SUUNTO Race

Excellent GPS watch, light weight, great battery life. Flashlight, and find my phone features are handy additions. Suunto app is decent.

This is such a great watch. Had it on for 3 days and battery life has only dipped 9%. It’s super lightweight but still looks and feels like a premium product. Very simple functionality and layout which is great and looks very modern and updated inside of interface. I’ve had Apple Watch Ultra and garmin epix 2 and I would wear this one in a heart beat. Apple is nice if you want to connect cellular and leave your phone, garmin is very ruggid, but this watch hits all desires in between. Highly recommend especially for the price

There are so many in-depth reviews of this watch, buyers know what they are getting. I will only add a few observations since upgrading from the Ambit 3 Peak that I used for 6 years.The screen is excellent: easy to read, crisp, best of the best.Battery life is best in class, nothing better.The GPS accuracy is excellent.Maps & routing work great.Underwater depth gauge is unique and cool.The heart rate accuracy is mediocre. It's not terrible, but it is not as good as competitors. It sometimes gives very incorrect readings for several minutes at a time. Like climbing up a steep hill with your heart rate in the 160-180 range yet it reads 85 which is about half the true heart rate.Buyers should know that Suunto just released a new version of this watch called the "Race S" that does everything the "Race" does, but is smaller, cheaper, with an improved heart rate sensor. Even so, I'm keeping my Race.

I’ve owned this watch for 11 months and have ran over 500 miles wearing this watch. I’ve owned 5 digital Suunto watches since 2006. The watch works great tracking my runs without my phone. The battery last prolly a good two weeks and only gets down to about 30% and that’s a daily use with prolly 5-8 runs.I have set to find someone else with this watch but I can’t complain. It’s a great watch and best part it kit what everyone else has but does the same if not more than your typical smart watch.Messages portion is very basic. They are all (text, email, door bell alerts) on the same icon. I don’t get the alerts in my watch but that a personal choice.Great watch. I would buy again.

The Good: Clear display and good battery lifeThe Bad:The heart rate accuracy is awful. I see it skip around 70-90 bpm for an entire run, then yesterday I did a 9 miler, and this watch said I averaged 172bpm! I compared this to my Coros watch, which put me accurately right around 145bpm. My Garmin had similar accuracy to Coros.The running cadence is measured in rpm and not steps. e.g. The watch cadence shows 85-90, so you have to double that number to get an accurate running cadence. Maths while running is hard. I reached out to customer service who said there was a setting for it, but they didn't know where it was located, and we were unable to find it.The 5 or 6 times I have tried to use the "find my phone" function, it can never connect to it. I just tried it again with no luck, and the phone is on my desk next to me. However, if I go to the app on my phone, connect to the phone, sync activities, then try the "find my phone" function, it will work. The problem here is, if I don't know where my phone is, how can I sync it to the watch with the app?I'm getting awful rashes and burn marks from the band. I take it off to shower, and make sure it's dry when I put it on, but they won't go away. The rashes cut open and bleed sometimes during longer efforts, even if I don't have the band that tight.When I go for a bike ride, the watch won't stay high enough on the wrist to prevent from the dial digging into the back of my hand. To the point where it cut open my skin in the last race and I was bleeding from it. I try to pull it up on my wrist and tighten the band, but it still slides down as I ride.The magnet on the charger is weak. It's easy to bump it off and not realize it's no longer charging. Why not just make a clip one, or one that locks into place? This would help for longer events when you need to charge it in your pack.The app takes forever to load activities. I also cannot edit the display of an activity while I'm doing it. e.g. If I'm out for a run, and I decide I want to see my average pace, I cannot go into the phone app and add avg pace to the watch screen without stopping the current activity first.The menus for controls and activities seem haphazard and disorganized. I've slowly gotten used to them, but there are other watches with menus that seem to flow better.I reached out to customer service on these issues, and it looked like they just copied and pasted responses back, and said have nice day. Pretty disappointing experience.At this point, I'm just wearing it because I spent money on it, but I can't say I'm enjoying it. It will probably end up on eBay or at Goodwill.

The heart rate monitor is nowhere near accurate.I came from the Apple Watch ecosystem and was looking for something with simplicity and enhanced fitness tracking. I really wanted to like this watch; the AMOLED screen, interface, and design are all top-of-the-line, but as a sports watch, the HRM is a total failure.My sedentary HR should be around 60, but this watch, Racer S, can give you anywhere from 120+ to 80+; it jumped around so much that you thought of visiting the ER.During exercise, the starting HR should be 60 to 70, but it started out giving you 120+ again and stopped working a few min into the exercise.I did contact Suunto technical support and tried toggling on/off the 24/7 HR tracking, soft reset, and hard reset. They all appeared to work for a brief period (like in a couple of hours) and then got back to "normal"Yes, if I am seriously into tracking my heart rate, I need a chest strap, but again, that will defeat the purpose of my mantra to keep things simple and common; this is a sports watch, and my Gen 4 Apple watch that I have been using several years does better than that.

Amazing watch, tons of features, incredible quality, absolutely not a bad purchase