Suunto Race: first impressions switching from Garmin to Suunto

[NM_gent]

Hello,
A couple of months ago I decided to make the switch into the Suunto world (again, past user of a Suunto Core) as the Suunto Race seemed very intriguing. Here I write my first impressions, what I like and what I don’t like about the watch so far to share with the community and to hopefully trigger improvements in future firmware updates.
I am primarily a cyclist and came from the Garmin Vivoactive 4 as a first fitness watch. I was looking for an Amoled screen smartwatch with more sport/training data. The Garmin alternatives I was considering were the Forerunner 965 and the Epix (Gen 2) both of which are on a much higher price tag than the Suunto Race. However, I decided to give Suunto a chance and went for the Suunto Race because it seemed a best value choice and also I was a bit tired of Garmin’s design and UI.

To be clear, there is still a lot of functions I haven’t tested outdoors, such as navigation or recording different type of sports (i.e. cycling). For the moment, I have only tested running and the GPS is great, sport watch faces very clean and nice. Before buying the watch I heard a lot of negative reviews about the optical HR sensor; haven’t used it a lot during sport myself as I opt for a HR belt. Regarding the interface lug that people have mentioned, in my experience it is hardly noticeable and definitely not a big problem.

Positives of the SR:

• The looks of the watch, interface design and materials quality are a major plus for me. The fit to the wrist is quite comfortable and unnoticeable.
• The battery life is impressive!
• The Suunto app is amazing. The interface and data statistics are excellent. Gives a great overview and comparison with past activities, for example to browse through your activities calendar or check your averages for a given sport at a given time period (weekly, monthly, yearly) is awesome and even better than Strava’s display.

Main deciders to switch from Garmin where the design of the watch itself, interface and app which I find very old fashioned and annoying with Garmin’s offer. Plus the available watchfaces on the watch, the default options (currently there is no possibility to upload custom watchfaces) for my taste are sharp looking and minimalistic. Imo, this is another advantage against Garmin of which the watchfaces I find terribly ugly.

Things I am missing on my SR:
— Generally I am missing additional features related to health and fitness. The data are there but there is limited display of these data on the watch itself. Sometimes more elaborate display of recent data in each widget page would be nice. Another example, daily stress levels based on HR is a nice feature to have which shouldn’t be very difficult to apply.

• Currently, during an ongoing activity/exercise it is impossible to change into the watch face to see the time…This is quite basic to have on a watch, I would assume, and a swipe to the watch face and swipe back to the activity pages would be nice. This issue has been noted by other users as well.
• Music (Spotify) on watch to listen over Bluetooth.
• ‘Lock’ function of the watch from accidental touching of the screen or crone.
• Suunto app: More pages where the user can display data averages of choice with time evolution; for example rest heart rate, body resources average, HRV value etc. with time (days, weeks, months). At the moment, for some of these metrics only the last 7-days values appear in the dashboard as a trendline but nothing more.
• Since TrainingPeaks is a partner, some more training data insights and graphs in the Suunto app would be definitely appreciated by the users. Or else, a TP premium subscription discount with buying a Suunto watch

Things imo Suunto needs to fix in upcoming firmware updates:
— The major issue for me is the sync between the watch - phone and third party apps.
First of all, the sync of the watch to the phone app is very sluggish and to be honest I don’t really understand how it works; most of the times you need to press sync multiple times before you can see recent transfer of data to the app (e.g. sleep data).
Sync with Strava; although it is a partner app there is no 2-way sync with the watch! Activities recorded with the watch itself get synced to Strava seamlessly but the other way around doesn’t work! For example, using Zwift for indoor cycling the only way to get the data in the Suunto app is using a third party app (such as RunGap). I expect to have the same problem with outdoors rides recorded with my bike computer and uploaded to Strava (haven’t tested yet).

• Bugs already reported such as delayed reset of logbook/weekly TSS record which doesn’t happen automatically on Mondays. Or during the week often appears incomplete (different than what you see on the phone app) because activities not recorded with the phone sometimes will sync and show on the TSS weekly chart and weekly value and sometimes they won’t.
• Notifications control from the phone to the watch should be more customisable. For the moment it seems there are only two options: all notifications ON, or all notifications OFF. I would appreciate that at least there is the possibility of an in-between mode which allows calls to appear on the watch while notifications may be OFF in general.

Overall, so far I am quite happy with my new watch and it seems that Suunto has made a big progress to come to the smartwatch market with a very competitive watch to give alternatives to users who are not exactly feeling at home with Garmin. The design, materials and battery life are from the best in the market, especially at this price point. Furthermore, the watch can offer several training data insights to please even the data freaks. I would like to see how Suunto continues to improve from here on!