Suunto Race S In-Depth Review: Smaller, cheaper, yet better?

Suunto has just announced the Suunto Race S, a smaller and lighter version of the Suunto Race they announced last fall. Except, it’s got more features, better accuracy, is substantially cheaper, and is even manufactured in Finland. Unlike some of their competitors, it appears Suunto is actually listening to what their customers want. Well, mostly anyway.

The new Suunto Race S includes some big-ticket features people have been asking for, such as a Suunto Climb Guidance (a ClimbPro-like feature), better heart rate sensor accuracy, more watch face customization, and better UI responsiveness. Plus, a boatload of other items. In many ways, we start to see Suunto being able to focus on some of the smaller tweaks that people want, as opposed to being stuck on playing catch-up on big-ticket items. Not to say there still aren’t some much-needed omissions, but Suunto is clearly starting to find their groove here.

Before we get into it, note that Suunto provided a media loaner Suunto Race S watch to test. As usual, I’ll get that back to them here shortly. I’ll go out and pick up my own to continue testing the new features once they arrive. If you found this review useful, you can use the links at the bottom, or consider becoming a DCR Supporter, which makes the site ad-free, while also getting access to a mostly weekly video series behind the scenes of the DCR Cave. And of course, it makes you awesome.

With that, let’s get into the new bits!

What’s New:

The Suunto Race S is obviously new hardware, namely in that it’s smaller hardware. But, it’s also got some updated internals too – such as the new optical heart rate sensor. And then, on the software side, there’s a slate of updated features. All of these features are going to the existing Suunto Race (as well as Suunto Vertical and Suunto 9 Peak Pro). Thus, all those continue to get updated from a software standpoint.

Here’s what’s new (as compared to the existing/larger Suunto Race):

– Suunto Race S is a 45mm case size with a 1.32” AMOLED touchscreen
– New optical HR sensor design
– Manufactured in Finland (see notes below)
– Added Suunto Climb Guidance (a ClimbPro-like feature)
– Added three new watch faces
– Added ability to customize watch faces, coloring, and complications (from the watch)
– Added colorful emojis (as opposed to black/white stenciled emojis)
– Increased from 300 emojis to ~1,000 emojis
– Increased performance/responsiveness of the user interface (doesn’t suck anymore)
– Added sport-mode-specific display settings (e.g., brightness/etc…)
– Added new paused screen (lets you see workout data screens when paused)
– Increased map zoom level up to 20KM (from 2KM)
– Reduced turn-by-turn notifications to just the bottom of the screen (versus full-screen takeover)
– Added more than half a dozen Suunto Apps as part of the June 2024 update (including Moxy sensor support)
– Adding menstrual cycling tracking in the Suunto App (manual logging/tracking at this point)
– Improved step counter to reduce misdetection (e.g. reducing teeth brushing steps)
– Added Vietnamese language support
– Increased map storage to 32GB (from 16GB for the stainless steel Race)
– 28% lighter weight than the Suunto Race (60g vs 83g)
– 14% thinner than the Suunto Race (11.4mm for S vs 13.3mm)
– Has 50m waterproofing, instead of 100m on Suunto Race
– Maintains 100% carbon offset inclusion
– Maintains dual-frequency/multiband GNSS
– Maintains same 22mm band/strap design
– Glass is Gorilla Glass (versus sapphire crystal on Suunto Race)
– Stainless steel bezel
– Priced at $349/349EUR

In terms of manufacturing, Suunto is bringing back manufacturing to Finland for the Suunto Race S. With the Suunto Race, that manufacturing was done in China. The Suunto Race S though will eventually be manufactured in two different places, depending on where shipments are going. For the Americas, Europe, and likely South Africa distribution, it’ll be units from Finland. Whereas for Asia, it’ll be units made in China. Suunto noted that there may be temporary edge cases where units come from one area versus the other, but on the whole, that’s the plan. That said, to begin, manufacturing is only initially in Finland. Down the road it’ll be started/ramped up in China.

Here’s a quick chart comparison between the Suunto Race & Suunto Race S, from a specs standpoint:

Here’s the official battery chart for the Suunto Race S:

I will say, that these battery life values for the Daily Use section seem very optimistic based on my testing. I’m seeing about 3-4 days for always-on display (albeit with roughly an hour training per day), and about 5ish days battery life with AOD off (with an hour or so per day GPS training). The GPS battery rates have been spot-on.

Got all that? Good, let’s get cooking.

The Basics:

In this section I’ll focus on the day-to-day usage of the watch from a usability, widgets, activity/sleep tracking standpoint, as well as other non-sports focused areas. In the next sections I’ll cover sports/training features, then navigation/mapping features. Very little of this has changed from the previous Suunto Race unit launched less than a year ago, but for those bits that are new, I’ll dive into the differences.

The Suunto Race has both buttons, as well as a Digital Crown. The Digital Crown is used for navigating up/down lists, as well as zoom in/out on maps. This is in addition to the two other buttons above/below it, and the touchscreen itself.

From a usability standpoint, the Digital Crown works fine, though, those that know my reviews over the years know that I don’t really find the Digital Crown great (on any watch, Apple included) for anything except zooming in/out on maps. In general, I find digital crowns finicky to use, especially during sport activities, compared to just pressing buttons. But, that’s mostly a personal preference.

Meanwhile, the 1,000 nit AMOLED screen is brilliant to see, both in bright sunny conditions and darker conditions. I spent most of my time over the last week+ in Greece, on a very sunny island. I never had any issues seeing the screen in any conditions during mid-summer-sun, or at night.

In the case of the Suunto Race S, as with most AMOLED displays, there are essentially two modes: Always-on, or Gesture-based. Always-on means the screen is always-on, but will dim when you put your wrist down. Whereas Gesture-based means that the screen turns off entirely when you put your wrist down. This is obviously done to save battery, with Suunto saying that in gesture-based mode Suunto claims 7 days of battery life, versus always-on claims of about 5 days of battery life. As noted earlier on, I’m not quite getting these numbers, but rather closer to 3-4 days in always-on, and 4-5 days in gesture-based. In this case, I had the “Display Only” option, which should save more battery.

Now, one new bit here with the Suunto Race S is the new watch face customization. Sure, the Suunto Race S got three new watch faces, but what matters here is the ability to quickly and easily customize the watch faces (including complications and coloring) right from the wrist. Simply double-tap the screen and it lets you tweak the various complications:

My only complaint here is that nearly every shower I took, resulted in it activating the watch face complication configuration. This wasn’t a huge deal, roughly akin to how my Apple Watch seems to always be swapping watch faces due to rubbing against clothing/etc. It’s slightly annoying, but not a deal breaker.

Now looking at some of the daily stats, each morning when you wake-up, you’ll get a morning report of your sleep details from last night. This is something Suunto has had for a year or two, but is now improved with the Suunto Race and carried through to the Suunto Race S in that the screen will stay there for at least an hour or so, until you dismiss it. Previously, it’d disappear the moment you rubbed your eyes open, meaning you virtually never saw it.

In addition to the morning report, you can dive into your exact sleep stats as well in the sleep details widgets (obviously a different day below, versus above):

In terms of the accuracy of sleep data, I’ve found the times I went to sleep/woke-up spot-on, as well as handling cases of briefly waking up early morning (e.g. 5-7AM briefly for a few minutes), which is always good to see. As for sleep stages/phase accuracy, it’s not an area I judge, because the comparative tools to try and do that simply aren’t that accurate – only in the 80% range (and we’d never judge heart rate accuracy on something only 80% accurate). Thus, I just take the general position that most of the sleep stage/phase data is iffy at best from all companies. Do note that Suunto will track naps, though, I haven’t taken any naps during this testing period. I’ll probably get right on that later today, after all these reviews go out. I did however find that the SpO2 readings at night (blood oxygen levels), were basically garbage.

Further, the Suunto Race S tracks your Heart Rate Variability, or HRV. Suunto rolled this out last year to the Suunto Race (and other units), and it monitors your HRV values throughout your sleep, and shows you the average. In comparing Suunto’s values to that of Garmin, Polar, Whoop, and Oura, all of them have been within +/- 2ms for the entire time, each time. Thus, the differences tended to come more from how each unit classified awake-time within that. You’ll see HRV status in a variety of places, but most notably in the ‘Recovery HRV’ widget down below in the widgets roll. Here this shows your current HRV ranges (which take 14 nights of initial sleep data to first populate), followed by where you currently stand.

Now, this is just one of the various widgets that you’ll see when you scroll down from the watch face. Other widgets include the stopwatch, notifications, heart rate, resources (basically your energy for the day), sleep, sunrise/sunset, and more. You can see your training-related status here, as well as other stuff, like weather.

Now, all of these stats are visible in the Suunto App on your phone. You can see it first at the high-level for everything in the last 7 days, and then if you open up that day you see a bit of a ‘feed’ for your day, showing your sleep, activity, workout, etc stats:

And these stats are also available for training volume/etc too – but more on that later.

Next is smartphone notifications. The Suunto Race S greatly expands the number of emoji here, from ~300 to ~1,000. And even more importantly, they now have color in all of them (versus black and white Commodore 64-style emoji previously):

Also of note is that the Suunto Race S carries forward the flashlight via display of the past. This isn’t a dedicated flashlight like on the Garmin watches, but rather, uses the screen instead. You can also create a hotkey for this (to hold down the upper right button for two seconds). I found it perfectly functional for finding my way around hotel rooms at night. It’s not as bright as the Garmin ones, but again, it does the trick.

Lastly, it should be noted the bands are swappable. It comes with a 22mm standard band attachment, so you can easily swap it out for other Suunto bands, or any number of a gazillion other 22mm watch bands on Amazon. Your choice. Also, Suunto has a variety of bands they’re selling the unit with. The one seen in this review is the lower right orange/purple one.

The stock bands are pretty comfortable, so all is well there. And of course, given they’re designed for sport-usage, let’s shift into the next category.

Sports Usage:

Of course,  the entire purpose of buying a Suunto watch is for doing workouts or sporting activities. Or at least, I hope that’s why you’d buy this watch.

The Suunto Race S has all the same sports as the existing Suunto Race, which is to say, everything. All of these, in turn, have varying levels of sport-specific data and customization of things like data fields. In general, Suunto sport modes tend to be more about calorie burn and categorization of your activities, rather than having unique data metrics for each and every sport type. Obviously, the big-name sport types like running/swimming/cycling have unique per-sport metrics, but when you get to some of the less-popular ones, it’s more about general data fields. Suunto has been expanding this a bit though with some of their Suunto Apps, which are little apps that can run on the watch, and are sometimes a bit more specific in terms of data they track.

To begin, you’ll tap the upper right button to open up the most recently used sport mode, from there you can select the sport mode and change it to something else. Once you tap a sport mode, you’ll be brought to this page here, which shows GPS status, sensor connectivity status, battery life estimates, and more.

From here you can change your battery mode (which can offer longer battery life, but usually at the reduction of some other feature or data update rate), as well as add things like a route. You’ll also see the ability to choose the map style (light or dark), and most notably, SuuntoPlus Apps. SuuntoPlus apps are both Suunto-developed and 3rd party apps that you can load onto the watch. This comes in two basic flavors: Apps and Guides. Apps are all-encompassing, while Guides tend to be for things like structured workouts.

With the Suunto Race S, Suunto pre-loads certain Suunto Apps tied to certain sport profiles. For example, a tennis-focused app developed by Suunto when you launch the Tennis sport profile. With today’s announcement of the Suunto Race S, there’s even more new Suunto Apps being announced, which of course go to more than just the Suunto Race S, but all the other recent watches as well.

That said, as I’ve complained for years, Suunto is also using them as a bit of a crutch. Many of these SuuntoPlus Apps that are developed by Suunto should really be built-in features of the watch. And the reason that matters, is that you can only add in 2 apps per sport profile at a time, or 1 app and 1 guide (they do at least remember them each time now). Thus while Suunto as a company has many of the sport features Garmin does, you can’t actually use many of them concurrently together, because of the limits Suunto has in place – thus making it much less useful.

Suunto really needs to pick at least a few of these per quarter, and ‘upgrade’ them to built-in features. Undoubtedly they have the data on which ones are most popular (especially over longer periods of time), so this shouldn’t be a big ask.

That said, Suunto did build-in a structured workout builder into their app, making it easy to get structured workouts on there. These still take up the slot of a ‘Suunto Guide’, but you can run them concurrently with an app, so it’s less of an annoyance there. You can create multiple steps and then send it to the watch (even to a specific date). Further, they also support TrainingPeaks structured workouts, as well as workouts from numerous other connected platforms.

In my case, I created a series of 800m repeats, and then executed it on the Suunto Race S. This was easy to create via the app, and even easier to follow on the watch. I simply ran when it told me to run, and dropped dead when it said I was done running.

As for changing your data pages/fields, you’ll do that via the Suunto App on your smartphone. You can customize these per sport profile, with variants for whether or not you’ve got a cycling power meter connected, or other sensors (and running power is built-in, so that happens automatically with no external sensors). That said, what’s rather annoying here is that you can’t edit existing (default) sport profiles. You have to start over and re-create, even if you want to change a single data field…which, is (and long has been) bizarre – resulting in duplicate sport modes. I’m not sure why this is still the case.

Finally, before we start actually running, we’ve gotta talk about sensors/accessories. The Suunto Race S can connect to Bluetooth Smart sensors including heart rate sensors, cycling power meters, cycling cadence/speed sensors, and running footpads. However, it will only connect to a single sensor of each type, it cannot save more than one sensor type. Further, it doesn’t even show you the name of the sensor it connected to (it will at least show you the power meter crank length option though, if applicable).

Look, I’ve said it before in my Suunto Race review, and I’ll say it again in this Suunto Race S review– this just isn’t good enough in 2024. It wasn’t good enough in 2018 either. Or even 2012. Every other watch supports saving multiple sensors of the same type, which is particularly important for cyclists. Especially those cyclists with home trainers or indoor bikes that want to connect to those, else, you’re constantly having to re-pair sensors (without ever knowing if you’ve paired to your bike, or perhaps your buddy’s bike). Suunto really needs to have this be a focus area for the winter, ahead of next season. I’m not sure why this can keeps getting kicked down the road.

Likewise, Suunto also doesn’t have any broadcast heart rate feature, to transmit the optical HR sensor to apps like Zwift, Peloton, etc… Again, in 2024, with many people using that function for indoor training, it seems like an obvious gap. Especially now that Suunto has fixed the accuracy issues with the new optical HR sensor found in the Suunto Race S.

Ok, with everything all set, let’s get this workout underway. After tapping start, you’ll see your data pages as configured:

I had no issues with data pages, crashes, or anything of the sort during any of my runs/rides/swims/etc… Everything worked exactly as I expected. Likewise, I had no issues viewing the data pages of the AMOLED display during bright sunny workouts, or evening sunset workouts. Again, AMOLED displays of 2024 are very solid compared to AMOLED or LCD screens of just a few years ago. Visibility is simply not an issue anymore.

Oh, and that new ‘pause’ screen? Here ya go. It allows you to iterate through your data fields/pages like normal, even when paused:

Once done, you’ll save the workout and see a complete summary of your workout data.

And, of course, all of this data is visible on the Suunto App as well. If you have connected platforms like Strava or TrainingPeaks, those will show up a few seconds later once synced to the Suunto App.

In that same vein, you’ll see training load and recovery stats within the watch, as well as app platform. On the watch itself, you’ll see the TrainingPeaks metrics of TSB (Training Stress Balance), TSS (Training Stress Score), and CTL (Chronic Training Load), down in the widgets.

But these are also shown on the Suunto App, on the main homepage, and you can dig into them in more depth if you want to here too.

Suunto has licensed these from TrainingPeaks, so that in theory they should match your TrainingPeaks account, assuming the data you have matches what’s in your TP account.

Mapping & Navigation:

The Suunto Race S contains the same maps and navigation features of the Suunto Race, except now adding in Suunto’s new ‘Climb Guidance’ feature, as well as increased map zoom levels, and minor tweaks to turn-by-turn prompts so that they don’t overtake the screen.

The Suunto Race S has 32GB of storage, which is notable because the base edition of the Suunto Race (stainless steel) only had 16GB. Practically speaking, both is plenty for the maps that Suunto uses, as they are much smaller than Garmin maps since they lack street names/POI/etc… To get maps onto the watch, you’ll need WiFi connectivity, and the Suunto App on your phone, allowing you to select and save WiFi networks.

Next, you’ll choose which maps/regions you want. Suunto’s region picker allows you to get fairly granular on the exact area you want. This is great in that you can download smaller map regions if you’ve got limited connectivity right before an adventure (whereas Polar and Garmin have massive multi-GB map sizes). It also means you’d have to try really darn hard to fill up the 32GB of storage (or about 28GB of usable space). On the downside, if you’re traveling in a foreign country, you might not know the correct/exact region name for the area(s) you’re in, since those don’t usually align to provinces or cities. It will show you your nearby maps though, which helps get the right ones, once you’ve arrived:

Downloading maps uses the aforementioned WiFi, once placed on the charger. You’ll see it connect to WiFi and download any maps in the queue. This is kinda nice in that if you know you’re going on a trip, you can choose a bunch of regions, then put your watch on the charger to top-up. Suunto’s map download process doesn’t tend to be fast though, so give yourself some time.

Once maps are loaded, they’ll be on your device till you delete them. First though, let me quickly give an overview of the ’state of maps’ in relation to various devices in the market today:

Breadcrumb trail only: This is when you don’t have a background map, but just follow a little trail on a blank screen. This is essentially Suunto’s older devices, and Polar’s older devices. No maps, just a line.

Non-routable Maps: This is when you have a map displayed behind your route, which shows terrain/trails/lakes/water/mountains/etc… Depending on the company, it may or may not show name terrain labels too. However, this isn’t routable, so it doesn’t actually *know* if you’re on the ‘Deer Lake Trail’ – it just knows you’re on the breadcrumb track. If you stray too far from the trail, it’ll give you an off-course warning, but it cannot smartly re-route you back. It just tells you via compass how to find the trail again. This is what the Suunto Race/Vertical are, and all COROS watches, and the Polar Vantage V3/Grit X2 Pro.

Routable Maps: This is the ‘highest’ level, and is when the watch can actually route on the trails by itself, if needed. It knows you’re on Deer Lake Trail, and the next trail coming up is Big Bear Trail. And it knows if you miss that turn, whether or not you need to turn-around, or can catch-up later on. This is what most of the higher-end Garmin devices are (any devices with mapping, like the Fenix/Epix series, or higher-end Forerunners).

Now, practically speaking – I’ve routed with all three types for years, and generally speaking, you’ll get to your destination just fine. However, having maps (either routable or non-routable) is a massive boost in confidence, mostly when you need to make a decision at a fork in the trail. With breadcrumb routing and slight trail junctions, it’s often just a bit of a guess or trial/error. But with maps, you can usually see terrain features (like a stream or hill) that make it easy to confirm.

With the Suunto Race S, it has the non-routable maps, albeit lacks place/location labels. Still, this is more than enough in most cases. The only scenario that you really want routable is when you go off-course permanently. In that case, you want a new route, and the Suunto Race S can’t do that for you. You’ll be on your own there, whereas a Garmin with routable maps can give you a new/updated route. But that happens super rarely to me.

With all that background, let’s look at some routing. I did a run the other day, for which I created a route on Strava first, and then it synced to the Suunto App. From there, it synced to the Suunto Race S. However, notably, on the Suunto App, you’ll see the new climb information shown along the bottom. At right is another route I created to show more variation in the climbs, and how the climb metrics are displayed (you’ll see the one at right has 4 steeper climbs, versus my Greek Mountains route has one steeper climb.

Once you’re ready to start, you’ll select the route from your route listing. You can see a quick overview of the route stats, but you can’t see the details of upcoming climbs like you can with Garmin ClimbPro. Still, this is Suunto’s first foray into climbing metrics, so it’s a good starting point.

Next, once your route has started, you’ll see the route atop the map. You can zoom in, pan around, etc… This is where the new 20KM zoom limit comes in (versus 2KM previously), and is handy when you need to get a much wider picture of the area around you. For hiking, 20KM probably won’t be used much. But when cycling, 20KM is only 35-40 minutes of quick riding. Note the terrain topo map shown, though you won’t see street names/etc:

As you approach a turn, you’ll get a turn notification prompt, which no longer takes up the entire page like before. Instead, it’s just a banner along the bottom, allowing you to continue seeing your data pages. Next, as you approach a climb, it’ll briefly show an upcoming climb warning, with the climb number (e.g. Climb 1 of 4).

Instead, it’ll trigger the climb page to start showing up, you’ll need to press the tiny little +/- at the top right (which can be hard to see in certain lighting conditions). When you tap that +/- button, it’ll show you the new climbing page, showing your place on that specific climb, and the gradient stats:

Again, I appreciate what Suunto has started to do here. It’s a good start. But, I’m looking for a bit more…flair…in my climbing metrics. The above 2.5KM climb had plenty of variability in it, from 2-5% sustained, to shorter 10-14% chunks. Plenty of pain to go around. Yet looking at the above, you’d think it was pretty much same-same all the way up.

Compare that to the below, side-by-side, shot from Garmin’s ClimbPro, showing more clearly the variations of what’s coming:

The good news is, this is something that Suunto can easily update in the future. I didn’t find any of my climbs to show anything more than a single color. So while knowing how much distance/ascent is remaining to the top is a critical metric, the color-coordinated visualizations of the grade is what seals the deal on usefulness. In any case, I had no issues with these popping up during my workouts, nor any issues with navigation.

In terms of GPS battery life burn/usage, both without and without navigation, I found that having navigation enabled did have an impact to the battery (as expected). In these cases, I was rarely on the map page actively, but on other pages instead. Albeit, some of the impact might have also been the heat. On days I was using navigation, it was quite hot (90°F/32°C). Versus the non-navigation days ended up being cooler (about 80°F/27°C). Just how the cookie crumbled. Still, here’s some random stats:

Navigation Enabled: Recorded battery burn rates with an estimation of 17-19 hours across my tests
Navigation Disabled: Recorded battery burn rates with an estimation of 27-29 hours across my tests

The 30 hours is spot-on with Suunto’s battery claims. These were measured using the DCR Analyzer, which enumerates out the recorded battery life values from Suunto’s watches (as well as Garmin/Wahoo/Hammerhead/Stages/others), and then determines the trend to estimate battery life:

As noted above, in terms of non-GPS battery life (e.g. just daily smartwatch mode), I found the battery burned a bit faster than Suunto’s claims. Seeing roughly 3 days for always-on mode (with it in sleep mode at night), and then about 5 days for regular gesture-based display

Accuracy:

In my original Suunto Race review last year, I started off the heart rate accuracy section without any fanfare saying the “…optical heart rate sensor accuracy. It’s bad. There’s no two ways to slice it.”

Good news! Suunto clearly heard the feedback from myself and many other reviews about how bad the Suunto optical HR sensor was, and as a result, they doubled the number of LEDs, and revamped the algorithms. In turn, it went from “worst sensor in the endurance industry” to “damn, very strong”. It’s not quite Apple/Garmin good, but it nearly aced all my tests.

Here’s a run I did, relatively steady-state, and as you can see – after the first 90 seconds or so, it’s very much the same the entire time:

Next is a run that initially goes up a mountain nearly 1,000ft, and then eventually comes back down. An out and back of sorts, that ended up as an interval run. Everything is very solid here, minus one interesting blip at the 1hr 2min marker…when I stopped to drink water out of a faucet. It didn’t like that.

Next, we’ve got a route that includes a bunch of climbing, followed by a bunch of descending (running). This is notable because it’s these sorts of routes where you can get cadence lock while descending (where the unit will lock onto your footsteps, instead of your heart rate). However, no issues here:

Next, looking at an interval run (800m repeats), it had no problems at all holding here. Again, we see a slight fumble in the first 90 seconds of the run, and then it’s all good. The slight fumble in the last interval is actually just me holding the camera, so I won’t hold that against it.

Now, when it came to cycling heart rate (outdoors), it was all just bad-bad. That’s not terribly surprising, given it’s one of the harder things for optical HR sensors to get right:

Same was true for another ride as well. In this case, the one labeled ‘Karoo3’ is the Garmin HRM-PRO chest strap source.

So, moving on to GPS.  Suunto maintained the very strong land-based GPS accuracy, but also seemingly worked to fix the openwater swim accuracy (finally!). Even happier times. So, let’s dive into it.

First, some land stuff. Seriously, this is so boring because there’s nothing to look at. Not in the mountains, not in the trees, not in the city, it’s just…identical to the other top-end units I compared it with (Garmin Epix Pro, and Apple Watch Ultra 2), such as this run:

On a run in the mountains a bit, with some coverage and/or steeper sections, I had no issues with it holding lock just the same as the other units.

Same goes here on these small roads. This is actually a fairly steep section descending (12-15% grades), and didn’t see any meaningful differences here between units.

If we look at cycling routes, again, it’s all virtually identical to a heap of different bike computers:

And no matter where on that entire line I zoom in, it’s all just like this, boringly the same:

So last but not least – what about openwater swimming? After all, that’s long been the most challenging thing for Suunto to get right. Well, finally, they did:

Or at least, pretty good. Sure, it’s not quite as perfect as you’d see from Garmin’s openwater swim tracks, but this is a massive improvement over the Suunto Race.

Ultimately, there’s some very solid improvements here. The biggest is clearly optical HR, which went from ‘very not good’ to ‘very solid’, at least for running. Meanwhile, for GPS, it maintained the accuracy I saw previously for land-based activities for the Suunto Vertical/Race, and improved upon it for openwater swimming.

(Note: All of the charts in these accuracy sections were created using the DCR Analyzer tool. It allows you to compare power meters/trainers, heart rate, cadence, speed/pace, GPS tracks, and plenty more. You can use it as well, more details here.)

Wrap-Up:

Just over a year ago, in Spring 2023, when Suunto released the Suunto Vertical, I commented that it appeared Suunto was turning the ship around on hardware – but needed to work on the price side. Then, last fall when they released AMOLED-based Suunto Race at $449, building upon the Vertical’s features, but dropping the price, I said in my review summary “this appears to be Suunto’s best watch ever.” I went further and noted that if Suunto wanted to be in the mix, they had to keep doing what they were doing in terms of pricing – but that they had to improve in accuracy.

Turns out, they did both. Strongly.

Bringing the Suunto Race S down to $349 is astonishing. All while increasing optical HR and openwater GPS accuracy, increasing responsiveness, increasing a slate of features, and bringing manufacturing back to Finland. They more than stuck the landing. One might argue they went for blood. Not Garmin’s blood, but COROS and Polar’s blood. The pricing here seems designed specifically to cause severe heartache for those two brands. Garmin can still lean on more features, deeper mapping/navigation, and other smartwatch stuffs (payments/music/etc…). But Polar and COROS? This significantly undercuts their pricing strategies, even more than the $449 Suunto Race did.

Now, that said, there’s still some areas Suunto really needs to work on. Everything and anything to do with paired sensors (e.g. cycling sensors), mostly sucks. Likewise, as awesome as the ever-growing collection of on-watch Suunto Apps are, these need to start being baked into the core watch functions, as opposed to being a ‘pick only two’ choice every time. Suunto is doing great work here, it just needs to be consolidated into the core product, else most people won’t bother to use it.

Still, Suunto is nailing it with the Suunto Race S. And like I said with the prior Suunto Race review – I hope people reward them for that. Their decisions illustrate that they not only have a plan, but are executing on it in a way that’s clearly aimed at increasing market share.

With that – thanks for reading!

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