Polar’s Cheaper Street X Smartwatch Is Right here to Steal Away Garmin Customers

With the Loop, Polar took on Whoop by principally providing an analogous screenless health band with one huge promoting level: no month-to-month subscription. Now it has Garmin in its sights. The firm simply introduced the Street X, a fitness-focused smartwatch that mixes options from Garmin watches just like the Vivoactive 6 and Fenix 8, although at a barely lower cost level than earlier Polar smartwatch choices.

The $250 Street X is an “urban-ready smartwatch” that comes with just about each function you’d count on in a health watch in 2026, together with sleep monitoring (it detects sleep length, high quality, and phases). It also can monitor restoration intervals utilizing metrics like nighttime coronary heart price, coronary heart price variability, autonomic nervous system exercise, and pores and skin temperature.

Polar’s latest smartwatch helps 170 totally different sports activities and exercise varieties, together with energy coaching, operating, HIIT, and biking, in addition to calisthenics, and comes with GPS, an optical coronary heart price monitor, and goal-tracking options like “Training Load Pro,” which helps you gauge when to coach and when to give attention to restoration.

Hardware-wise, the Street X has a 1.28-inch AMOLED touchscreen with Gorilla Glass 3 and weighs 48g. Polar says the watch has as much as 10 days of battery life when you’re simply utilizing it as a typical smartwatch. For coaching, Polar says the Street X will get 43 hours when steady GPS and optical coronary heart price monitoring are turned on, although it additionally says you may rise up to 170 hours relying on which power-saving settings you could have turned on.

Polar is positioning the Street X as with the ability to deal with the “demands of city life,” together with “daily knocks and bumps to crowded commutes and life on the move.” To that finish, the Street X has a polymer physique and an “eight‑screw chassis” and reaches the army normal MIL‑STD‑810H, that means it could actually face up to harsh situations, together with shocks, excessive temperatures, humidity, and dirt. It’s additionally water‑resistant with a WR50 ranking, that means it could actually face up to a 50-meter depth—no deep-sea diving right here.

While price-wise, the Street X compares to Garmin’s Vivoactive 6, in its ruggedness, it goes toe-to-toe with costlier Garmin watches just like the $999 (beginning) Fenix 8, which can be MIL-STD-810 and has among the identical options, together with a flashlight, which is a Polar first on the Street X. The Street X can be considerably inexpensive than earlier Polar smartwatches just like the Vantage M, which begins at $499, and doesn’t have a paywall for any of its options.

If you’re into Polar’s mixture of city and rugged, the Street X is offered right now and is available in black and “snow white.” Other coloration choices, like forest inexperienced, might be accessible in a “limited batch” from polar.com, although extra availability is predicted in Q2.