Polar’s Cheaper Street X Smartwatch Is Here to Steal Away Garmin Users

With the Loop, Polar took on Whoop by basically offering a similar screenless fitness band with one big selling point: no monthly subscription. Now it has Garmin in its sights. The company just announced the Street X, a fitness-focused smartwatch that combines features from Garmin watches like the Vivoactive 6 and Fenix 8, though at a slightly lower price point than previous Polar smartwatch offerings.

The $250 Street X is an “urban-ready smartwatch” that comes with pretty much every feature you’d expect in a fitness watch in 2026, including sleep tracking (it detects sleep duration, quality, and stages). It can also monitor recovery periods using metrics like nighttime heart rate, heart rate variability, autonomic nervous system activity, and skin temperature.

Polar’s newest smartwatch supports 170 different sports and activity types, including strength training, running, HIIT, and cycling, as well as calisthenics, and comes with GPS, an optical heart rate monitor, and goal-tracking features like “Training Load Pro,” which helps you gauge when to train and when to focus on recovery.

Hardware-wise, the Street X has a 1.28-inch AMOLED touchscreen with Gorilla Glass 3 and weighs 48g. Polar says the watch has up to 10 days of battery life if you’re just using it as a standard smartwatch. For training, Polar says the Street X gets 43 hours when continuous GPS and optical heart rate tracking are turned on, though it also says you can get up to 170 hours depending on which power-saving settings you have turned on.

Polar is positioning the Street X as being able to handle the “demands of city life,” including “daily knocks and bumps to crowded commutes and life on the move.” To that end, the Street X has a polymer body and an “eight‑screw chassis” and reaches the military standard MIL‑STD‑810H, meaning it can withstand harsh conditions, including shocks, extreme temperatures, humidity, and dust. It’s also water‑resistant with a WR50 rating, meaning it can withstand a 50-meter depth—no deep-sea diving here.

While price-wise, the Street X compares to Garmin’s Vivoactive 6, in its ruggedness, it goes toe-to-toe with more expensive Garmin watches like the $999 (starting) Fenix 8, which is also MIL-STD-810 and has some of the same features, including a flashlight, which is a Polar first on the Street X. The Street X is also significantly less expensive than previous Polar smartwatches like the Vantage M, which starts at $499, and does not have a paywall for any of its features.

If you’re into Polar’s mix of urban and rugged, the Street X is available today and comes in black and “snow white.” Other color options, like forest green, will be available in a “limited batch” from polar.com, though more availability is expected in Q2.