Polar Takes On Whoop With Subscription-Free, Screen-Less Wearable
Polar wearable teaser
Polar
Polar makes watches and heart rate readers for people who consider exercise one of their primary hobbies, but it has a rather different kind of wearable on the way.
On September 3 it will fully unveil a screen-less tracker made for 24/7 wear. And unlike the popular Whoop band series, it won't come with a mandatory subscription attached either.
It will track your heart rate through the day, monitor stress and sleep. 'It's something you wear 24/7, it should always be by your side,' says Polar CEO Sander Werring.
Polar is going against the grain here in two important respects here. It's a break from the company's recent consumer releases, which have focused on the exercise enthusiast end of the market. And it also rejects the current trend for pushing a paid subscription. Why?
'What we see happening is basically there's a certain level of smartwatch fatigue,' says Werring.
'Health and wellness features remain an important part of wearing sports wearables, and smartwatches, but we see this completely new market now appear, which is more pointed at screen-less devices, more 'off time,' especially for the younger generation.'
Polar CEO Sander Werring.
Polar
Polar has not yet revealed this wearable's name, its price or its design — beyond the teaser image above – but Polar is much less of a stranger to this casual tracker space than you might guess.
More than a decade ago, in 2014, Polar released the Loop, among the first step-counting wearable bands that could also link to a heart rate strap. And in 2024, Polar shipped the Polar 360, a screen-free tracker made to be sold into businesses to help their employees keep a better eye on their wellness — rather than being pitched to the general public.
This upcoming wearable is effectively the public-facing follow-up to the Polar 360.
Polar 360
Polar
While to some these screen-free devices may seem like a return to the early, simpler days of fitness trackers, Werring says the public is a bit more savvy than the step-counting obsessives of the 2010s.
'It was the first opportunity for people to start to collect data on their daily habits. Then basically that evolved into the smartwatch era. I think nowadays, people are much more sophisticated in their thinking about health, wellness and data than we were in those days,' says Werring.
Rather than steps, the aim is for a wearable that can monitor wellness without pelting the wearer with stats and alerts.
'We are so connected every day with all impulses and triggers and screens and devices that we really see this opportunity at the moment for creating a solid and distraction-free device,' he says.
In practice this will boil down to all-day tracking of activity and heart rate, which will in turn be used to analyze the wearer's stress levels. And the stat gathering of course carries on into the night.
'Sleep is extremely important… Nightly recharge will tell you to what extent your mental stress levels have recovered, and to what extent you physically have recovered,' says Werring.
However, this Polar band is deliberately limited. It won't have GPS, and beyond the usual hidden reset button, won't have any controls either. Any activity tracking will be done automatically.
'Heart rate is something that will blend in during the day, so you don't need to basically use the app or trigger the device if you would like to go for, let's say, activities that are sports and heart rate elevating. It will all be there.'
Werring told me the tracker will use similar heart-rate-tracking tech to some of Polar's watches, which is good news. Polar watches generally offer solid HR tracking accuracy and reliability.
Werring also suggests Polar will not lean too heavily on AI in the marketing of this new wearable, which has become a commonly pushed feature among health and fitness platforms.
'Any newspaper you open at the moment, it's about AI, right? I'm not trying to discredit that because, yes, it's amazing, and the opportunities are huge also for us, but it's not something we are going to use to somehow try to say that we are great because of that. No, that's not our objective,' says Herring.
He says the aim is instead to 'democratize' this area of wearables, to 'make it low-barrier and accessible.'
This suggests that while Polar hasn't announced the price for this upcoming tracker, it is unlikely to cost a fortune. The ongoing U.S. tariff situation doesn't help Polar to finalize its plans, though.
'The biggest problem, of course, is the uncertainty of this whole situation. So that's something companies around the world deal with. It has, let's say, an effect of increasing prices on all aspects,' Werring says, while reaffirming the company's plans to release the tracker in the U.S at the same time as other countries.
'Our objective is to make exactly the same timelines for the launch as we have everywhere,' says Werring. Polar's recent Grit X2 Pro's U.S. release was postponed earlier this month thanks to that same uncertainty.
Polar will be back with more details on its screen-less tracker on September 3. And it could well appeal to those who like the concept of a low-upkeep lifestyle wearable without ongoing costs.
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