I know, this hardly justifies creating an extra topic, but maybe it helps Suunto to make better decisions in the future. I’ve been a huge fan of Suunto watches since the Altimax. I’ve owned the Vertical for 5 days now and did three different activities with it: A multisport hike & fly, mountaineering, and road cycling. In every of these activities the watch failed miserably - and always for different reasons.

The hardware itself is really cool. But the software is so extremely faulty that I see zero chance that even the worst bugs will be fixed within a whole year. The map, for example, is so unreliable that I wouldn’t dare taking the map as a backup solution in case of an emergency (e.g. white out in the mountains and the main map got lost).

If it was only about some low priority issues… But many of the main functions of the watch are unreliable and faulty. The Suunto way in the past was to offer a reliable product with far less tools than other brands (Garmin, Coros, Polar…). But what was offered did work really well. But product quality has degraded over time. My S9P is okay. It does have bugs, but I really love the navigation, which - despite not having maps - works much, much better than navigation on the Vertical. And the core functions are mostly reliable.

Time to look at the Fenix 7 for me … Never used a Garmin watch before and maybe I won’t like it and will stick with the S9P. But the poor quality of the Vertical brought me to this point. And despite I always wholeheartedly recommended Suunto to my friends, I can’t do this now. Too big is the disappointment in recent company decisons.

Cheers! My Vertical Titanium is now for sale for 515 EUR

And by the way: Also the latest Vertical firmware update from today is a disappointment. Map still doesn’t work reliably; still seeing the “black screen of death”.

Conclusions about the Suunto Vertical