For the last few years we鈥檝e had to make a choice: Do we want a fully-featured sports watch with one or two smartwatch features, or do we want a real smartwatch that gives a light nod to athletes?聽We haven鈥檛 seen any that truly marries聽the two鈥攗ntill now, with聽.
Let鈥檚 talk sports features first. It has built-in GPS (A-GPS and Glonass) for fast,聽accurate satellite acquisition. That means you don鈥檛 need your phone with you if you want to use it as a running watch. It鈥檚 waterproof to 33 feet (10 meters). It has a built-in wrist-based heart rate monitor with six LEDs, so you don鈥檛 need a chest strap, and it will help you stay in the heart-rate zone you want. You can use it to track a wide array of activities, and it even offers adaptive training programs for running depending on where you are and what distance race you want to run. It can help you manage recovery time, too.
That鈥檚 pretty good right there, but the watch also runs the Android Wear operating system, making it a full on smartwatch. It鈥檚 compatible with phones running Android 4.3 or higher and with the iPhone 5 and up (running iOS 8.2 or higher). It features a 1.3-inch, 240-by-240 pixel display covered in scratch-resistant Gorilla Glass 3. It has 4GB of built in storage, so you can load music onto the device and run with Bluetooth headphones, sans phone. It also has more than 4,000 apps that work with, and it responds to voice commands for all your Siri-like questions and commands (Google just calls it 鈥淰oice Search鈥). For those who have never used it, Android Wear is about on par with Apple Watch in terms of functionality and ease of use, which is to say it鈥檚 not perfect, but it鈥檚 pretty damn good.
The M600 also has all of the 24-hour a day activity tracking you鈥檇 want from a Fitbit-type device. It tracks activity levels, steps, calories burned, and gives you alerts if you鈥檝e been inactive for too long. It can automatically track the duration and quality of your sleep, too. Polar claims the battery will last two days when paired with an Android phone or for one day if paired with an iPhone (similar to Apple Watch longevity). It should be good for eight hours of GPS-based training.
It all sounds pretty sweet, and for $330,聽it鈥檚 twenty bucks cheaper than the entry-level Apple Watch. The waterproof factor alone makes it a lot tougher than the Apple Watch and tougher than most Android Wear watches, too (though surfers and snowboarders may still want to take a look at the ). We haven鈥檛 tested the M600 yet, but if it can deliver on its promises it will be the best sportswatch/smartwatch combo yet.
It could also herald a very interesting future. Because Android Wear is open-source,聽we could see it emerge as the go-to OS for sports watches going forward. That鈥檚 exactly what Google has done with Android for phones and tablets. Again, it鈥檚 not perfect, but it鈥檚 certainly a whole lot better than what companies like Fitbit, Garmin, and TomTom try to pass off as smartwatch features.聽I say bring it on.
Brent Rose is a freelance writer and regular 国产吃瓜黑料 contributor. He is currently traveling the U.S. living in a high tech van, looking for stories to tell. Follow his adventures on聽Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and