Polar has been quite busy over the past year or so releasing the Vantage V3 and Grit X2 Pro smartwatches, and it may have just saved its best watch for last. The Polar Vantage M3 is an excellent smartwatch built for athletes of all shapes, sizes, and abilities. You don’t even have to be an athlete to enjoy the Vantage M3, although you’ll miss out on many fitness-focused benefits.
With the watch market becoming increasingly competitive thanks to some amazing smartwatches, Polar needed a powerful, functional, and well-priced device in its stable. Not only did Polar finally get its pricing structure right with the Vantage M3, but the Finnish company is joining all three of its top-tier watches into a single software platform, meaning that the Vantage M3 gets the same feature set as its more expensive siblings.
Polar Vantage M3
The Polar Vantage M3 is a health-focused smartwatch packed with features. With smooth daily performance and up to seven days of battery life, it’s quite the device. The Vantage M3 has many features and metrics designed to give you a holistic view of your health and does so exceedingly well.
- Bright, beautiful AMOLED touch display
- Up to a week of battery life
- A ton of fitness features and health metrics
- Full map support
- Polar Flow needs to be streamlined
- No app store to extend features
- Strap is finicky
Price, availability, and specs
Polar released the Vantage M3 at the end of October 2024 with a $400 price tag. At the time of writing, the device is only available directly from Polar in two colorways: Greige Sand and Night Black.
What’s good about the Polar Vantage M3?
Perfect size, light, and well-designed
The Vantage M3 has a lot to like, but I’ll start with one of the biggest upgrades over the previous generation M2: the display. The M3 has a beautiful-looking 1.28-inch AMOLED display. Thanks to its 416 x 416 resolution, colors pop and text is sharp. With up to 1500 nits of brightness, I never struggled to see it outside.
The 1.28-inch display, while not as large as its pricier siblings, helps keep the size and weight of the Vantage M3 to a minimum. At 12mm thin, 44mm in diameter, and weighing only 53g with the wrist straps, the M3 is very light and fits perfectly on my wrist.
I was also quite fond of the M3’s overall design. The stainless-steel bezel has small studs that look nice and allow for a tactile feel when your finger reaches the edge of the display. This watch has character, more so than something like the Google Pixel Watch 3.
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Polar also gives you plenty of ways to interact with the watch interface. In addition to the touchscreen, there are five buttons on the side, two on the left and three on the right. These buttons guarantee that you can navigate the watch regardless of whether you’re wearing gloves or the display is wet.
Everything that you can do on the touchscreen can be done using the side buttons. You can even disable the touchscreen by long pressing the top button on the left side, avoiding accidental activation for moments when buttons just work better.
Battery life was excellent during my testing. Polar claims that the Vantage M3 can hit 7 days in smartwatch mode and record up to 30 hours of continuous training using the dual-frequency GPS. During my testing, I was getting anywhere from five to six days of battery life with a good mix of daily GPS-enabled exercise and smartwatch mode.
Health-focused goodness
While the fit and finish of the M3 are important, the main draw is the wide assortment of health-tracking features and capabilities. The Vantage M3 has Polar’s fourth-generation optical heart rate sensor, a SpO2 sensor, a skin temperature sensor, an ECG sensor, a barometer, a magnetometer compass, and an accelerometer.
There are over 150 sports profiles, but as a runner myself, I was quite pleased with the Vantage M3’s suite of abilities during my testing. You even get Hill Splitter, which automatically detects uphill and downhill sections, giving you insight into how quickly you were able to run the hill.
There’s Training Load Pro which indicates when I should rest or when I’m ready to tackle my next workout, helping keep me injury-free. There’s also exercise suggestions based on your recent training activities. These suggestions fall into strength, cardio, and supportive exercise categories.
During my testing, the Vantage M3 did a good job of tracking my heart rate. I’ll add the caveat that I don’t own a chest-based heart rate monitor like the Polar H10, but it was always in the realm of my averages and was accurate enough for me.
The dual-band GPS was also quite accurate during my testing. When running in open areas, the M3 was quick to acquire a signal and generally stuck to my running path. In more densely packed areas, such as hiking up a mountain, the M3 deviated a bit, but not notably so. It’s not as good as the Samsung Galaxy Watch Ultra, but it offers solid GPS performance overall.
Polar equipped the M3 with full offline map capabilities, including streets, waterways, highways, and buildings. You can also follow predetermined routes via a breadcrumb route or turn-by-turn navigation with Komoot.
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What’s bad about the Polar Vantage M3?
Polar Flow needs refinement
There are a couple of things that Polar does that I’m not a huge fan of. The Polar Flow app keeps track of all health-related data, but the app needs to be streamlined a bit. There are a ton of menus and not all the data is laid out easily. There are plenty of graphs and data available, but it’s not always easy to locate and read.
Polar stores all data in the cloud and allows you to access Polar Flow directly from a web browser. It’s far easier to digest data using this method compared to the phone app. Polar is also slow to add feature updates compared to its competitors like Garmin. This does give the platform a certain level of stability, but if you enjoy getting plenty of features added after the fact, you may be disappointed.
The main drawback to a watch like the Polar Vantage M3 is the lack of full smartwatch features. You can view your notifications and the weather and control the music playing on your phone, but that’s about all. And its functionality can’t be extended through third-party apps as there isn’t a place to download additional apps.
The watch can’t be used to talk on your wrist, and while you can see your notifications, you can’t interact with them outside of clearing them. There’s also no cellular connectivity, so you must be connected to your phone to get all the features. This won’t be a deal-breaker for many, but if you require additional apps or cellular connectivity, you’ll need to look elsewhere.
And I wasn’t a huge fan of the included silicone strap. It was comfortable enough and stayed secure once it was on my wrist, but operating the strap and buckle could quickly become frustrating. I had to fight with the strap to get it tucked under the loop far too often. Luckily, the strap can be swapped out as Polar uses an industry-standard 22mm watch strap.
Should you buy it?
There are many reasons why you should buy the Polar Vantage M3 and a few to potentially skip it. If you want a well-designed watch that excels at health tracking, the Vantage M3 is a huge win. It has excellent fitness tracking abilities, a bright and beautiful display, and great battery life. The convenience of not having to charge your watch every night or even every other night can’t be understated.
If you’re after a smartwatch that can duplicate what your phone does, the Vantage M3 may not be an ideal choice. You can’t download apps to extend its functionality, take calls from your wrist, or ditch your phone altogether with cellular connectivity.
What you do get is a solid fitness-focused smartwatch that does everything else quite well. It’s comfortable to wear for long periods, helps get you into shape, and helps prevent you from hurting yourself by overexercising. It’s a great option for anyone even remotely interested in improving their health.
Polar Vantage M3
The Vantage M3 knocks it out of the park for Polar. This smartwatch offers a fantastic feature set and a ton of health metrics at a very attractive price. It can’t download apps or interact with notifications, but it does just about everything else exceedingly well.
