Hi Chris and others here. Thanks very much for offering such direct interaction with V800 users. I'm primarily a trail runner and have had a sequence of Polar HRMs (625x, RS800) over the years. I just picked up a V800 (after a short 1-week flirtation with a Garmin 620 that I was unsatisfied with) and in the short time I've had it, it seems pretty great. My primary use is for tracking heart rate, pace/distance and elevation gain during trail runs. GPS-based systems have never worked well for me because I'm usually running in the forest. I have had very good results over the years with the foot pods associated with the 625x and the RS800 (good accuracy after calibration, even over highly variable trail terrain) and the barometric altimeter accuracy, so I'm optimistic about using the V800 and the Bluetooth Stride Sensor (plus taking advantage of all the benefits of the V800 over my previous devices, like GPS tracking for my road runs, seamless syncing with my computer and phone, much improved display, vastly better buttons, etc.).
I have a few questions that have come up in my use of the V800 to date:
1) Am I missing something or is it impossible to set a pace-based intensity target in a "Phased" training plan? This is not an unusual thing to do for, say, an interval session (e.g. warm up, then run X intervals at Y pace with some amount of recovery time between each, then cool down). It appears as though the only intensity target that is possible is a heart rate range... I could manually select a "Race Pace" training plan and sort of accomplish this, but then I'd have to constantly be starting and stopping things, manually timing the recovery break, etc. etc., which kind of defeats the purpose of being able to program a full workout into the watch. Since the pace guidance capability is clearly there in the watch (Race Pace) it seems like an easy addition to the options for the Phased training plans as well. Is this something that's on the radar for the V800 and/or Flow teams?
2) Because of my primary use case detailed above (trail running with variable GPS coverage) I strongly prefer to use the stride sensor for distance/pace information, which is thankfully exactly what the V800 does right now. I was also thrilled to see that even when the foot pod is being used for distance/pace, the GPS location information is still recorded - that is quite different than the Garmin 620 I experimented with, which would only use its foot pod for speed/distance if GPS was unavailable or disabled, in which case there was no recording of GPS location or elevation info. My request to Polar is that if you do change it so that GPS can be used for pace/distance even when a foot pod is present (as many others in this thread have requested), PLEASE MAKE IT A USER-SELECTABLE OPTION! Changing it to operate like the Garmin 620 does (where GPS is always preferred if present/active) would make the V800 useless for me.
3) The automatic calibration of the altimeter and stride sensor is very opaque right now. Neither the manual or any of the FAQs I've been able to find provide any useful information on how these two functions work, and there certainly is a lot of confusion and mixed results being reported. I think a lot of this confusion and use issues might be alleviated by publishing more detail on how these processes work. Some specific things that it would help to know:
- What is the watch doing when it says "altitude calibrating" (which seems to take quite a while sometimes) when I start an activity? Is it waiting for a GPS lock of a certain minimum vertical resolution to use as a barometric altimeter calibration?
- While I'm waiting for altitude calibration to complete, is the watch recording my elevation gain?
- For the stride sensor, how does it perform auto calibration exactly? Does it look at GPS data and compare that to stride sensor readings to come up with a calibration factor? If so, then it would be critical to perform the initial auto calibration runs in a location with excellent GPS coverage (i.e. not in the forest where most of my runs occur).
- Does auto calibration of the stride sensor occur over some initial period of use of the V800 or a new sensor (first X miles run, or first Y minutes run, ???) or is the V800 constantly "auto calibrating" and consequently making adjustments that could affect the comparability of different runs?
- What happens if you manually calibrate the stride sensor and then (intentionally or otherwise) put it back on auto calibrate? Does it start with a baseline of the previous manually entered value or start "from scratch" with a 1.00 calibration factor? Does auto-calibration "reset" any time you switch from manual to automatic?
- Is the calibration factor (manually set or auto-generated) specific to each exercise type? I can test this one pretty easily but haven't had a chance to yet. If it is specific to each exercise type, that would be an easy way to work around the issues some in this thread have reported with having to change their calibration factor when switching shoes (something I've never had to do BTW, at least with previous Polar foot pods) - you could set up a different "exercise type" that correlated to each shoe.
Those are the main questions/requests that I have. My apologies if any have already been answered; I read through all 11 pages of this thread but there's a lot there to digest.
Overall I really do think this is a great device - the polish of the watch user interface and the clarity of the screen alone show a lot of attention to detail in the design process that I think the other sports watch manufacturers are clueless about. I am eager/hopeful for the improvements and enhancements to functionality that will come with firmware updates. Thanks again for your participation in this forum.
-John
P.S. One more to add after today's run: as others have noted, the Ascent for an activity (at least running activities, don't know about others) as reported in the Polar Flow web site does not match what the V800 or the iOS Polar Flow app report - the web site shows more than 3x what the watch and the mobile app show. I suspect that the web site is incorrectly interpreting the units (i.e. my watch says I had 600 feet of ascent, the web site reports it as 2001 feet, which may have been a result of incorrectly converting 600 *meters* to feet...). Descent has the same issue.