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I’ve used this heart rate monitor and app for years. I’ve replaced the battery, always wet the electrodes, have my phone 3 feet away from me, and it constantly disconnects. The app UX feels 10 years old, and I find myself having to Google things to find what I need in the app. Using both these things is so frustrating that I went to repurchase a chest strap and monitor, and discovered it was somewhere around $80, when it performs like something that is $15. I’m honestly better off just guessing my calorie count burned, because of how inaccurate this thing is. I’m a woman, so when I try to wear the strap in the correct spot, it pushes against my sports bra. Rolling up the bottom of my sports bra didn’t seem to help either. I’m writing this review so that you can find another way to track your heart rate during workouts instead of using this product and app that are extremely frustrating to use.

A stable and well-debugged app that syncs well with Strava, which is appreciated, but the display shows too much information at the expense of knowing your current heart rate at a quick glance. The heart rate is not even the most prominent number! Polar is all about HEART RATE, correct? I suggest a home screen that shows nothing but current heart rate, in BIG numbers, color-coded by training zone, and then let the user swipe left to see the other stuff. I do not want to hunt through all this information when I am suffering on a climb and need to immediately back off when I’m overworking. Ditto for the voice guide: make it more useful for the serious athlete: the user must be able to set his own minimum/maximum heart rates for a workout, and have the voice guide alert him when he is above or below them. Again, it is critical to be alerted quickly, so as not to overwork. That is the principal reason athletes use heart rate. We don’t want to hear “you are improving fitness,” for crying out loud! We want to hear “ping! You are over 160!” I get the feeling this app wasn’t even designed by/for serious athletes. Give the data geeks what they seem to want, but keep the home display and voice alerts SIMPLE. If it had the features I ask for above, I would give it five stars.

Pairing can be an issue when Polar H10’s battery is replaced, and the pairing process is confusing. The app requests BT connection, and then the iPhone does, too. So, the device appears to be connected to both. It’s confusing because you don’t know to which device you are connected first, which is vital if you want to connect H10 to the app and an external equipment, such as Bowflex trainer. So, if you are already connected to the trainer, and then you want to connect to the second (the maximum) device, it gets infuriating to determine to which system (that is, iOS or Polar app) you are going to be connected. So you’ll just have to fiddle a lot with all those switches — turning on/off Bluetooth, unpairing H10, restarting the devices. Also, there’s still no native iPad polar app. Lastly, the app is vertical only. Which is ok, but then, the provided colored chart at the bottom is too small to be useful. So, viewing it in a landscape mode would be great.