Two years in, a solid performer with room for an update

A fitness-focused wearable is only as good as the consistency of its sensors, the ease of use of the fitness data it captures, and the actionable information it provides based on those two features. In that regard, the Polar Ignite 3 is a powerful tool for helping you live your healthiest life. At its price point and with its feature set, I think it’s tailor-made for a very specific user, but two years into its life cycle, there may be better options for some shoppers.

Price, availability, and specs

Launched in November 2022, the Polar Ignite 3 is available from Polar.com and Amazon for $340. It goes on sale regularly, with the lowest recent sale price being $250 in January 2024. The Polar Ignite 1 was first released in June 2019, followed by the Ignite 2 in April 2021, so I have to wonder if we’ll see a Polar Ignite 4 this year.

What I like about the Polar Ignite 3

Ignite your fitness journey’s intensity

I have a Polar H10 chest strap and use it to validate the quality of the heart rate sensors in many of the smartwatches and fitness trackers I review. Its strengths are rock-solid reliability, great battery life, and accuracy. The Polar Ignite 3 fitness and wellness watch is no different; I’ll give it that upfront. But there’s a reason why it isn’t called a “smartwatch,” and we’ll get into that in the next section.

The Polar Ignite 3 gets a lot of things right! It looks great, and I even like the buckle and tuck band that it comes with. Generally, I’m not too fond of any band that requires a tuck, but this one is comfortable enough to wear until I can buy a more breathable replacement. The 1.2-inch AMOLED display is bright and vibrant, and even a monochrome workout stats screen pops up during training sessions, giving the watch enhanced readability outdoors in cloudless sunlight.

The screen is Gorilla Glass, the bezel is stainless steel, and though the case is plastic, the watch doesn’t feel cheap. It does feel quite light and is comfortable to wear to bed.

The design of the watch’s underside is thoughtful. While almost all fitness watches and bands’ sensor arrays create a bump on the bottom, the Ignite 3’s array isn’t noticeable and has yet to leave a mark on my arm when worn snugly against my wrist during training.

In my testing, the heart rate monitor on the Ignite 3 has been reliable. It even keeps up with sudden changes in heart rate during interval runs, something that some watches and bands struggle with. That reliability is important because it feeds excellent information about your workout metrics, recovery, sleep tracking, and FitSpark recommendations based on an aggregate of all that data. You can look at that data directly on the watch, dig deeper in the Polar Flow app (shown in the grid below), or go down the rabbit hole by viewing a much deeper dive on the Polar Flow web portal.

The centerpiece of Polar Ignite 3 is the SleepWise feature. Based on your sleep amount, quality, timing, and circadian rhythm, SleepWise provides you with a forecast of your alertness levels hourly for the day after waking. Translation: It tells you when you’ll be the most alert, energized, and ready to get a good workout, and this forecast was fairly accurate.

There are so many metrics the watch and the Polar Flow app provide that we could do a much longer deep dive piece on that alone, but the other features I found very useful were the Cardio Load and NIghtly Recharge analytics.

Training Load Pro, as it sounds, provides graphs showing how much of a strain a cardio or weight training session had on your body. You get two metrics for this and graphed data: Cardio load and Perceived Load. You measure and quantify the latter in the Flow mobile app using the time-tested RPE or Rate of Perceived Exertion subjective metric. Training Load Pro is really what you need to understand your progress over time and continue to make the necessary adjustments to future training sessions to keep making progress on your fitness journey.

A critical aspect of increasing your V02 Max is training in the proper heart rate zones and adjusting those zones as your heart strengthens. The Ignite 3 places those zones front and center on the display while you exercise, and when you go into the Sport profiles section of the Polar Flow mobile app, you can use the default heart rate zones or set your own custom zones as your fitness level increases or if you get your V02 max professionally assessed and want to set your zones based on that.

The watch and app support are top-tier, even down to the ability to customize the data shown on the watch during training (image gallery above). When not training, I appreciate the information density of the watch faces so I can see which information is most important to me, all at once, at a glance.

I’m impressed with quite a few aspects of this fitness-focused watch and data experience, especially the fact that you don’t need to pay for a subscription to get the most out of the data and insights Polar Flow provides.

What I don’t like about the Polar Ignite 3

Consistency matters most, but…

The Polar Ignite 3 has been on the market for around two years. In that time, fitness bands and fitness-focused watches have launched with Tap to Pay, onboard music storage, and the ability to connect to Bluetooth earbuds and headphones. That’s a tough act to follow. With its dual-frequency GPS, you don’t need your phone. But if you need music to help keep your training session intensity up, you’re right back to square one, needing your phone.

Speaking of GPS, the watch has dual-frequency GPS for better accuracy, and for the most part, it’s fairly accurate. I tested it in the urban jungle of Downtown Los Angeles amid the iron giants — the skyscrapers — and compared to the Apple Watch Ultra, which had me on the sidewalks most of the time, the dual-frequency GPS data from the Ignite 3 showed me inside buildings at times instead of on the sidewalk, as you can see in the images in the gallery.

There are some other things you should be aware of. The watch interface does have a bit of lag to it. It isn’t as snappy as some wearables at this price point. This watch is incredibly thin and light, but I’d like to have a bit more energy in the haptic engine responsible for the vibration-based notification system on the watch. It doesn’t have a speaker, so no audible alerts. The vibrations work for me, but it could be an issue for heavier sleepers who may rely on the watch alarms to wake them in the morning.

There are some other things you should be aware of. The watch interface does have a bit of lag to it. It isn’t as snappy as some wearables at this price point. This watch is incredibly thin and light, but I’d like to have a bit more energy in the haptic engine responsible for the vibration-based notification system on the watch. It doesn’t have a speaker, so no audible alerts. The vibrations work for me, but it could be an issue for heavier sleepers who may rely on the watch alarms to wake them in the morning.

I’ve been getting around four days of battery life, which is great for a full-fledged smartwatch, but some of the fitness or running-focused watches in this price point have much more stamina.

“Sleepwalking” is what I call it when a fitness wearable gives false steps when sleeping or sitting at a desk. The Polar Ignite 3’s heart rate monitoring is dead on, but its step counting can be off a bit. I tested steps with a click counter in hand, measuring 3687 steps during one afternoon’s brisk two-mile walk.

The Apple Watch Ultra was off by around 33 steps, which I would partially chalk up to errant clicking. The Ignite 3 was off by 131 steps. I retested another day, and the Ignite 3 was still off by several steps. Regarding sleepwalking during my sleeping hours, the watch was excellent, registering no false steps, but sitting at my desk, it registered up to 40 steps while seated. Remember, most of these fitness bands and watches measure “steps” by measuring arm swings, along with an algorithm that helps interpret those arm swings to estimate steps.

The Polar Ignite 3 does not have wireless charging. It uses a proprietary charger that connects via magnets and pogo pins. But with the battery lasting four days and charging rapidly via a wired connection, this isn’t a big deal.

Ultimately, a fitness tracker is about trends and not precise data. It is not a medical-grade device, so your expectations should be for consistency and actionable data/insights, so this “Sleepwalking” and misstep counting are not a dealbreaker. For comparison, Google’s Pixel Watch 2 was also off by quite a few steps when I tested it.

Should you buy it?

It’s totally okay to not want a full-fledged smartwatch

The Polar Ignite 3 and Polar Flow app are excellent tools for being the healthiest version of yourself possible. With one caveat: the watch-to-phone connection isn’t very robust. You can see notifications from your phone but can’t act on them from the watch.

You can’t respond to text messages or take phone calls directly from the watch, making this a fitness-focused wearable, not a smartwatch. And that’s okay because not everyone wants a mini-smartphone on their wrists. If that’s you, a device like this may be just what you’re looking for.

That said, for $340, there are more capable smartwatches that will give you all of what the Ignite 3 offers and more. Google’s Pixel Watch 2 and Samsung’s Galaxy Watch 7 are prime examples. Then there’s the Fitbit Charge 6, which is only $160 and has a comparable companion app and similar features, though it does look like a fitness band rather than a traditional watch.