POLAR F6 Men's Heart Rate Monitor Watch (Black Coal)

I always knew that I should be hitting 65% to 85% of my maximum heart rate while exercising, and I knew that I was sometimes, but this little gadget showed me how far off the mark I was. I had to double my cardio workouts in order to get into the zone where I needed to be to lose weight. Now, I am seeing real results. That knowledge alone was worth the price. Most of us overestimate how hard we work out, spend a lot of time at the gym, and then get frustrated at the lack of results. With this gadget I am able to make my workouts effective not just long and energy consuming.The features on the A5 model are numerous enough to make this a great toy, and few enough as not to make it too complicated. This model is reccomended by Polar as one for for people looking to lose weight and increase overall fitness. This is not a model for the serious "data junkie" who wants to store all of their workout data in a spreadsheet. I don't think that this is a model for cyclists either. This is a model for someone who wants to know how many calories they've burned, time in their target workout zone, BMI, % of maximum heart rate being reached, and heart rate. You can also perform a fitness test with this model, and that is an interesting feature.This model comes with a transmitter. The product specifications were not clear about whether or not it came with one. I was confused about that, and ended up purchasing an extra, albiet better, transmitter. The transmitter that came with the A5 does not look comfy, the front part that goes over your chest is made of flexible rubber and the back part is a fabric strap. The extra one that I ordered (for $45) is a totally fabric model called the WearLink, that has one small plastic piece in the front. So, I would suggest you buy a more comfortable mostly fabric transmitter, if you plan to wear it alot.

Worthless. Half the time it doesn't work -- picks up other monitors, or doubles your heart rate, or doesn't show one, or shows a ridiculously low one. Nice, when it works, but completely unreliable. Don't waste your money.

So, I bought this watch originally thinking it would monitor my heart rate on command. Big mistake. It doesn't work at all without the strap. At first I was very disappointed by this fact. Now my thinking has come around 180 degrees. It turns out that the chest strap is the finest thing in life since sliced bread. All of your better quality gym equipment support the strap. Devices such as the LeMond bikes and the LifeFitness Elliptical crosstrainers will all lock onto that short wave signal and report your heart rate accurately, at all times, regardless of whether you hold the grips or not. That is a great and wonderful thing. It is a pain to cling to the grips, and they are not particularly accurate heart rate monitors in the first place.The watch turns out to be a sizable disappointment. The LCD numbers are way too small when they could be much larger. Get rid of the animation. Give us big numbers. The backlight is horrible. You won't be able to read the time or the numbers in a dim environment (say a movie theater). You have to click too many buttons to get into a workout recording mode, and you have to click too many buttons to break out of it.This watch suffers from computer confirmation syndrome (CCS). CCS is a type of Tourette Syndrome that greatly afflicts the minds of software engineers everywhere. You should not ask twice if the user really, really, really wants to begin or really, really, really wants to stop. The interface needs a major redesign. It should become like a stop watch. 1 click starts the count. 1 click stops the count. Fire your software designers and your software engineers. Get new ones. Death to CCS.There is another important flaw. The watch attempts to give you a calorie count. This figure inaccurate and disagrees with the exercise machine's calorie count if you compare the two numbers. The watch is wrong. The machine is right. The machine is in a better position to know what you are doing because it can calculate the wattage you are expending. The watch knows nothing of the resistance level you are currently fighting. It cannot know the wattage level your are expending.I would highly recommend that you buy the strap and not the watch.

So, I purchased the F6 in October of 2006. I use it for cycling and on aerobic machines and it really works great. No complaints about performanace at all and it does a nice job of tracking exercise. I paid $99.95 for the product, which seemed sorta high, but I wanted a reliable product from a good name. Well...in August 2007, the transmitter stopped working. Despite the "2 year" warranty stated above, that does not cover batteries, which apparently was the transmitter problem. So, I sent it back to Polar to fix it...but they can't fix it, they can only replace it. All said, it cost me $52 plus my shipping costs to fix. The "replacement" was clearly not new. I'm not sure if it was mine, but it definitely was not new. So, in less than a year, I've had to shell out about $160 and, if the battery dies again six months from now, I guess I'll have to go through this again. I would not but another Polar product.