A truly unfortunate purchase
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Hello, sorry if I start posting with a message of disapproval, but if I had found a similar message before purchasing I would have avoided buying a Suunto and having to complain afterwards.
First of all I have to say that I’m not a sports person, I go to work by bike, I go for walks or I swim with my little daughters, but I don’t practice any sports because, for some reasons that I prefer not to go into.
Secondly, I want to say that before this Suunto I used a modest Chinese smartwatch ( I don’t say the model as not to advertise it) which however beats this much more expensive Peak Pro 9, six to zero.
my complaints:
1 display of shameful quality, small, not very bright, the colours practically do not exist
2 complicated menus, of course it also depends on the size of the display
3 watch faces… misery
4 serious problem, synchronization with apple health… I read that there are users who have been complaining for many years, and Suunto has not done anything about it yet
5 I use a smartwatch mainly to track sleep, and here too, only problems, synchronisation with apple health non-existent, HRV activated but does not correctly record periods of sleep and wakeup, also the hours of sleep shown by the watch are different from those of the suunto app.
6 barometer… wrong altitude. If I reset it with the gps in the morning outdoors, at 0 meters above sea level, by the afternoon it already shows at least 38 meters of altitude. if I do again a reset, after another 4-5 hours, it goes back to indicating a random number
Aesthetically it is a really nice watch, you can see the quality materials, you can see that the sensors are excellent, but overall, the software management is disappointing, there are too many gaps, the money spent seems really wasted. After a month of use, and hours and hours wasted reading on the forums how to make it work well, I give up, ebay is waiting… I’m really very disappointed.
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@msa2025 I am sorry for your failed expectations, but you probably should have done your homework a bit better. You bought a serious sports watch expecting to get a smart watch.
Display and the bland colors are due to MIPS display technology which is the reason of awesome battery life. I wouldn’t change my MIPS display for all of the Amoleds in the world.
Complicated menus… I’d say the menus are logical but it’s your opinion and I respect that.
Watch faces: there are not hundreds of them like in Chinese activity trackers and Apple Watch, but I don’t really miss a full packed NASDAQ index dashboard or Batman logos. Suunto watch faces are suitable for sports watch and they provide information for the intended audience. Also, Suunto has heard the requests in this forum and the watch faces are today more configurable than what they used to be.
Apple Health; don’t worry because the sync is equally bad to Google Fit and Huawei Health and many more. It shouldn’t be a surprise that Suunto App is the primary dashboard. If you want Apple Health then you should have probably gone with Apple Watch. Apple opens their APIs to their chosen partners and it comes with a considerable price tag. Suunto decided not to go that way.
You are right about sleep tracking, it is a known problem. It sucks big time, especially with the watches older than Suunto Race (older ones have different algorithm). I used to have a few believable sleep measurements, but still I felt empty. Sleep tracking didn’t give me any added value. I think it is something that must be there because all of the competitors have it. I would actually benefit from something that could warn me from the first symptoms of sleep apnea, but I don’t think any watch on my wrist under the pillow can do that.
Barometer is exactly what the name says: it is a barometer and it measures air pressure. You do realize that any changes in air pressure will result in changes in assumed altitude? Without constant GPS tracking the watch can not know if you have climbed 38 meters up or if the air pressure has changed accordingly. Simple physics.
You are not the first and definitely not the last one who comes here in this forum to vent after a misjudged purchase. Still I am sad your expectations didn’t meet the reality. I wish you good luck with a real smartwatch!
Compasses: M-311, A-10, SK-7
Diving: Finnlight Navy 90, Vyper
Sports: Metron, S7, S9B and Vertical -
@BrunoH nice response
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You bought the wrong watch, I think… perhaps a Apple Watch would be better for you? And regarding to sleep tracking… the S9PP is a sports watch and not a sleep watch
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Sure, I certainly didn’t do my homework, but since my requests were modest, I expected not to have problems with a Suunto watch, especially choosing a less “extreme” model like the 9 peak pro that I chose.
As for the battery, even the watch I used before allowed me to go two weeks without charging, without any limitations, and it was precisely on the basis of this data that I discovered the peak 9, which is a discriminating feature for me.
I confirm that the other watch was using a custom version of Android, and it synced perfectly with Apple Health. AppleWatch is not for me, I find a watch that has a battery that lasts half a day when turned off useless. Even though the rest of the ecosystem I use on a daily basis is mainly Apple, I swear I’m not a fan of this company, and their “commercial” practices personally annoy me.
Even though I can agree with you on everything you wrote, for the Baro function, I don’t agree, because the function is called Alt/Baro, and the screen is in fact divided into Altitude “and” Barometer, so thinking that it should indicate the altitude, is obvious. I have previously had watches equipped with a barometer, in addition to having a nautical license that requires knowing how to read the instruments on board, including a barometer, so how works it is clear to me, but as proposed by Suunto it is misleading. It is not a problem for me, my maximum climb is a couple of flights of steps, but if someone went to the mountains, they would certainly be confused. Unless they have had 20 hours available to study the user manual and then half a forum…
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I think a Fitbit might be more appropriate. It might be worth taking a look there. Good luck!
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@msa2025 Regarding the alt/baro functionality you mention you set it to 0 but I assume you weren’t laying on your back in the ocean at the time so why did you set it to 0? The Alt/baro function tells you your absolute height above sea level so if it’s jumping back to ~40m then maybe this is because you are ~40m above sea level?
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@msa2025 in my experience the barometer on my Suunto is incredible accurate. The best I have ever used including older hand held barometer back in the day, several watches and GPS units. And I do use it in the mountains for navigation.
Good luck with your search for a replacement. I really value my Suunto but would be careful of the user case before recommending it.
Suunto Vertical
Suunto 9 BARO
Garmin Fenix 3, 5
Suunto Vector -
@Audaxjoe The barometer is very accurate. The derived altitude isn’t when the watch isn’t properly calibrated.
My experience is that a substantial drift can happen in watch mode, but in an activity the auto-calibration results in spot on values.@far-blue said in A truly unfortunate purchase:
you set it to 0 but I assume you weren’t laying on your back in the ocean at the time so why did you set it to 0?
It depends where @msa2025 lives. Here in The Netherlands we have huge areas that are well below sea level.
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@far-blue
No, I’m in Treviso, the part of Italy near we produce the famous but not so good Prosecco! wikipedia says 15 mt up sea level. (same wikipedia syas 9 meters for Venice… not so reliable?) -
@Audaxjoe The problem is that when i reset it, and it takes the altitude with gps, then it should keep it. The altitude. Then, of course, the barometer must change based on the weather conditions.
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@surfboomerang This can be the reason… in watch mode it is not updated/adjusted with GPS data.
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@msa2025 I live at 30 metres above sea level, so quite similar. I seldom adjust the readings. Occasionally it has a rogue reading. 95% of the time it doesn’t shift, even with pressure drops/gains. It is sometimes a few meters out, like just now it reads 38 meters. But I think that is totally acceptable.
My Garmin would float me up to 8000 meters when watching TV… Older model, Fenix 5 so no doubt greatly improved with newer Garmin watches.
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@Audaxjoe said in A truly unfortunate purchase:
no doubt greatly improved with newer Garmin watches.
Garmin usually adjusts altitude during sleep. The pitfall is that Germin adjusts it to street level, although you might sleep in a skyscraper. Ususally my Garmin is set to about 115m in the morning for me. My Race S tells a more realistic 128m, as I live in the 5th floor.
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People learn how barometric altimeters work and are upset that the measurements change with time and motion. Edition 2137.
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@Łukasz-Szmigiel Suunto used to have an option: altimeter/barometer mode.
Now there’s some kind of crude automation - living in a relatively flat place, with normal movement, pressure changes are often interpreted as altitude changes.
Why such pseudo-improvements, which instead of helping, causes new problems?
