Suunto Run Review: Be Different. But Don’t Compromise.

Sports watches have become crazily expensive in recent years. It doesn’t have to be that way for those who choose wisely.

At $250 (£199/€249), Suunto RUN is one of the safest choices you can make alongside the Garmin Forerunner 165 and Coros Pace 3. You may even find the Suunto RUN for the lowest price of the three, and you probably won’t need to compromise on your favourite feature. When looking at long lists of confusing features, the clue is in the name – Suunto RUN. Runners get all the core features.

Suunto has transformed in recent years, refocusing its higher-end watches on adventure and sports. Most notably, the company has vastly improved its smartphone app, which is now excellent and has also continued to use high-quality materials on its mid-range watches. With Suunto RUN, you get that excellent app, and whilst you don’t get the app store support of Suunto RACE, you do get a featherlight, durable sports tool with a market-leading AMOLED display, a gorilla glass lens, and a metal bezel

Suunto RUN

GPS Running Watch

$250

£ 199

+other retailers

Price and Value: A Budget-Friendly AMOLED Option

The Suunto Run is one of the most affordable AMOLED-screen, run-focused smartwatches. Its $250 price tag makes it an easy entry point into the Suunto ecosystem. Compared to its “older sibling,” the Suunto Race S ($350-$469), the Run offers similar core running features for $100 less.

Design and Comfort: Looks Good, Feels Good, Designed Well.

At 36 grams (1.27 oz), this is a lightweight watch, with the low weight slightly boosting heart rate accuracy as the watch moves less on your wrist. The featherlight 22mm nylon strap is soft, snug and stretchy, making it comfortable to wear 24/7. I would change the heavily ‘SUUNTO’ branded strap for a more 24/7 aesthetic alternative.

It features an impressive 1.32-inch AMOLED touchscreen (466 x 466px). It’s a bright, responsive, high-resolution display that’s readable in direct sunlight and looks great outside of sports and in.

The watch is controlled via the touchscreen, two standard buttons, and a digital crown. The digital crown allows easy scrolling through menus and data screens, which is great for everyday use but a must-have when the screen is wet from sweat/rain and less responsive.

The body is ‘plastic’ or more accurately, glass fibre reinforced polyamide. The thin steel bezel and Gorilla Glass are more premium materials that add durability. It’s also waterproof to 50 meters (5ATM).

What stands out most for me here is the buttons’ usability, the display’s visibility and the durability of premium materials – unique at the entry-level price.

Key Running and Sport Features

The Suunto Run has 34 sport modes, skewed heavily towards every running genre. 34 sounds a lot, and it probably is for runners, but other watches offer more.

New run-specific modes include:

• Finish-Time Mode (Marathon Mode): Provides real-time finish-time estimates based on your current pace, a different take on competitors’ more common virtual pacer feature.
• Track Mode: Increases distance accuracy and gives a prettier  GPS trace when running on an athletic track, provided you choose the correct lane. It’s a ‘pro’ feature that most will not use, but reflects the comprehensive nature of the suite of running features.

Beyond running, it supports everyday activities like hiking, cycling, swimming, yoga, tennis, and boxing, including multisport / triathlon profiles. However, restrictions exist; for example, cycling modes do not support power meters (added Jul 2025).

You can customise sport modes and data screens through the Suunto app to see your preferred metrics, with options for 1 to 4 data fields per page. Structured interval workouts can also be created in the Suunto app and synced to the watch for audio-guided training.

The watch provides everything from simple post-run reporting to insights into:

• Training Load and Stress Score.
• Recovery guidance, including HRV from sleep, duration, and daily resource levels.
• Fitness Level (VO2max) and race time estimates for standard distances.

New Feature – Zone Sense

Zone Sense is a great new feature that dynamically determines your aerobic (AeT, LT1) and anaerobic threshold (AnT, Lt2, Lactate) during sport. This is a superb feature based on relatively new HRV science called DFA a1 (actually it’s a variation of that, but some niche applications use dfa a1 and that’s what it is more commonly known as). The only downside is that it requires a Bluetooth chest strap.

It really is the case that your zones vary from day to day and even during your exercise as you fatigue. Zone Sense works it all out for you in near real time. In testing I found it to be most reliable at training around your aerobic threshold, less so for faster, VO2max and threshold training.

Suunto ZoneSense (DDFA) – thoughts after a threshold run

Music Storage and Connectivity

Although new to Suunto, RUN has legacy music abilities by industry standards.

You can manually store hundreds of MP3s on the watch and playback directly to headphones without a nearby smartphone.

Suunto Wing Review

If you need music and compatibility with a streaming service, you will want a Garmin or an Apple Watch. Suunto and Coros do not support Spotify or similar services.

While I have a Spotify family account, I only listen to the same songs I did 10 years ago and have on CD. So watches like Suunto RUN are fine for people like me who only occasionally (or never) need to listen to music. For the significant minority who listen to music whilst running, the lack of streaming support is a fatal omission.

Smart Features, Smart Payments

Suunto RUN offers standard smartwatch features like phone notifications, media controls for your smartphone, and alarms. Most sports watches do the same.

However, it lacks contactless payment options. There is support for Alipay in China, but for anywhere else in the world, the only option open to you would be for a generic payment strap like the one produced between Fidesmo and Polar, which fits most watches.

GPS and Heart Rate Accuracy – Tests, Results, and Conclusions

TL;DR – Suunto RUN has accurate GPS by 2025 standards.

Like the high-end Suunto watches, Run also has a Sony dual-frequency GPS capability (L1 + L5). Sony is no longer the best GPS chipset, but it’s up there with the best. The current generation of dual-frequency chipsets, including Sony, is the first to be what I say is accurate.

TL;DR – Suunto RUN’s new optical HR sensor needs improvement.

Suunto RUN boasts a new optical HR sensor, but the results I experienced were mixed. Sometimes excellent and oftentimes not. Wear a chest strap or biceps band during sports for accurate results, and you should find the watch to be accurate when used outside of sports.

Here is a selection of test results

Suburban Running Test

Excellent results when running

Open Water Swimming

Providing you get a good GPS signal at the start and don’t keep your Suunto submerged for too long, you should get great results like this.

Cycling

Tracks are great when cycling too

GPS Accuracy – What I haven’t tested

I have yet to perform my standard running GPS test and see how it performs in areas where tree cover and tall buildings are an issue. Based on what I’ve seen, I’m confident the results will be excellent, but there will be some issues in built-up areas (that’s how the Sony chips perform). TBC

Heart Rate Accuracy

I know how to wear and use optical HR devices properly. Even when worn and used correctly, heart rate accuracy is not great. That said, results will vary by person, sport, and how you use it. You might get lucky, or not. Wear a chest strap or biceps band.

The Suunto Run includes a barometric altimeter for elevation data, once a high-end feature, this is now relatively common at this price point. It’s accurate enough for non-specialist uses.

Altitude measurements were generally in the right ballpark, possibly under-reporting and possibly drifting whilst stationary, suggesting incorrectly ‘fused’ sensor data between barometer and 3D GPS, as this chart exemplifies:

Suunto App Experience

The Suunto app is where all your workout data is synchronised and analysed, and where you personalise your watch’s screens. In my opinion, it is one of the better apps for a sports watch.

The app does not have the complexity of sports analytical platforms, nor should it. There is a good balance of easy-to-glance recovery, sleep, progress and workout stats, with a deeper dive possible into your completed workouts. Like all other apps, you can sync your workouts to platforms like Strava.

The app lacks a Training Plan feature, so you can’t import a 3rd party plan, nor can the app’s AI create a plan. However, you can manually create and schedule workouts and structured intervals and get AI-coached feedback.

There are compromises, too, with maps and routes. You can create a route in the Suunto app or externally, and it will manually sync to the watch, but there are no maps on the watch, so all you get is a breadcrumb trail. Full maps are typically only on brands’ more expensive models, and Suunto is no exception.

The app features a Suunto Coach (AI-based) that tracks training patterns and offers tailored but relatively generic feedback.

What’s Missing and Areas for Improvement

Suunto Run offers excellent value, but you must expect to compromise on Suunto’s more advanced features.

• No offline maps: Unlike the Suunto Race and Race S, the Run only offers basic breadcrumb navigation, without detailed underlying map data. This omission is not unusual at this level.
• Music storage limitations: It only supports drag-and-drop MP3 files, not streaming services like Spotify. This omission is not unusual due to commercial issues linking to the streaming services.
• No smart payment features: Lacks widespread contactless payment support like Garmin Pay. A payment strap is a workaround. Again, this omission is not unusual; companies the size of Suunto only have the option to partner with middlemen like Fidesmo, but Suunto hasn’t yet done that.

• Limited watch faces and customisations: For example, complications cannot show VO2max. Most watch companies have inadequate watchfaces and the ability to customise them. They don’t seem to realise that people wear watches 24×7 for aesthetic reasons – if you have the wrong utility or aesthetic, people simply aren’t going to wear your watch and will either not buy them in the first place or change at some point in the future.
• No external running plans: Perhaps the core omission from what is billed as a running watch. This is the one ‘app’ (ability) that Suunto should add or at least boost their AI Coach to give daily suggested workouts that work towards a specified race goal.
• No SuuntoPlus apps: No access to 3rd party apps. This is seemingly a fair omission at this price, but it seems odd when competitors like Garmin and Apple offer it.
• Real-world battery life: While published as 12 days for everyday use and 20-30 hours of GPS usage, those performance levels deteriorate significantly when you have Always-On mode with medium brightness and can be improved using single-frequency GPS and less frequent recording. That said, I’m happy with the offer.
• Charging cradle: The new magnetic charging cradle, whilst a modest improvement on the previous version, is nowhere near as good as the strong magnetic chargers Suunto made 5+ years ago.
• Restrictive sensor support: There is HRV HR strap support, but not for power meters. This seems a somewhat petty and deliberate omission that will annoy the minority who need it.

Suunto Run vs. Competitors

The Suunto Run is positioned directly against the Garmin Forerunner 165 (Music), Coros Pace 3, and Polar Pace Pro.

• Compared to the Garmin Forerunner 165 Music: If you exclude the optical sensor, the Suunto Run has superior hardware, whereas Garmin has a superior ecosystem and superior smart features like music streaming and contactless payments.
• Compared to Polar Pacer: Polar has a more complete set of run features, most notably the running plans. However, Suunto’s presentation is superior all around.
• Compared to the Coros Pace 3, the Suunto Run has superior hardware. If you can live with its inferior screen, Coros will give you the best battery life.
• Compared to Suunto Race S: The Suunto Run is much lighter (36g vs. 60g) and $100 cheaper, with similar real-world battery life and fewer features. The Race S adds offline maps, more onboard storage (32GB vs. 4GB), SuuntoPlus apps, and running/bike power support – RACE S is a complete option.

Note Coros Pace 3 (not shown) and Polar PACER have old tech MIP screens

Dealing with Missing Features

Having used all these watches, I appreciate that you must compromise somewhere or jump to the next price tier. There are multiple price tiers ahead of you, but if you can afford $100 for the next tier, the Suunto Race S is an excellent watch with few compromises, and you should get that if you can.

Smart features, Advanced features – Generally, Garmin is a safer choice if you are unsure of the advanced features you need, but Garmin typically gets a bad rap for usability, complexity, and reliability, especially for newer models. If you are a ‘normal’ runner (millions of us!), the Suunto will do what you need – be it a parkrun or marathon. Then again, so will an Apple Watch…

Maps – If maps are a must-have for you at this price level, you can get 3rd party map apps for the Garmin environment (dwMAP). Still, you might be better off considering a cheaper brand like Amazfit or even an Apple Watch.

Suunto Run Detailed Specifications

Here are the detailed specifications of the Suunto RUN.

Who Is The Suunto Run For?

The Suunto Run is an excellent choice for any ability level, specifically for anyone who also wants

• a reasonably good but not excessive battery life.
• to be exposed to more advanced running features, without reams of unnecessary ones.
• no or basic route navigation
• no or basic music support
• the aesthetics of an AMOLED screen, and decent-looking watch faces and menus.
• 24/7 comfort and decent in-sport durability

It’s also capable of multisport and triathlon, making it suitable for those planning their first triathlon.

Suunto Run Review – Takeout: A Worthy Contender, worth considering

msrp/rrp: $250 (£199/€249)

Historically, Suunto struggled to make compelling sports watches at any level. More recently, the company finally nailed the mid-tier market with Race and Race S. However, at the ‘entry level’, Suunto RUN is not the ‘no-brainer’ that those two are, but it is worthy of serious consideration. It’s a strong contender to its established rivals here, none of whom stand out as the obvious winner.

While RUN has some software limitations (app store) and hardware quirks (charging cradle), these are relatively minor and offset by the smartphone app, which sets Suunto apart from the cheaper brands and offers a rich experience similar to that of Garmin or Polar.

For me, the hardware and design aesthetics set Suunto apart and would be the key factors in my choice to own and use one – there are few alternatives with steel bezels and Gorilla Glass at this price. Suunto’s menus and screens on the watch are imperfect and have visual flaws and oddities, but so do those on every competitor’s watch; Suunto easily holds its own if design and quality are important to you.

Suunto RUN

GPS Running Watch

$250

£ 199

+other retailers

Sources & Resources

• Suunto Run official manual and user guide
• Suunto Run official product page
• Suunto Run official software release notes
• Suunto Run Support Page
• Suunto community forum
• Suunto on Reddit
• Suunto on watchUSeek

the5krunner.com © 2010-2025

tfk, the5krunner
Sports Technology Reviewer and International Age Group TriathleteWith 20 years of testing Garmin wearables and competing in triathlons at an international age group level, I provide expert insights into fitness tech, helping athletes and casual users make informed choices.

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