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Irish Mirror

Lifestyle

Mark Kavanagh

Polar Ignite 3 review: Stylish sports watch with an array of useful tracking and data analysis

Polar (Organization) Garmin Apple GPS

Polar Ignite 3 is a stylish 43mm fitness watch with a gorgeous AMOLED touchscreen display and dual band GNSS among its big selling points.

The latter feature is only on a handful of smartwatches from Apple, Garmin, COROS and Huawei and it’s not on Polar’s current flagship Vantage 2.

The AMOLED display is the first on a Polar wearable and looks stunning. It has Gorilla Glass 3 protection, which is not the latest version.

Its glossy gently curved edges hide the relatively slim bezels well.

You can choose from three backlight brightness settings, and you will need the brightest option when using it in outdoor sunlight.

The watch feels great on your wrist too; it’s so light and comfortable to wear.

My review was the Night Black, but it’s also available in Greige Sand, Purple Dusk and Brown Copper.

Polar Ignite 3 key features

Ignite 3’s clever features include Sleepwise, which analyses your sleep and lets you know how it will affect your alertness for the day ahead. You need to capture at least five nights’ sleep within the last seven days to get these forecasts.

You also get voice guidance during your workouts, with real-time feedback and metrics on your workouts during activity.

Watch faces and the data they display (known as complications) are all fully customisable.

You can mirror the notifications from your smartphone, and you can control the music playing on your phone on the watch and that works well.

But there is no onboard storage or third-party app support, so if you want music while you run then you will need to take your phone out.

Navigation of Ignite 3’s menus and functions is primarily done through the touchscreen interface, but there is a single physical button too (which brings you back to the home screen).

The interface is generally quite smooth but sometimes swiping up or down does not always generate the zippy response you get from other smartwatches.

It’s a 192Mhz CPU, incidentally, with 5MB of RAM.

Perhaps a firmware update can improve the lag issues.

Health and fitness

Polar Ignite 3 supports more than 150 sports profiles but it only stores about 20 of these on the watch – the rest you can access through the free companion app, Polar Flow.

The watch and app give you incredibly detailed insights into your performance (such as the firm’s Training Load Pro and Energy Sources).

A neat feature called FitSpark gives you suggested workouts from one of three categories: Strength, Cardio or Supportive (Stretching/Core).

You can pair the watch up with an external heart rate monitor to improve that accuracy.

I compared Ignite 3 to several other fitness watches and found the heart rate monitoring was excellent, but the GPS tracking did not match the accuracy of the likes of Garmin Fenix 7 or COROS Vertix 2.

There is a back-to-start mode which is a basic but useful navigation support.

Battery life is a plus point.

In basic mode, you can get up to five days of activity tracking with continuous heart rate monitoring and phone notifications turned on. This decreases to two days if the always on display is turned on.

In GPS training mode you can get up to 30 hours continuous training with single-frequency GPS (power save) and optical heart rate or 21 hours with dual-frequency GPS (which delivers more accuracy).

You can’t use Ignite 3 for making contactless payments which for me is a big downside and there is no smart assistant support.