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Polar teams up with Strava to quantify your cycling skills and track your routes

Here’s your chance to get a deal on the Polar V650, Polar’s Red Dot award winning cycling computer. Today, the sports tech company announced a partnership with Strava for two new bundles, the Polar V650 HR Strava and the V650 HR Combo Strava. Anyone who grabs a bundle before April 30 will get two months of Strava Premium free.

The Polar V650 HR Strava bundle goes for $270 — the HR represents the H6 Heart Rate Sensor that rounds out the bundle, saving buyers about $25. The Polar HR Combo Strava bundle goes for $320, but it includes Polar Speed and Cadence Sensors as well, which are $50 and $45 respectively. Counting the Strava, that means buyers that snag one before April 30 save at least $80 over buying each piece separately.

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Strava’s premium membership has all the sweet analytics like Suffer Score and past stats view (free accounts are current-week only). But even better, users get access to personalized feedback from Carmichael Training Systems and McMillan Running, two big-name coaching services.

The V650 is Polar’s mid-range bike computer, but it has a healthy feature suite. GPS and a barometric altimeter let the V650 display altitude and VAM (vertical average mileage, or average ascent speed) as well as all the usual stats like speed and distance. Its 2.8-inch color touchscreen is perfect for displaying maps. And, like most Polar gear it integrates with Polar Flow, the Web service where users can manage their fitness profiles across devices and link them to other services.

With Flow, the big, shiny V650 can take advantage of route guidance, a new feature Polar announced in January of this year. It allows Polar Flow users to download and follow routes other Flow users have recorded and shared, as well as ones you record yourself. The V650 holds up to 20 routes at once, syncing easily from the user’s Favorites list in Flow on the Web.

Favorite routes also come up in the V650’s Map layers. If Favorite Routes is selected, all the synced routes will be visible in single map display mode. That’s in addition to speed, distance duration, heart rate, cadence, and power, all on the same touchscreen.

The V650 is the only Polar bike computer that doesn’t link to the Polar Flow app via Bluetooth. Until the V650 syncs with the Polar Flow app, users will need a computer and Micro USB to sync their data.

Polar fans and V650 owners can only hope this is remedied in the months to come. In the meantime, the V650 still has some pretty sweet features found in more expensive computers, and the new bundles shave a few more dollars off the price tag for an even better deal.

Aliya Barnwell
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Aliya Tyus-Barnwell is a writer, cyclist and gamer with an interest in technology. Also a fantasy fan, she's had fiction…
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