Suunto 7 Review – Best Smartwatch For Wear OS

Here is a summary of my time with the Suunto 7 and a discussion of the more interesting details that cover my review experiences with the Suunto 7.

Simply summarised “The Suunto 7 is by far the best smart, sports watch for Google’s Wear OS” and from a personal perspective, I’d much rather have a Suunto 7 than an Apple Watch.

or…

Simply summarised, “The Suunto 7 is over-priced with an under-featured, proprietary Wear OS app” and from a keen athletic perspective, I would personally choose a different watch as I do LOTS of sports.

Update: 10 Jan 2021 LAUNCH ISSUES 100% FIXED

 

Suunto 7 Review – Why the controversy?

The Suunto 7 is a smart sports/outdoors watch for Wear OS, simple as that. As such it is mostly competing with other SMART watches like the Apple Watch, Casio WSD-F30 and the Samsung Galaxy Watch Active.

It’s just not correct to compare the Suunto 7 to other high-end Suunto watches. They are targetting different markets so a different feature set is appropriate for the target market. And it’s not right to compare the Suunto 7 to competitive high-end sports watches, the Suunto 7 is clearly targeting SMARTs because of the reliance on the Wear OS platform.

However, it is perfectly valid to compare the abilities of Google’s Wear OS platform to Apple’s Watch OS platform but that is mostly beyond Suunto’s control. And it’s perfectly valid to compare Suunto’s Wear OS app to other sports and outdoors apps, both in terms of the app itself and how it integrates with the wider Wear OS environment (Google Fit)

Finally, of course, absolute comparisons like PRICE are perfectly valid too.

So where any ‘controversy’ does exist, it’s because people are not making valid or fair comparisons…at least that’s my opinion of their opinions. You can make your own mind up.

Suunto 7 Review – What is it in a bit more detail?

Suunto 7 a very well-made, good-looking, large-format smartwatch. It feels like the physical watch should be able to handle the rigours of the outdoors and, perhaps more importantly, it has a comprehensive set of sensors that enable the software to do awesome things. So it has

• GPS-Galileo satellite capabilities (Qualcomm) which give positional and directional information (compass)
• Optical Heart Rate Monitor (Pixart)
• Barometric altimeter that supports further refinement by GPS altimetry (FusedAlti)
• An accelerometer that detects movement and, for example, refines speed as determined by GPS
• Microphone – for voice access to smart functionality
• NFC/Payments chip for tap and pay
• WiFi chip to, for example, talk to your home speakers
• Bluetooth 4 to pair to sensors (with caveats) like speakers
• And the battery, buttons and touchscreen make it all work

 

The software operating system it runs is Google’s Wear OS, which can work on an iPhone but it’s really designed to aid a better integration with Android smartphones. Many, but not all, of your favourite Android apps, will also have a cut-down version or partner version that works on Wear OS watches – thus Suunto has made an app for your smartphone and a Wear OS app for the Suunto 7. That’s just one app on the watch, but you NEVER have to use it if you don’t want to.

Wear OS on your Suunto 7 will run apps that can do wonderful stuff like KOMOOT, Google Maps, Strava and MUCH more. And it also runs the Suunto Wear OS app. More on that in a minute.

Apart from apps, Wear OS supports thousands of watch faces, including a special heatmap watch face from Suunto, and special screens called ’tiles’ which are always on and can be swiped over the watch face from time to time.

Then we come specifically to the Suunto Wear OS app. As Wear OS apps go, it’s awesome in the intended scope. Its mistake, perhaps, is to look a little too much like the exact same interface style used on Suunto’s other high-end watches. As it looks the same, people seem to expect it to have the exact same functionality as these other watches. It doesn’t. But compared to other, Wear OS sports apps it DOES already have good functionality…admittedly, perhaps not the pro-athletic levels of functionality found on sports watches.

Suunto 7 Review – What Is The Target Market

The Target Market Is An: Active person looking for a smartwatch

First and foremost, I’d say it’s for people who use an Android smartphone and who want a decent-looking, well-integrated companion watch. They will want to buy that watch also for its smart functionality, perhaps the ability to play music, make contactless payments and/or for Google Assistant.

Maybe the target buyer is interested in a bit of activity tracking. Maybe.

Probably the target buyer will be interested in sports usage but not to the level of a serious athlete or multi-day adventurer.

So what does that sound like? Yep. To me, it sounds like an alternative to an Apple Watch. NOT an alternative to a Suunto 9 or Garmin Fenix 6 Pro Solar or even to a top-end Garmin Forerunner running watch. Suunto devotees may scoff, and rightly so, this is not a watch for them. But hey, the Apple Watch is the best-selling wearable…EVER. There REALLY is a HUGE market for this sort of thing. Honest!!

OK, there’s the price too. But I’ll gloss over that for a while.

Suunto 7 Review – More on how it all works

This is not a review of  Wear OS.

I like Wear OS. The Suunto 7’s buttons and touchscreen are a great interface to Wear OS.

The Suunto 7 works well.

Out of all the Wear OS watches I’ve used, Suunto 7 offers one of the very best usability experiences. It has the most powerful processor and there are no lags worth noting, except when an app is installing over WiFi (?!)

The Suunto HEATMAP watch face is great. You can display a zoomed-in or zoomed-out heatmap centred on your current location for any sport or class of sports. It’s not THAT useful, but it is clever and looks nice!

Furthermore, you can configure two complications on it, I chose to add a shortcut there to GPAY and another to show the battery status. Instead, you could probably have a running total of your steps or similar.

If I then swipe to my chosen tiles I have the following

• My current week of training 9 (a Suunto tile)
• My current month of training (a Suunto tile)
• Google Fit shows my active minutes and heart points
• Weather forecast
• You can also see your 24×7 HR if you are into that sort of thing. It looks like it only gives infrequent readings (15 minutes). Which is not great.
• then there are timers, calendars, other heart graphs and news headlines to choose from. But no compass 🙁 you’ll need an app for that.

Other than APPS, the remaining areas of the Suunto 7 to consider are CONTACTLESS PAYMENTS, MUSIC, Google Assistant, the battery that powers it all and the accuracy to which it is all delivered. Let’s look at those…

Contactless Payments

I’ve set up a couple of my credit cards on the Suunto 7. I’ve also put a shortcut to GPAY on the watch face which makes the payment really simple.

The only caveats are

• GPAY requires you to have a passcode set for the Suunto 7. If you take the watch off you have to re-enter the passcode. There is probably also a time delay after which you have to re-enter the passcode but I’ve not encountered that and, if it exists, it must be several hours. Hence payments are VERY, VERY easy.
• Google PAY / GPAY – you can pretty much add ANY Amex, Visa or Mastercard to the Suunto 7 (supported services). This is similar to Apple PAY but Garmin PAY is restrictive in its support for payment sources. On the downside, GPAY only works in these countries.
• Paypal is not supported – it’s only supported in the Google PLAY Store.

FWIW: For Garmin PAY I had to apply for a special credit card to get any form of payment method working for me in the UK, which is fine, but Google PAY took all 5 cards that I currently own.

Summary: Great. Far more flexible than Garmin and similar to Apple. At least it was for me…

Music

You can use Spotify to locally cache music and playback at your leisure. You can also have rips/downloads. It seems to try to stream over WiFi too.

I had no pairing or playback issues with my Jabra Elite 65t earbuds but I did have some issues when casting to specific speakers in my ‘smart home’.

Summary: Fine for standalone playback to earbuds and controlling your phone’s audio.

Google Assistant

I’m a partial fan of Google Assistant and its integration with: my smart home; a fairly smart car; and its ability to answer questions without getting angry even when I shout at it. I also have an iPhone XR and Google Assistant is better than Siri.

The Suunto 7 has a microphone and screen as an interface to Google Assistant but it has no speaker and hence should know if you have earbuds paired or if there are Google Home speakers available over WiFi (Mesh).

I’m not convinced that the Suunto 7 really tries to use my WiFi as often as it might, it seems to very much prefer to communicate with my Android smartphone. So, by my command, it does initiate music on the smartphone and playback on my earbuds and it also will show a pretty picture of BAKU on the Suunto 7 when I ask “What’s the capital of Azerbaijan?”.

As I have numerous connection points/microphones in my house I’ve not gotten to the bottom of what the Suunto 7 is/is not doing here. And I don’t propose to spend any time figuring out why it only ‘kinda works’.

Summary: Needs fine-tuning for a Smart Home but seems fine as a companion to your android smartphone.

Battery – How long it works for

Suunto claims 12 hours of GPS usage and 20 hours of non-GPS sports usage, which is good for this type of watch. However, in my experience, I reckon you will get 9-10 hours of GPS usage from a full charge depending on the exact sports usage. This will be further reduced if you have the screen set to ‘ALWAYS ON’ and the screen brightness cranked to the max. Start playing music and battery life will be lower still – that’s true of all smartwatches.

From a practical viewpoint, if you look at your 4-5 hour marathon you also have to account for depleting the battery the night before and on the journey to and from the race. Will you make it through that race? Probably. However, if you wake up and put on the watch fully charged all will be good. I tried this ‘test’ as follows

• 8 am. wake up and turn the fully charged Suunto 7 on
• 9 am to 1 pm bike ride with GPS enabled, stopping indoors (poor GPS in a coffee shop) for 30 minutes
• 1 pm to 2 pm outdoor run, no music
• At this point, the watch read just under 50%. I think it was 48% or 46% (ie 10% depletion per hour)
• After that and using normal ‘watch’ mode, the reading fell to 21% by 11 pm.
• 9 am: wake up and the battery-saver watch face was showing

So my point to fitness freaks is that the S7’s battery is sufficient for your marathon. A 4-hour marathon with music might also be possible.

Would the battery life be sufficient to give you a day’s navigation over the hills whilst linked to your smartphone and listening to music?…no.

Summary: The Suunto 7 has awesome battery life for a Wear OS watch and also good when compared to the Apple Watch. Of course, YOU will almost certainly want better battery life. Good luck with finding it in a directly comparable product!

 

Activity Tracking on the Suunto Wear OS APP

The Suunto 7 tracks your activities fairly well. Activities mean ‘your non-sporty exertions’…like climbing the stairs or walking 500 miles just to be with someone. it also covers non-exertions like sleep tracking.

Well, when I say it tracks activities fairly well and also covers sleep, what I mean is that Google Fit works for the former and you will need an app like Sleep as Android for the latter. You could probably also use another stair-climbing, step tracking app to capture activity too. But the bottom line is that activity and non-activity (sleep) is piped into the Google Fit ‘service’, which is great. What’s not great, for some people, is that the Suunto android app does not retrieve that data.

I can’t believe that this won’t be added QUICKLY by Suunto. It wouldn’t bother me as an owner of the watch but I’m positive this omission will REALLY hack some people off. After all, Suunto has specifically said that the Suunto 7 targets an “Active person looking for a smartwatch“. Presumably, an active person wants to track activity?

Me? I’m just bothered about the smart stuff and sporty stuff and that the sports stuff syncs back to the Suunto android app. Talking of which…

General Sports on the Suunto Wear OS APP

The Suunto 7 is for active people rather than athletic wannabes and multi-day, extreme adventurers. As such, the Suunto APP supports all major single sporting activities. Clearly, it is still work-in-progress so I won’t dwell too much on what might be added soon.

Whilst the onboard Suunto Wear OS APP does not support external Bluetooth Smart sensors, the Suunto 7 does support them via 3rd party apps. But what you lose with 3rd party sensors, you gain with onboard maps integrated into the Suunto 7’s Wear OS app. Try finding maps on a Garmin Venu.

Interestingly the Suunto app allows both MANUAL and AUTOMATIC laps but doesn’t yet support either interval training, adaptive training or sports mode customisation. At least not yet.

Running Differences

Not all running metrics were available on the Suunto 7 at the time of writing; cadence, pace, distance, time heart rate and others are either displayed or recorded.

Running Cadence & Pace (FusedSpeed) come from arm movements and GPS – both taken into account. Thus indoors on a treadmill, you get pace estimated solely from arm movements. My further understanding of WearOS is that the GPS on your phone will be used if the phone is present. On a normal run, with your phone at home, Suunto 7 will use the onboard GPS/Glonass/Galileo chip from Qualcomm.

Cycling Differences

The Suunto Wear OS app doesn’t support power, speed or cadence sensors but will give you GPS speed, distance, time, lap, elevation and HR data either on the watch or on the app. You will get richer cycling functionality on sports-specific devices like the Suunto 5 and Suunto 9.

Swimming Differences

Swimming functionality supports differently sized pools as well as detecting your stroke, pace, intervals and laps. Plus there is the added bonus of heart rate from swimming. Not all of that is displayed right now but it is recorded back to the Suunto android app.

Outdoors Differences

The Suunto 7 boasts heatmaps and free offline maps with a variety of styles, none are available on any other Suunto. Along with the quality feel of the hardware, ‘maps’ might be why Suunto believes it can justify a high price point. Also packed in are a barometer and GPS-altitude as well as FusedAlti, which combines the two. You get the vertical speed and weather functions and a compass can be delivered with several Wear OS app options.

But what’s missing from the Suunto Wear OS app is waypoint navigation and route navigation. You just can’t sync the routes from your Suunto smartphone app to the watch (yet). Of course, there ARE other Wear OS apps that can provide routing and, indeed, you might even prefer to do that by installing Google Maps or one of the many apps that leverage Google Maps or other map services.

Suunto 7 Accuracy

There’s a lot to say about the accuracy but it can be summarised as similar to competing devices but with the need for a bit of fine-tuning (that will come).  Here is a link to a detailed post covering many aspects of Suunto 7 accuracy for those of you who are interested. There are some new results added in there but they just confirm my initial findings. Note: This post is available only for supporters to access…the start of this paragraph summarises the accuracy results.

Suunto 7 Accuracy

Suunto 7 Review – Extras

Part of enjoying the Suunto 7 is discovering new ways of using Wear OS and, especially new Wear OS apps. These might help.

• Exercise Timer – Helps with intervals
• Gesture Launcher – Tap, draw and open something else whilst using the Suunto Wear OS app eg a compass app
• SportyGo – Now has support for CALIBRATION of STRYD (Review here), support 3rd party sensors   !!
• GhostRacer – Similar, plus other features
• Baro Trend – Shows trends…of barometric pressure, nice look and feel
• Compass for Wear OS – Guess what this one does? 😉 I’d like a compass as a tile
• Wear OS on the Android smartphone has a ‘screen always on’ setting but to make this work you must set it in the Suunto app

Please feel free to make suggestions below in the comments section and I will add them here.

Suunto 7 – Updates

I’ll add links to other posts which details software updates made after launch

Suunto 7 – more to routes than meets the eye

There’s more for April 2021

new Suunto Features, new Suunto 9 Baro Titanium

 

Futures – Suunto 7 Review

Google is probably addressing developments to Wear OS including support of peripheral functionality like SpO2 monitoring and whilst there are many use cases like ovulation/fertility tracking that I believe are not integrated into Google Fit, apps do already exist for those purposes.

Putting that to one side, what Suunto need to address in short order are just these three things

• DONE: Proper integration of the Google Fit data into the Suunto android app. It’s a silly omission even if there are workarounds.
• DONE: Custom sports profiles. Now available, but the devil is in the detail

and in the medium-term, it would seem sensible to

• Add routing & routing guidance within the Suunto Wear OS app to partner the map/routing functionality in the Suunto android app

In the longer term many enhancements could be made to the Suunto Wear OS app but their introduction will be mitigated by the existence of similar functionality in other Wear OS apps.

Whilst the Suunto 7 is a great quality piece of hardware I’m sure that we will see even better cases offered for the Suunto 7 later this year…it’s what Suunto do!

My opinion is that the Suunto 7 is here to stay – in terms of name, format and target purpose/audience. I’m expecting that this strategic change for Suunto will pay off and that they will iterate newer versions of the Suunto 7 in the years to come.

Buy Suunto 7 Discounts, Pricing and Availability

In the USA you are looking to buy the Suunto 7at an rrp of $499 and in the UK it’s GBP429 and in the EU it’s 479€ to buy. these ARE discounted though. The best prices I’ve found are linked to in the red banner below at Wiggle in the UK/EU and REI in the USA where members get $50 off.

Q: Is it good value-for-money?

A: There is nothing directly comparable, except perhaps the Casio WSD-F30 – the Suunto 7 is better than that and a tad cheaper. Do you get a large robust screen on an Apple Watch? No. Do you get such a range of smart features on a Garmin Venu? No. But then the Garmin and Apple clearly have other strengths.