Thursday, February 4, 2010

POLAR CS600X Bike Computer - Review



This Polar CS600X is a very serious bike computer that is GPS compatible, measures heart rate, speed, distance and even power. You'll see it a top a lot of handlebars in places like the Tour de France because it is serious team issue equipment.

This bike computer is pretty easy to get mounted, programmed and ready to roll with the exception of the power system, which is a bit quirky and takes some adjusting. Unlike most other power meters which focus on power generated in the rear wheel or crank - i.e. in the drive train - this power meter measures chain vibration.

While it is a lot cheaper than the $1,000 plus you'd drop on other power measuring devices its accuracy has been questioned in other reviews. To accurately assess this you'd need to run a dueling meters test on a bike equipped with a Cyclops or other high-end power meter and unfortunately we did not have that luxury.

On the road this bike computer worked like a dream syncing up quickly and consistently displaying speed, distance, heart rate and watts throughout the duration of the ride.

You can input data for up to three different wheel sizes so you do need to make sure that your wheel size selection is correct prior to departure or it will throw your distance off.

The oversized display provides excellent data readability regardless of weather conditions and the ability to add a Polar G3 GPS sensor to sync mapping to Google Earth for post-ride analysis is really cool and would be an exceptional feature for mountain bikers.

We really liked the incline measurement feature which accurately assessed the slope of the road quite accurately in our estimation based upon DOT and topographic maps. If you know what the gearing needs to be for a specific level of incline you will find this useful.

It is hard to compare Polar's line of cycling computers with Garmin's, but the differences can best be summarized as follows. Polar has a superior quantity of data and generally tends to have its computers driven by external sensors to generate speed data, although external GPS sensors are available and compatible with some units. Polar has the superior training analysis software and gets the nod for incline measurement.

Garmin, by contrast, uses internal GPS sensors in all of its cycling computers which make them inherently accurate for speed and distance. The other thing we liked about Garmin was its ability to pair with ANT compliant power meters to display power output. While most ANT complaint power meters are expensive they are also very accurate.
The Polar Pro Trainer 5 software that comes with this bike computer allows you to download your post-ride data to a piece of software wirelessly with a USB stick and perform a lot of high-end analysis.

All-in-all we'd give the Polar CS600X 4.75 out of 5 stars.

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