Polar Grit X2 Pro Titan review

The Grit X2 Pro Titan is a top-end fitness watch from Polar, a Finnish company that has been a key developer of heart rate sensor hardware for decades. Polar truly is a household name when it comes to fitness trackers.

That high-end label comes with a serious-looking design and the materials to match, a sharp OLED screen and a bunch of impressive fitness features. By the time you read this, its tracking accuracy should be great too, with some inaccuracy issues at launch having largely been fixed.

However, there remains a question mark over whether Polar’s fitness platform is ready for a fitness watch this high-end, pushing the Polar Grit X2 Pro Titan to compete with the best Garmin watches and the Apple Watch Ultra, among others.

Limited mapping and coaching skills, and having no local music playback, will be a Grit X2 Pro Titan dealbreaker for some. Still, this watch is potentially just a software update or two away from greatness.

Polar Grit X2 Pro Titan review

Polar Grit X2 Pro Titan: Price and availability

The Polar Grit X2 Pro Titan was released in April 2024 as a reworking of its flagship watch, with upgrades including a titanium alloy casing. Hence the name.

This is not a cheap watch and costs $869.95 / £749 / AU$1,299.

There are no size options here, but there is a slightly more affordable stainless steel version called the Grit X2 Pro. It costs $749.95 / £649.99 / AU$1,099.99 and is similar but weighs 2 oz (57 grams) minus strap, compared to the 1.7 oz (48 g) of the Titan version reviewed here.

Polar Grit X2 Pro Titan: Design

Our first impressions of the Polar Grit X2 Pro Titan were twofold. First, there are the visual aspects. This looks like a serious watch, with the no-expense-spared combo of a leather strap and a lavishly carved bezel. It’s quite big and imposing, a sports watch where style hasn’t been ignored.

But the second thing we noticed was almost the opposite. This watch is surprisingly light, for which you can thank the titanium alloy used in the casing.

Cheap smart/fitness watches are often made of plastic or aluminum; higher-end ones might be made of hard-wearing stainless steel. The Polar Grit X2 Pro Titan’s titanium is the most expensive of the lot, and combines great strength with low weight. You might not imagine this would be the sort of watch you’d want to wear overnight, but the 1.7 oz (48 g) weight makes doing so far more palatable.

You could also pay a fortune elsewhere for the bundled strap, which has a vegetable-tanned leather outer and cork lining. It’s a lot more comfortable and less skin-indenting than the classic silicone of a runner’s watch — although you obviously can’t just carelessly just run it under the tap like one of those. A silicone strap is included with the Titan model too, though.

Other aspects of the Polar Grit X2 Pro Titan’s toughness are great. It has 100m water resistance, fit for everything but diving, and the Sapphire Crystal screen protection is top-tier. If you want this kind of build from Garmin you’re looking at spending big money, on the even more expensive Garmin Epix 2 Pro Sapphire. To give the full picture, the underside of the Polar watch is largely plastic, which likely reduces cost and weight.

Like other recent high-end sports watches, the Polar Grit X2 Pro Titan has both button operation and a touchscreen, and uses OLED screen technology rather than a dull-but-practical transflective display. It’s like an Apple Watch screen.

This is a 1.39-inch,454 x 454 pixel display that looks colorful and sharp, and is able to relay pretty complex charts of heart rate data legibly. It’s also handy for one of the Polar Grit X2 Pro Titan’s key features: on-watch maps. More on those later.

The screen is bright enough to be clear in direct sunlight, but only when it’s on its highest brightness setting. It snaps out of this after a second or so of a direct interaction, in order to save battery.

This watch has an always-on mode too (disabled as standard), but all this will show is the time. Still, being able to get at the time is the main job of these modes, which bridge the gap between normal watches and smart/fitness watches.

Polar Grit X2 Pro Titan: Performance

The Polar Grit X2 Pro Titan has a big focus on performance. Your performance. Sure, you can use it like any other higher-end fitness watch, to track your runs, swims, bike rides and gym sessions. It has modes for those and a handful more.

But it also has a load of different fitness tests: walking, running, general fitness and cycling benchmark tests, plus an orthostatic test and leg recovery. You could try these every now and then as a way to mark your progress if your 5km or 10km run times won’t do. These are side attractions, of course. And most of the time, the prospect of actually doing these isn’t going to be appealing.

How’s the actual fitness tracking? For the first few weeks, it wasn’t all that great. Heart rate accuracy was pretty poor for the first up to 12 minutes of sessions, generally displaying a much too high HR reading. 160 bpm walking down the road? You’d hope not!

Polar has since largely addressed this with a software update. Its HR accuracy has improved massively and is now similar to that of an upper/mid-tier Garmin watch right from minute one.

GPS tracking was strong from the first software iteration, though. It locks on quickly and maintains a strong signal. The Polar Grit X2 Pro Titan uses dual-band GPS, which has only become prevalent in mainstream watches in the last couple of years. Just as the name suggests, this doubles up on the frequency bands the watch can use, which can help in more challenging environments —n in a city full of skyscrapers, a heavily forested area or a valley, for example. It’s hard to say how much this actually helps the average suburban runner, but we certainly had no issues with the Polar Grit X2 Pro Titan GPS.

We did encounter a couple of bugs with the updated software. On one occasion, the Polar Grit X2 Pro Titan became almost completely unresponsive after pausing an exercise. This seemingly happened because some notifications had come in — but it’s absolutely what you don’t want in the middle of a run.

Our major and only serious gripe about the Polar Grit X2 Pro Titan, though, is that its software and wider platform are arguably not developed enough to comfortably sustain a watch this high-end. The implementation of maps sticks out the most.

The Polar Grit X2 Pro Titan comes with 32GB storage for map data. European and US maps come preinstalled, which is great. However, you have to put in a lot of effort to use on-watch maps properly.

You can’t create routes on the watch. You can’t create routes in the Polar Flow companion app. You can’t create GPX route files in another app and open them up in Polar Flow. Instead, you have to create routes using Polar’s web interface, which can then be opened up on the watch. This feels years behind Garmin’s implementation and gives what should be the Polar Grit X2 Pro Titan’s killer feature all the impact of a soggy marshmallow.

We can’t imagine this is Polar’s endgame for mapping, though. We just have to hope this watch (rather than a new model) will benefit from the improvements when they arrive.

Similarly, the phone app just isn’t that slick if you’re used to, say, the style of Strava or Garmin Connect — which itself had a contentious revamp not long before this review. And Polar could improve its longer-term training tools. The Polar Grit X2 Pro Titan will suggest the type of intensity of exercise you should do each day, but you can’t treat it like a full-on coach as you can with a Garmin Forerunner 965. Or an Apple Watch, thanks to its wealth of third-party apps.

Polar has nailed something just as important, though — the look and feel of the watch interface. It’s easy to navigate once you get your head around its conventions, makes solid use of the screen space and feels responsive. Wed that to the luxury-adjacent watch outer and you have a compelling package on the surface. It’s only underneath that some problems arise.

Polar Grit X2 Pro Titan: Features

The ECG is another example of a feature not feeling quite fully fleshed out (yet). ECG stands for electrocardiogram, which can be used to look for signs of potential heart arrhythmias.

Polar’s Grit X2 Pro Titan will take a 30-second reading by asking you to put your finger on one of the buttons and hold still for 30 seconds. You can see the heart rate pattern evinced through the electrical signals of your body. But at the end you just get to see your average heart rate, heart rate variability and beat-to-beat interval.

Wearable ECGs are useful when they identify possible issues and signs of arrhythmia, not when they provide stats that don’t offer anything useful beyond what the rear optical heart rate sensor already provides. This is Polar simply being sensible, not over-reaching with a feature that can mean people worry about their health. But other brands use this tech better.

The SpO2 blood oxygenation mode does at least tell you whether your reading is normal or not. But, again, it feels a little limited as you have to manually request a 30-second reading.

At the lighter end of the feature set, the Polar Grit X2 Pro Titan does not support wireless payments like a Garmin Fenix 7 or Apple Watch. And while there’s support for notifications from a connected phone, it's a basic implementation.

Polar rates the Grit X2 Pro Titan for 10 days’ use from a single charge. That is a realistic figure, but you can expect it to halve if you use the always-on display mode, which shows the time all day.

An hour of GPS run tracking eats up 4% of charge, so while serious volume runners will see this stamina drop further, a normal runner’s training won’t be particularly draining.

There’s no way to truly kill the battery as the Polar Grit X2 Pro Titan does not support music playback. It can only act as a remote for a connected phone. Looking for a watch that will let you run phone-free, including entertainment? This one isn't it, despite its healthy 32 GB of storage.

Polar Grit X2 Pro Titan: Verdict

On the surface, the Polar Grit X2 Pro Titan looks every bit a world-class fitness watch. The design is serious, tough and attractive, it’s clued up to the OLED screen trend and still lasts a good while off one charge.

Thanks to a mid-test software update, heart rate and GPS reliability are great. And the basics of watch navigation are about as slick as those of the top Garmins.

Look more closely, though, and you’ll find a few important features are missing or underdeveloped. There’s no local music playback for phone-free running. On-watch maps are here, but feel underbaked. And thanks to limited coaching functions, the Polar Grit X2 Pro Titan isn’t as good a training tool as cheaper Garmin rivals like the Forerunner 965.

While it seems a great deal in terms of its build and materials, it may arguably be a bit too expensive considering its actual capabilities. Still, it’s a joy to use and live with if you won’t butt heads with its limitations.

If Polar Grit X2 Pro Titan is not for you

The top pick for high-end features at a good-value price is Garmin’s Forerunner 965. It has greater feature breadth and depth than the Grit X2 Pro Titan, but its build and design are less impressive.

Step up to the Garmin Epix 2 Pro and you get a more serious-looking titanium bezel and sapphire screen protection. But at that point you are looking at spending more — significantly more, if the even larger 51mm diameter version appeals.

Sticking to Polar, the step-down model is the Vantage V3, which has similar core features but is less rugged and offers just 5ATM water resistance instead of 10ATM. It’s a good option if you will be happy with a plainer-looking watch that isn’t quite as durable as the Grit X2 Pro Titan.