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In the UK we use a combo of the metric/imperial systems. Typically all distances/speeds are measured in miles (imperial), and temperature is measured in celcius (metric). I couldn’t tell you what a farenheit even is - I’ve never seen it used, but miles, yards and feet, sure. Suunto (at least, the Race S) only allows either metric or imperial for EVERYTHING.
But even a separate imperial/metric setting for temperature and distance isn’t enough - really it should be per sport. E.g. in the UK swimming would still use metric distances. Even metric countries might want to switch to imperial for running if they were training for a marathon or doing mile repeats (etc)
This appears to be a perennial request:
https://forum.suunto.com/topic/4768/imperial-metric-settings
https://forum.suunto.com/topic/5746/metric-vs-imperial-on-watch/13…but not seen it as a feature suggestion, so here we are
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I isazi moved this topic from Feature Suggestions on
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this would be good
the distance/altitude unit could be set/overridden under exercise options, before you start an activity? this would be changed to suit the activity as needed
for temperature unit, if the weather widget had some configuration under settings, like many of the other widgets do, it could be managed/overriden there?
this would not typically be changed once setwe often want to do things like run 10km, but track our pace in mins/mile
so units for everything, distance, altitude, pace, and temperature could all be set independentlybeing able to see both units all of the time (I’m sure this would present lots of UI challenges!), or easily toggle between them during an activity (configurable long presses - with an option being to toggle units - during activity??), would be my preference! I want to know I’m at 1,085 m (3,560 ft), and have gone 5.95 km (3.7 miles), and it’s 11 C
(52 F)atm I’ve set to imperial, am trying to learn fahrenheit and get better at the other conversions
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@dankcushions said in Imperial for miles, Metric for celcius, and per-sport settings:
In the UK we use a combo of the metric/imperial systems.
Should note people are not required to use whatever the dominant system is in their country. I live in the USA and use metric for all my sports activities. I don’t see a modality where imperial has an advantage. In running, track is 400m on the inside lane, and the most common events are 5km and 10km. Occasionally you may see “3 mile” race but it’s actually 3.1 mile (5km). Having km splits makes sense. If one looks to higher half and full marathon distances, those aren’t even values for either metric or imperial, so no advantage there.
For rowing, everyone uses metric with pace being time/500m, even in America. I’ve never seen pace described in imperial terms.
For cycling, everyone should use power/watts, which is a SI unit.
What’s amusing is people who seem to insist they must use imperial and don’t realize all the areas in the world where they don’t use it. For example, anyone who buys a bottle of wine is almost always getting a 750ml bottle (others exist, but this is by far the most common). I’ve never seen anyone insist wine gets packaged in gallon jugs.
That’s not to say “split systems” shouldn’t be supported; just that one isn’t required to use imperial in today’s world. I also use Celsius for my home thermostat and no one has come to arrest me yet.
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What’s amusing is people who seem to insist they must use imperial and don’t realize all the areas in the world where they don’t use it.
it’s not a matter of “insisting”. in the UK every speed limit, road distance, (persons) height and weight, and others are still conveyed in the imperial system. someone born in the UK is raised within that system. changing such systems take decades. for example, when i was born in the 80s food weights were in imperial, but metric was being phased in. by the time i was interested in food weights, metric was the norm, but even now some 40 years later, older generations will understand them in metric, and food is hence labeled with both weights, which is a pretty reasonable convenience.
with all the will in the world, i’m not going to immediately learn a parallel measurement system just to use a particular sports watch. i’ll just buy a different sports watch, so that’s what i did.
alternatively: suunto could just work like every other sports watch and this stuff be configurable.
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@dankcushions said in Imperial for miles, Metric for celcius, and per-sport settings:
What’s amusing is people who seem to insist they must use imperial and don’t realize all the areas in the world where they don’t use it.
it’s not a matter of “insisting”. in the UK every speed limit, road distance, height, (persons) weight, and so on is still written in the imperial system. someone born in the UK is raised within that system. changing such systems take decades. for example, when i was born in the 80s food weights were in imperial, but metric was being phased in. by the time i was interested in food weights, metric was the norm, but even now some 40 years later, older generations will understand them in metric, and food is labeled with both weights.
with all the will in the world, i’m not going to immediately learn a parallel measurement system just to use a particular sports watch. i’ll just buy a different sports watch, so that’s what i did.
alternatively: suunto could just work like every other sports watch and this stuff be configurable.
I was raised in America. I understand imperial, and use it when I’m driving as that’s the road signs. However, I’m never going to run as fast as a car and, to the best of my knowledge, there’s no speed limits for runners. I took up running after having three children, and started with track running and building up to a 5km event. “Couch to 5k” is a common term for new runners. I don’t need to use imperial when I run as road signs mean nothing to me then,
For cycling this may be more important but, observationally, in America most road cyclists don’t bother to come to a complete stop at stop signs, and I typically don’t think they are too concerned with keeping to speed limits. Many cyclists don’t have a bike computer or a smartwatch to track speed anyway; it’s not a requirement in America for a cyclist to have a speedometer.
I may have a weird bias as I’m also left-handed, and grew up with this not being well-tolerated. Classrooms would have desks designed only for right handed people, for example. There was a lot of pressure to try to do things right-handed that was not natural to me. These days being sinister (the reverse dexterious, for right handed people, means skillful, while sinister has other connotations) is less an aberration in most of the world but I still run into issues.
This is to say I’ve never felt I had to bow down to a status quo, and instead, adopt systems that work to my preferences when possible. I track my weight (66kg) in metric, as it is useful in stats like my cycling watt/kg value (my FTP works out to 3.212 watt/kg), and my doctor uses kilograms as well; it’s amusing when I get a checkup and the assistant tried to be helpful converting it to pounds and I note I’m comfortable reading the metric display. I like my dates written as 22 May 2025, using the word for the month to avoid problems with American colleagues who might be flummoxed if they thought a year suddenly had 22 months.
You’re never too old to learn new things. That said, I do think Suunto should be configurable as you ask. I just don’t think people should feel required to use the default systems they grew up with. Learning is fun. And one can use multiple systems: wine in 750ml bottles, beer in a proper English pint.
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@raven i also learnt running via couch to 5k. at some point i increased my distance and then pivoted to miles as that is easier for me to ‘visualise’ because that’s the system i was raised under. i have an instinctive picture in my head of how far “10 miles” is. that’s the distance from my childhood home to the big supermarket. i used to cycle that distance for a summer job. That Kind Of Thing.
as for farenheit - that is complete nonsense to me! something like 0F is the coldest day that Mr Farenheit was aware of, and so what, 100F is the hottest? cmon
just don’t think people should feel required to use the default systems they grew up with. Learning is fun.
of course
i am learning japanese as we speak. it’s fun, but typically when i buy a gadget or a wearable it’s to convenience my life, rather than inconvenience it. like i occasionally switch my phones language to japanese so i can respond to messages in japanese etc, but i’d draw the line at a japanese-only phone! -
@dankcushions Yeah, for myself, as I said I grew up in America but specifically Florida. We used Fahrenheit but I didn’t really understand temperatures below say 70F (about 21C). Some time ago, we moved to the America midwest to a university town that has real winters. This is a community where walking is easy to do and I wanted to try to adapt as best as I could to winter and walk even when it’s colder than I’d like. However, I honestly could not recall what freezing was in Fahrenheit I knew it was thirtsomething and I think an even number, but whether that was 32, 34, 36 was difficult to recall. We needed a new HVAC system in the house I bought and we got a Nest thermostat to go with it. I decided to set that to Celsius as I knew it was zero there and that seemed proper to me. We raised our three kids in this environment, switching the car to Celsius as well, and now they all think “Celsius first,” which was beneficial when we visited Europe.
My overall point was to push against the idea of “my country does things X way, so I have to do that too,” without taking some consideration and introspection on whether that makes sense or if another option is better. I will mildly tease my American running friends who use imperial I’ll always “do better” than them, as for every 3.1 miles they run I’m running 5km which is more, right? For myself, I can now visualize a kilometer easily but I just think of a mile as two kilometers even though it’s wrong. Oddly, when in a car I don’t really think about “distance” as much as I do “time”. Something isn’t X miles or Y km away, it’s 15 minutes with the current traffic.
However, my friends use of imperial doesn’t bother me, and if that’s their preference I don’t want them to feel forced to change, much like I don’t want to use a right handed bowling ball but have rarely had my preferred option. I just wanted to present the idea that, while waiting for Suunto to improve preferences, perhaps try out options you may not have thought about. Sounds like you’ve already made that analysis though. I hope things improve for you.
On a related note, with my new Race S I’m trying out 24 hour time. Typically I use am/pm with watches, so “4pm” rather than 16:00, but on some of the watch faces when I set that up I disliked the how the watch looked with the pm label on it, and didn’t see a way to disable that (I’d be ok with 4:00 and having to figure for myself if it’s am or pm). I switched it to 24 hour time and liked the look of it better. I should probably take the time to go through all the watch faces in both modes, and document my dislike of the pm label, to encourage more options to turn it off (and this will be amusing if someone points out I can do that now and missed it) but I’m also not too bothered by seeing 16:00 so perhaps my laziness will win out.
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@dankcushions funny, I’m not disagreeing with you, but I’m from the UK, I’m 58, and an perfectly happy using metric for everything sports related and personal life weight etc. Only in a car do I use Imperial as all the road signs are that way.
Not everyone from the UK cares, but I get your point and it would be handy for some people.
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@dankcushions I am in the USA but I also strongly prefer temperature in Celcius. Suunto Ambit used to support mixed units. Then when a new software was introduced for Spartan series, mixed units were no longer supported.
I don’t see this as a very complicated feature. It would be really great to have this!
Also, while we are here, please make vertical speed unit customizable too with choices between feet/hour, feet/min, meters/hour, and meters/min. When imperial units are selected, vertical speed defaults to feet/hour, which I personally find unusable because the number ends up being too large (typically 2000-4000 ft/hour for me) and changing too much every second. I have hard time processing that. For something like trail running, feet/min makes more sense because it produces small numbers in 30-60 ft/min range (up to 100 ft/min for descents) that are much easier to reason about. In fact the choices that I mentioned above are possible on Garmin watches.
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@roblambell said in Imperial for miles, Metric for celcius, and per-sport settings:
units for everything, distance, altitude, pace, and temperature could all be set independently
And vertical speed too, please!
With choices between per minute and per hour (see my other comment). -
@sky-runner we are really asking this, for a while now. Not implemented yet, but I heard the request finally arrived at the decision level
