General thoughts and suggestions

[Jan Van de Velde]

Hi all,

I’m a new Suunto user, switched from Polar for the Suunto Vertical. In general I’m happy with my pruchase, with the watch (or the brand?) has some quirks. So I thought I shared my thoughts, both the good and the bad, here. Feel free to comment and maybe/hopefully some of the suggestions are picked up?

Overall impression

• Beautiful watch. Quite big and heavy (I have fairly small wrists), but not so that it is problematic.

• Battery life is amazing. This is also the main reason for my switch to this watch. I do 10-15 hours of exercise (HR+GPS) per week and my Polar watch had to be chraged 2-3 times per week. Now I only have to charge every 2 weeks. My main complaint here would be that I can only choose between “24/7 HR tracking” or “no HR tracking”. An intermediate option to track HR only during sleep would allow me to even further increase the battery life without, for me, significant reduction of

• It also has by far the best default watch band of any watch I had up to now. In any case the first band that I didn’t want to replace the moment I laid eyes on it… I do wish that Suunto would come out with something like the Garmin Ultrafit for those cases that a nylon strap would come out.

• My biggest complaint would be the watch faces. (I’m probably not the only one.) The amount of watch faces and the amount of customization is extremely limited. It was the same on my Polar, but that was a much more budget watch, I would expect more from this watch. I use the “Suunto Vertical specific” watch face. Even simply showing the date and the battery percentage at the same time is impossiblesince they are in the same upper left “stack”. And while the graph with altitude is cool when on long hikes it is fairly useless in daily life. The graph could just as well be used for any continous metric, e.g. resources, HR, steps, kcal that is found in the daily overview of the app.

Exercise mode

• In general exercise mode is good, it does wat it must do. The screen is very large and can easily show a lot of information. A large battery life means no problem for longer events and the GPS accuracy is indeed amazing (although I always choose a lower accuracy mode in favor of more battery during training).

• My main complaint would be the accuracy of the wristbased HR. While the wrist HR is good during normal use, during exercise it shows the weirdest things… (All out effort at 90 BPM.) This would be the main thing that my Polar did better then the Vertical. I knew there would be a difference and it is , but I did not expect it to be this big.

• A second big complaint would be the lack of customisable triathlon sport mode. Unless I missed something, I can only have custome sport modes using the different sport mode and the multisport feature. That is far from perfect and can cause mistakes in the heat of a race.

• Some small complaints:

  • I did not find a way to turn on the backlight expect for the “wrist twist”? Did I miss it or is it not there?
  • When I run a race I do it on feel. I measure my HR (with a HR band ), but I never look at HR. When customising the sport modes, I can chose not to include HR in the data but I always have to see the HR intensity zone circle around the screen? Or is there a way to suppress this?
  • Am I correct to see that I can’t add battery percentage as one of the data fields during training mode?
  • The Swimrun SuuntoPlus sports app s*cks completely. A standard Swimrun multisport mode (as offered by Garmin) should be easy to add, no?

Widgets

• The widgets are a very clean and easy way to display information. They are reachable and a fingertip and in general very usefull. Some thoughts and comments below.

• Heart Rate does what it should do. Accuracy when not working out seems pretty decent. The only extra thing here would be an option for wrist HR measurement during sleep tracking.

• Blood Oxygen is difficult to judge. My main complaint would be that the widget itself is buggy and seems to be stuck sometimes. It currently says 95%, measured 8hrs ago at -1 m, while the blood oxygen measurement during sleep says something completely different (99% at 375 m, which seems much more correct).

• Activity: no complaints. Number of steps seems to be quite accurate!

• Sleep tracking is always a problem for me. No watch (Fitbit, Polar, Apple, etc.) evert tracks my Fell Asleep moment correctly, they all are off 2-3 hours. No idea why. No difference here. If the wirst HR during sleep tracking option is added, this will work perfectly.

• Resources is something I don’t use often since my sleep tracking is off and it thus shows me always low…

• Fitness Level is something I use quite a lot. The VO2max estimate seems to be much more accurate then my previous devices and is very much in line with official tests!

• Weather and sun & moon are more a gimmick for me. The only complaint would be that these are also sometimes stuck in time.

This is just my 5 cents. A very good watch, which would be perfect (for me) with some small updates. I am under no illusion that my post will make a big difference in the development, but it doesn’t hurt to try right?

Jan

[fluca]

@Jan-Van-de-Velde Welcome in our suunto community.
I share most of your remarks and I can say they are spread in several different posts in this forum already. Let’s hope this will get read and suunto developers will decide to address some.