The $299.95 Polar Vantage M2 GPS multisport fitness tracker builds on its predecessor with music controls, weather data, and more training tools to help you monitor your recovery and manage your energy. It's a good entry point into Polar’s flagship sports watch line, offering a comprehensive list of 130 sports profiles, impressive heart rate accuracy for a wrist-based tracker, and about a week of battery life on a charge. For most exercise enthusiasts, we recommend the $249.99 Garmin Venu Sq 2, our Editors' Choice winner, which doesn’t offer as many sports profiles as the Vantage M2 but costs less and has a vibrant touch screen. If you need those extra sports modes or you prefer Polar's companion app, we recommend the newer Pacer series (starting at $299.95), which gives you all the benefits of the Vantage M2 at a lower price.
The 'M' Means Midrange
In Polar's lineup, the $299.95 Vantage M2 sits below the $499.95 Vantage V2 multisport GPS watch and its newer sibling, the Vantage V3 ($599.95). Those premium Vantage V models offer several upgrades that aren't available on the midrange M2, including an ambient light sensor, a barometer, a compass, a newer heart rate monitor, a touch screen, longer battery life, and more advanced features like recovery tests, running power measurements, and hill-specific data about your ascents and descents.
If you don’t care about those additional bells and whistles, the midrange M2 might suit you just fine, but differentiating within Polar's midrange options can be tricky. Triathletes might lean toward the M2 because it's advertised as a multisport tracker instead of the Polar Pacer series (starting at $229.95), which is specifically aimed at runners. Vantage series models can indeed help you train for a triathlon with multiple sports profiles you can readily switch between on the fly, but the newer Pacer series offers all of the same tracking features as the M2 and then some, including 20 additional sports profiles (150 total). The Pacer Pro (currently $329.95) offers all the features of the standard model, plus wrist-based running power measurements, Komoot turn-by-turn route guidance, and Hill Splitter ascent and descent tracking.
Like the Vantage M2, models in the Pacer series lack a touch screen but still let you easily switch sports mid-training and work with the same excellent companion app.
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Outside of Polar, there's no shortage of options, but our favorite general-purpose GPS sports watch is the Garmin Venu Sq 2 ($249.99), which strikes a better balance between a fitness tracker and a stylish smartwatch with an AMOLED touch screen, a selection of downloadable apps and watch faces, and mobile payment support. The Venu Sq 2 offers 25 different activity profiles for tracking your workouts, which is obviously a fraction of the 130 sports profiles you get on the M2, but it still easily covers the needs of most folks looking to casually or even seriously train. The Venu Sq 2 also features a blood oxygen saturation (SpO2) sensor, a feature Polar only offers on its high-end Vantage V3.
The Hardware: Five Buttons and No Touch Screen
Out of the box, you get the watch itself, a charging cable (you’ll need to provide your own power brick), and an extra-long strap. You’ll also find a small packet of papers including quick start guides in various languages.
The included strap is made of silicone and I was relieved that it felt comfortable when pulled snugly around my wrist. The instructions tell you to pull it tight for accurate heart rate measurements and only loosen it to let your wrist breathe if you don’t need that data for a set period of time. I wore the watch tightly enough to gather heart rate data for a week straight without issue.
I tested the model with the black and gray finish, but it also comes in gold-champagne. It looks understated at a glance, which suits my style.
The watch face measures 1.8 by 1.8 by 0.49 inches (HWD) and weighs 1.58 ounces with the wristband or 0.98 ounces without it. Look closely and you’ll see it isn’t using premium materials. The casing and screen are both made of plastic, but at least the bezel around the screen is stainless steel. The Garmin Venu Sq 2 has an aluminum bezel and a superior Corning Gorilla Glass 3 cover instead of plastic.
That display bezel takes up a whole lot of real estate, especially compared with smartwatches like the Apple Watch Series 9 and the Samsung Galaxy Watch 6. Beyond the bulky bezel, the M2 features a 1.2-inch Memory in Pixel (MIP) display with a 240-by-240-pixel resolution. It’s dull but functional, and I could read it clearly even in bright sunlight.
The M2 lacks some other basics of smartwatches. Most notably, the screen isn’t a touch display. You also can’t download apps. You can customize the watch face to an extent and select which functions you want to scroll through, but you can’t change much aesthetically beyond basic color palette swaps.
The right side of the watch case houses three buttons. The top and bottom scroll up and down respectively, and the middle button selects. A small red line on the watch face points to what you’re selecting. The left side of the watch case has two buttons. The top primarily functions as a light, but can access advanced settings during a workout. The lower left pulls up a menu from the main watch face but is otherwise used to go back when you’re navigating the interface.
To help you stay connected, the M2 can display notifications from your phone, but it doesn't let you filter which notifications you receive. When I was driving with navigation on my phone, my watch buzzed each time I needed to make a turn. It also buzzes each time YouTube sends a pop-up with a video recommendation, and for plenty of other notifications, which gets old. Thankfully, you can easily set it to disable alerts when you're training or turn off phone notifications altogether if you prefer.
Since it doesn’t have a touch screen, accessing some basic functions like Do Not Disturb can be cumbersome. On my Samsung Galaxy Watch, I swipe down on the touch screen and tap the Do Not Disturb button. That’s it. On the M2, accessing that same feature takes 11 button presses if you know exactly where to find it. For Do Not Disturb, hit back > up > select Settings > General Settings > hit down four times > select Do Not Disturb > hit down > select On. You can mitigate this annoyance by scheduling a Do Not Disturb time frame in the same menu.
By way of tradeoff, the streamlined functionality results in battery life well beyond what you get from most smartwatches (again, think of the M2 as a fitness tracker first). The 230mAh battery is advertised to last 30 hours when training with heart rate monitoring and GPS tracking, or 168 hours (seven days) in watch mode with heart rate monitoring.
In testing, the M2 slightly outperformed Polar's estimate, lasting a full week on a charge with mixed use. Over the course of that week, I trained with GPS five times for 30 minutes to an hour each session, and otherwise wore it in watch mode with heart rate monitoring always enabled.
When the battery reached 5%, heart rate monitoring automatically cut off, so I missed some data, which was disappointing. Still, now that I know that happens, I can plan around it, and battery life is impressive overall. It offers plenty of opportunity to plan a charge, even if it can’t quite match the nine days of life we got from the Venu Sq 2 in testing.
Setting Up the Vantage M2 and Taking a Tour
I had no problem setting up the M2. Simply plug it in using the included cable to wake it up and get started. Note that you need to align the red mark on the charging pad with the red mark on the watch. That fooled me for longer than I’d like to admit.
From the watch face, you pick your language and choose how you’d like to proceed through setup. You can use your computer, your phone, or the watch itself, though Polar recommends one of the first two. I opted to use my phone, so I downloaded the Polar Flow app (available for Android and iOS), set up a Polar account, then found the watch had timed out of the setup process, so I had to restart it. I’d advise first downloading the app and setting up your account before powering on the watch.
During setup, the app prompts you to turn on location access and enable notifications, and it gives you a rundown of the watch buttons. Once I had my account in place, I was up and running on the watch in a few minutes.
From the main watch face, hit the back button to access the main menu. From top to bottom on this menu, you access the following: Start Training, Notifications, Serene (a meditative breathing exercise), Fueling (set up mid-workout reminders to hydrate or eat some carbs), Timers, Fitness Test, and Settings.
The Fitness Test is a five-minute, non-exercise test during which the watch instructs you to lay down and relax, then measures your heart rate and calculates your VO2 Max, which is the amount of oxygen your body can absorb during exercise and a common aerobic endurance metric.
Within the Settings menu, you access more submenus: General Settings, Choose Views, Watch Face, Time & Date, and Physical Settings. In General Settings, you can find basic information about your watch, and toggle alerts, Do Not Disturb, flight mode, heart rate tracking, inactivity alerts, music controls, and notifications and vibrations. Here you can also indicate whether the watch is on your right or left wrist, access GPS controls, set your language, and set your preferred unit of measurement (imperial or metric).
The Watch Face menu lets you set an analog or digital clock. Physical Settings refers to you; You can tell it your age, gender, height, and weight, and set your training background (how often you usually train) as well as your activity and sleep goals. I picked level 1 for my activity goal, the recommended option for sedentary office workers such as myself. This menu updates as the watch gathers data, and will eventually tell you your max and resting heart rates and your most recent VO2 Max score.
Finally, Choose Views lets you pick what information you can scroll through from the main watch face. Your options, from top to bottom include Time Only, Daily Activity, Cardio Load Status, Continuous HR Tracking, Latest Training Sessions, Nightly Recharge, FitSpark Training Guide, Weather, Weekly Summary, Your Name, and Music Controls.
I selected everything other than Your Name and Music Controls, which gives me plenty to scroll through. I usually keep the watch on the Daily Activity screen, which shows your progress toward your goal with a blue ring that encircles the watch face. On most of the screens, you can click for more information. Weather, for instance, will show a forecast. Daily Activity will show your steps and calories burned.
FitSpark and Recharge are particularly interesting. The first recommends exercises based on your current fitness level and cardio load. The second shows your sleep data and how well it’s helping you recover. Note that both will be blank for the first few days you use the watch while it gathers the information it needs to make assessments and recommendations.
Testing the Vantage M2
I have admittedly fallen pretty badly out of shape in my post-pandemic life, and strapping on the M2 motivated me to get moving. I watched Polar's instructional videos on its website and app to get familiar with the M2’s advanced functionality before starting and noticed that I don’t look anything like the buff dude featured in them.
I started with the Fitness Test. I laid back and relaxed as instructed, enjoying the chance to chill during the day, and before long, the watch buzzed to let me know it was done. My result was a “very low” VO2 Max score, disappointing but probably accurate.
When you're ready to track a workout, select Start Training from the main menu to scroll through and pick from a variety of sports profiles. From the app, you can select your favorite activities from a huge, alphabetized list and save up to 20 sports profiles on your watch at one time.
As you make your selection, you’ll see your heart rate on the screen, and for outdoor activities, the preview screen includes a little arrow with a colored circle around it. That’s the GPS coming online. For the best results, you’ll want to wait until that colored circle is green, indicating the watch has locked in your location. It sometimes takes the GPS an annoying few seconds to connect when I'm starting a workout, but once it acquires a signal, it works well. Post-run GPS data always correctly shows my winding circular routes through my Chicago neighborhood.
While tracking a run, the watch screen shows relevant statistics like your distance, heart rate, time per mile, and time elapsed.
In training mode, that light button in the upper left gains a few extra functions. Tap it to access power save settings and Back to Start, which brings up an arrow indicating the direction where you started your workout. While running in a city, I couldn’t exactly follow the Back to Start diagonal arrow, but it’s meant to provide basic guidance. My other gripe is that it can be hard to remember how to find the Back to Start feature. I actually had to look up how to find it three times before I had it down, in part because I don’t really use the Light button for any functions when not working out.
You can pause the workout by tapping the back button, or end it by holding that button down. After a workout, the watch shows additional metrics for the session like your average and max heart rate, cardio load, energy used, heart rate zones, and pace.
I tested the M2's heart rate data against a Garmin HRM-Pro chest strap over a week, and measurements from the watch proved accurate. Chest straps are inherently more accurate when measuring heart rate than wrist-based wearables for obvious reasons, but the M2 kept up to an acceptable margin of error.
For my first run, the M2 reported my maximum heart rate at 176bpm vs. 167bpm for the HRM-Pro. For a second run, the M2 reported 172bpm against 166bpm for the HRM-Pro. For that second run, the M2 estimated that I burned 366 calories during the 30-minute workout, 72% from carbs, 27% from fat, and 1% from protein.
I like that the M2's post-workout charts show all of my heart rate dips and lifts, whereas the HRM-Pro smooths the data somewhat. On subsequent workouts, I tested the M2's response time by varying my speed as I ran. The watch's real-time pace and heart rate readings could take a beat or two to catch up after I drastically increased my intensity, but the overall data at the end of a workout always proved accurate.
Finally, the M2 generally tracked my sleep quite well, accurately reporting the time I drift off and wake up each morning. The app charts your sleep data to display amount, depth, recovery, and solidity. It takes a few days for the recovery stat to populate, but I find this information useful, and it even includes an accompanying recommendation. When I sleep and recover well, it encourages me to push myself during the day’s workouts. If not, the app will advise me to take it easy for the day.
During testing, it accurately tracked a few shorter nights of sleep and advised me to find more time for shut-eye. The chart showing deep sleep and interruptions also matched my experience to the extent I could tell.
After a few days, the Cardio Load Status metric finally populated and it generally showed that I was maintaining my fitness level. Specifically, it said that I’ve been “training less than usual, but just enough," which made me laugh because I had actually been working out more than usual. To be fair, I did run a little harder the next day and eventually earned the “productive” Cardio Load Status.
Once the M2 got a sense of my sleep recovery and cardio load, the FitSpark feature also turned on. Based on my recovery status, it recommended a cardio or strength training workout. Clicking through on the watch face pulls up a list of recommended options.
I tried a recommended workout called Bodyweight Regular based on the watch's recommendation to "Build Some Muscle." I was annoyed to find that this 15- to 20-minute workout included five minutes of warmup and five minutes of cooldown that were free form, or as I understood it, without guidance. I ended up skipping past the phases after doing roughly 30 seconds of jumping jacks and then getting bored.
I liked the rest of it. The program prompted me through five different exercises: squats, push-ups, good mornings, dips, and crunches. It timed me for two rounds, walking me through 40 seconds of each exercise, then a 20-second break to get ready for the next working interval. When I got to phase three, I had to stop because I wasn't familiar with the good morning exercise. Hitting select pulled up a simple menu so I could skip the phase or get instructions. I chose the latter and the guidance was clear enough.
After wearing the M2 for a week, I checked my fitness level again. I still scored Very Low, which was discouraging. At least the Garmin HRM-PRO gave me a badge for getting my heart rate up several times in a week.
I didn’t actually think that testing the M2 would transform my fitness level within a week, but I would have appreciated minor acknowledgment, even if it was just a meaningless badge or achievement.
In the Flow With Polar Flow
While I didn’t make that much progress in a week, the M2 and its companion Polar Flow app and website can help you train over a longer period of time. The watch automatically syncs to the app at regular intervals, but you can force a sync by holding the back button for a couple of seconds.
From the app and website, you can track your activity and sleep over time, and access reports for details on any measured metrics. The website also offers community features to connect with other Polar users, and training programs for various events like a 5K or a marathon. Through the mobile app, you can connect to third-party fitness apps like Strava.
Overall, Polar Flow is impressively feature-rich and robust, and you can access the majority of its tools with any of the company’s current fitness trackers.
A Capable Tracker, But Not a Standout
Polar's most affordable model in the Vantage GPS multisport watch line, the Vantage M2 is a useful and accurate tracker that collects lots of helpful data to optimize your workout and sleep schedule. Taken on its own, it’s a good fitness tracker and a limited smartwatch that's well-suited for beginners and regulars alike. That said, the Polar Pacer offers most of the same features for less money, while the similarly priced Pacer Pro has more advanced training tools. Outside of Polar, the Garmin Venu Sq 2 is our Editors' Choice in this price range. It doesn't offer as many sports profiles as Polar's midrange trackers, but it adds an SpO2 sensor, a touch screen, and additional smartwatch features such as mobile payments.
The Polar Vantage M2 isn't the most value-rich option in a competitive field, but it's still a competent GPS multisport watch in its own right, with lots of activity profiles, useful training features, and an excellent companion app.
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