Polar F11 Women's Heart Rate Monitor Watch (Blue Glow, New Design)

I've had my Polar F11 for one month now and absolutely love it. It's worked beautifully and it has so many features that I'm still learning my way around. I was a little unsure about wearing a chest strap while working out, but once I get it in place I don't even know it's there. This has been a tremendous aid in keeping up with my workout sessions, time in each and number of calories burned.

I've owned this product for over two years.

The functionality is nice but reliability is a major issue.

I really like the fitness program. You can set your weekly goals and at the end of the week if you have met your goals you get a trophee displayed on the watche's "home page" (the default time display). This is a nice motivator.

When I exercise I want to see in one screen the %beat rate (%BPM), the time (clock) and the calories spent so far and you do have this option, although you do need to fiddle with the watch using a rather non-intuitive combination of button punching.

After a year or so I found out that you can lock the buttons and that's very handy since the buttons got pressed often in my gymbag, getting me into all kind of weird modes. I'm sure it says so in the manual but hey, who reads manuals...

I have never used the computer interface so I cannot comment about this.

There are a few negatives:
1. The watch looks very cheap. For this price I would have expected a watch I can use outside of the gym and this is not the case.
2. The strap's inside is made out of fabric that you need to profusely wet to get it to register your heart rate. The major issue here is that at the end of the workout you have some wet fabric that will end up stinking of sweat, and of mold if you don't dry it up in open air. Perhaps you can wash it (I have never tried) but it's a real nuisance. I've owned watches from other brands before and they were all-rubber and had no problems registering the BPM.
3. The biggest problem by far is reliability. I've had quite a few cases where the watch stopped registering the heart rate or provided blatantly wrong readings. The issue seems to be with the strap as the same wrong or missing BPM shows up on the treadmill as well. This typically happens mid session and the sensors conductivity doesn't seem to be the issue since I'm all wet from sweat + I am drenching the sensors before exercising. This is a bummer as I am losing track of effort level, calories etc. for this session. I have tried replacing batteries but that did not help. A separate issue is that I have had the watch freeze on a couple of occasions. The only way to reset it was to open the back, remove the battery and put it back in place (kind of a Ctrl-Alt-Del for watches...)

I am now looking for a new watch as the reliabiilty problem is a showstopper for me.

One request from the maker: Add an "Auto-on" feature where the watch turns on the exercise mode automatically when it registers a BPM above, say, 100 or so. I've had cases where I found out after a few minutes I have forgotten to turn it on.

I read reviews to find the best heart rate monitor on the market. They all said "buy the Polar F11" so I did. In 18 months I replaced the battery in the watch three times and in the chest strap four times. I experienced eratic readings more than anything else -heart rates from 0 for most of a long run or 220+ when I was running easy. It would hop from low to extremely high to about right and then go to zero. When I sent it back to Polar along with a letter to tell them the problems I had with it, they sent me a bill for $50 and all they had done was replace the batteries... again. I was really disappointed with my experience especially after reading the reviews.

This is my second Polar heart rate monitor (HRM) watch. I bought it because it has more features than my old F6, and since I exercise daily, I wanted a watch that did its job on the trail and looked good in the office. There are so many features that it is mind boggling, and the price is moderate for an HRM. It can be configured in many different ways, -- maybe too many? -- recording exercise data is easy and you can program it to match your personal needs. A bonus is that you can upload the data by transmitting them via a microphone to the Polar Personal Trainer site (polarpersonaltrainer.com) -- it sounds awful -- and keep a diary of your exercise sessions, progress toward a goal, weight loss, etc. Because it's a really good, reasonably priced HRM and because you can upload data, I highly recommend it.

In the past I have used several Polar Heart Rate Monitors (HRMs). However, it has been almost 8 years since I last used one and have recently re-started my running program after 8 years away from it.

I am always concerned about beginning a challenging sports regemine and prefer to do it in a heart-friendly way: HRMs are the key for me.

Looking at all of the options from Polar (I have always had great experiences with Polar products, unlike a few others which have been sort of hit-n-miss in terms of quality and reliability). I didn't want to spend a lot of money; but wanted to be sure it had a logging capability. I chose the F11 because it seemed to be the best combination of relatively low cost with good features.

I have been using it now for almost 4 weeks and have found it to be well worth every penny. The logging capabilitly has proven to be just fine (I had used one, in the past, that logged heart rate every minute or so which provided a great history of how I handled different terrain; but the cost of such monitors was much more than I wanted to spend at this point) and it is very easy to use.

The only challenge that I had was trying to figure out how to upload the workouts to the Polar Web sites fitness tracking web site. The challenge was figuring out that there is a "SEND" option on the "FILES" setting...but you have to scroll down to get to it.

It wasn't in the Polar user's manual at all...in fact, my experience, is that the User's Guide is pretty poor...just good enough to get started. I have figured out most of it on my own; but I'm a bit of a computer geek so it wasn't that challenging...for someone who is not so Info Technology literate, I think it would be hard (or not possible) to figure out. It took a lot of research on the Polar Web site to finally find what was needed.

I find the Polar Website to be adequate for logging purposes. It has a lot of features that look pretty nice at first; but I think it isn't really all that powerful. I like the logging; but the rest (the "partners", the "workouts", etc.) just don't measure up and are more fluff (in my opinion) than of real value.

As I said, however, I do like the basic logging capability. There is also some good "Calculators" that you can use and that I like pretty well (e.g., for figuring out Pace from Time and Distance). All could be done with a simple hand calculator; but I like having them available on-line while at their web site.

Overall, I really like this HRM. It does what I need; it has nice extra features over the truly basic HRMs and it lives up, in my estimation, to the excellent experiences I have always had with Polar HRMs.

I would definitely recomend this product to others who are similarly looking for a upper low to low mid-range (in terms of cost and features) HRM.