terms of helping your recovery. On the flip side, the sleep tracking is decent too, outlining the different stages of sleep you’ve achieved each night. This can include your sleep quality, calories burned, and steps walked, as well as the Black Mark of Shame – a mark on the wheel that shows if you’ve been inactive for an entire hour. Each day, the Polar Flow app serves up a sort of pie chart which fills up throughout the day, depending on what you’ve achieved. The Unite’s occupied with easing you into being more active while keeping tabs on your exercises, fitness levels and sleep. Instead, you can track other miscellaneous workouts with the ‘other indoor/outdoor’ options. In addition to the lack of GPS, the Unite also won’t get the plethora of specific tracking options for other activities such as weightlifting and boxing, to name a few examples.

The accuracy of this method will depend on your smartphone, as they’re all different.Ĭompared to our reference Garmin quatix 6x Solar (a high-end smartwatch), the Unite was around a thousand steps more generous a day on average. There’s no built-in GPS, so you’ll need your phone with you if you want to track your walking, running and cycling routes. It’s a good thing the Polar Flow app is so well polished, as we’d definitely recommend sifting through your stats on your smartphone, rather than fiddling around on the Unite’s screen.Īs mentioned before, this isn’t a device for hardcore athletes or stat fiends. The well-placed physical button helps things somewhat, letting you make selections, end workouts and return to the main screen, to name a few examples, but swiping through different options is still a chore, thanks to the poor responsiveness of the display. It’s by no means a dealbreaker, but combined with the fact that the display quite often fails to turn on on the first wrist flick, further adds to our frustrations. Not only that, but there’s a small delay in the auto-wake feature when raising your wrist to kick the screen into action. The Unite’s screen is frequently unresponsive and quite laggy, making for a rather frustrating user experience. Visuals aside, we were quite disappointed by the performance on offer.

The resolution leaves a little to be desired though, with visible pixels and slightly jagged edges if you pay close enough attention. What it lacks in aesthetics, it makes up in brightness, and we had no problems making anything out, even in the midst of a blindingly hot July heatwave. Surrounded by a gargantuan bezel and a flat base, it’s definitely not the prettiest wrist-mounted display we’ve laid eyes on, but that’s understandable at this price point. Shifting over to the business end of things, we have the screen.

Polar unite sl