Polar M430 vs Garmin Forerunner 630

Not only is this watch useful for running, you can leave it on for the whole day and it will monitor your sleep, give recommendations on training intensity as well as recovery, and keep your heart rate in check. With GPS off, it can work for 20 days, so you'll only have to take it off twice a month or so to recharge.

This watch offers great value for the money - usually, you have to be ready to pay $300 and more for a decent sports watch, but M430 does the same job and costs around $200.

Although this watch is targeted primarily at runners, you can also use it for biking, swimming, strength training, and many other indoor and outdoor activities that you can choose in the Polar app.

Even to date, the majority of sports watches don't offer particularly good hear rate tracking capabilities. You either have to buy an additional chest strap or rely on built-in sensors that are often imprecise. The M430 offers the best of the two worlds - you can get data nearly as precise as from a chest strap without having to buy and wear one.

On top of tracking the stats that most sports watches track, such as step count, burned calories and covered distance, the Forerunner also records a number of in-depth measurements, like heart-rate patterns, running cadence, VO2 max, and many others.

Even though this watch was first introduced in 2015, in many ways it still beats the vast majority of new and much more expensive watches: It's 10 to 20 grams lighter than most alternatives; The battery lasts for four whole weeks with the GPS turned off, when the majority of newer models last only for 5-10 days. In GPS mode, it lasts for 16 hours, outperforming most watches that hold a charge for 5-10 hours. And with both GPS and Glonass, the precision and reliability of tracking are great too. Best part of all, the Forerunner 630 comes around $200 cheaper than what you'd pay for a newer watch with comparable performance.

In idle mode, the battery will last for up to four weeks, when most GPS watches last at best 7-10 days. Of course, the actual battery life will depend largely on how you use the watch, but it's one of the best batteries available in a sports watch nevertheless.

The Forerunner has both GPS and Glonass services, so there's very little chance that it will lose your geolocation. There's also UltraTrack, a tracking mode with low energy consumption but less precision that can be helpful during a multiple-day hike.

Especially if you owned previous Garmin models, using this watch is very simple. All modes and apps can be accessed via the touchscreen. You can also access some functions, like turning the watch on and off and locking the screen with physical buttons on the sides.

Besides tracking various fitness indicators, you can use this watch to get call and text notifications from your phone and check the weather.

The screen is big enough for you to be able to easily follow paths and read notification and text messages. The image is very clear, even under direct sunlight.