CES brings a lot of great products to us and today Suunto have announced a new smartwatch running Wear OS, the Suunto 7 Smartwatch.
Suunto are well known for their high quality sports and fitness tracking watches are are looking to take a step forward into the Wear OS market with the Suunto 7 Smartwatch. Running the newest Snapdragon Wear processor, the SD3100, combines with Google’s Wear OS and their own sports expertise to deliver a streamlined interface and high quality overall experience.
The Suunto 7 is much more than a usual Wear OS smartwatch with Suunto’s apps included to deliver over 70 different sports modes from running and cycling to skiing and surfing while still having a battery life of 12 hours in continuous GPS Tracking mode — or up to 48 hours in daily use enabled by the Qualcomm platform.
The watch allows for full colour offline outdoor maps with built-in Suunto Heatmaps so you can still find your way and know the best training routes, even when you have left your phone at home.
The Wear OS experience is still fully fledged with Google Fit, Google Assistant and Google Pay all integrated — along with all the usual Google apps and apps from the Google Play store.
As you may suspect with support for skiing and surfing, the Suunto 7 Smartwatch is shock-proof, water-proof (to 50 metres) and dirt-proof — can’t wait to test these out. The display is an “ultra-bright” OLED display is protected with Gorilla Glass affording it the protection it needs as an active watch.
On the new watch Heikki Norta, chief digital officer at Amer Sports Corporation (Suunto’s parent company) said:
Suunto set out to overcome the challenge of designing a smart watch with robust sports watch features, and vice versa, in order to help users get the most out of both their sports and their busy lives. Combining Suunto’s decades worth of versatile sports and outdoor expertise with the helpful smartwatch features from Wear OS by Google provides an incredible opportunity for us to inspire new and expanding audiences to explore their surroundings, wherever those adventures might take them.
Weighing 70 grams the bezel is made of stainless steel and the 24mm bands are available in various silicon, leather and textile styles. Available in Australia from January 31 via Suunto.com and various retailers including JB Hi-Fi we won’t have to wait long to see it here.
At a RRP of $799 it is not a cheap watch but Suunto are well known for their higher end, quality sports watches and this promises to be no different. We hope to have one on our review bench in the next couple of weeks to give you the low down.
I’ve been field testing one of these for Suunto for >6 months now. Happy to take questions.
Can you pair chest straps (Wahoo Tikr) and if so are third party apps then required to capture the HR data?
Hey @Andrew. No, you can’t pair any BLE sensors at the moment. On the flip-side, I’ve found the OHR sensor to be the most accurate I’ve tested so far. For some reasons I could never get the Valencell sensors in all of Suunto’s previous models producing reasonable HR readings.
Thanks Paul, I noted another review recently that said the new Fossil Wear OS watch (Gen 5) performed considerably better (faster no lag on the touch screen) than other Wear OS watches due to it’s 1GB of memory as opposed to 512mb.
Question from me is does this watch also have 1GB of memory and have you found the responsiveness of the watch in daily use acceptable? I have a Nixon Mission which is good but can be slow and laggy when navigating with the touch screen.
Thanks in advance!
You are right re the fossil 5th gen working better with more memory. At this stage details on the suunto watch are scarce but you’d hope it would have 1GB.
Hey guys. I can confirm it has 1GB of RAM:
suunto:/ $ cat /proc/meminfo | grep MemTotal
MemTotal: 969236 kB
I’ve found it quite responsive although I’ll admit my focus has been testing of the Suunto Wear OS app more than other apps.
Don’t suppose it’s got LTE?
No, BT and WiFi only