Polar M600: Your guide to the new Android Wear sports watch

Polar has decided to go toe-to-toe with the Moto 360 Sport and the Sony SmartWatch 3 by unveiling the Polar M600, its first ever Android Wear smartwatch.

It means that Polar beats traditional rival Garmin to the Android Wear cherry and also vastly enhances the sporting credentials of Google's smartwatch operating system.

Read on for the all important Polar M600 spec, features, price and release date details and don't forget to also check out our Polar M600 review.

Polar M600: Sports and fitness

The M600 features Polar's own proprietary optical heart rate sensor tech, which uses six LED lights to generate wrist-based readings.

Like dedicated Polar fitness watches that we've seen in the past, the heart rate monitoring extends to features such as training zones, HRMax, Zone Pointer, Recovery Status and accurate calorie burn.

If you're not entirely confident about wrist-based bpm tracking then you can also pair the M600 up with one of Polar's HRM chest straps. The company will be selling M600 bundles that include the H7 chest monitor – in three different colours.

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The Polar M600 also boasts GPS (with Glonass) for accurate run tracking and 24/7 activity tracking, including automatic sleep monitoring, and supports smart coaching features plus Polar's Running Program, which we recently tried out on the Polar V800.

Of course, all of this activity data pipes straight into Polar Flow (and Google Fit) as well as third-party platforms such as MyFitnessPal and MapMyFitness.

Like the Polar A360 fitness tracker, the M600 is waterproof so you can take it swimming. It has an IPX8 certificate meaning it's good in up to 10m of water. You can't use the wrist-based HRM monitor in the pool though.

Basically, the M600 is your traditional Polar sports watch – but with Android Wear running the show.

Polar M600: Hardware and spec sheet

The Polar M600 is powered by a MediaTek MT2601 processor – not the dedicated Qualcomm Snapdragon Wear processor that's set to dominate the smartwatch platform in the months to come.

Like the rest of the Wear range, it comes with 4GB of storage and 512MB of RAM.

The battery is a 500mAh pack, which is pretty mega in smartwatch terms. Obviously, GPS run tracking will hammer it but, on regular Android Wear mode, Polar is promising two full days of battery. We'll wait until we've fully tested one before we comment on that claim.

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The screen is a 1.3-inch, 240 x 240 (260ppi) colour transmissive TFT touchscreen display, covered with Gorilla Glass. There's also a dedicated front training button for when your hands get a little too sweaty for swiping the screen.

Weighing 63g, it's more svelte than the other new sporty Android Wear smartwatches – Nixon's The Mission and the Casio Smart Outdoor.

Polar M600: Android Wear

So what's happening on the Android Wear front? Well, you'll get all of the same goodness you get on all Wear watches. That includes voice control, notification support and the ability to customise watch faces. There's also 4GB of internal storage letting you sync apps and music from Google Play to listen to music during your workout sans smartphone.

It'll pair up with Apple phones but, much like the other Android Wear watches with iPhone compatibility, the M600 will have lesser capabilities compared to syncing up with an Android device… although Android Wear 2.0 will address some of these issues.

Polar M600: Price and release date

The Polar M600 is going to be available with either black or white silicone bands with a red option set to land before Christmas.

It will be available globally later this year for . You can pre-order now.