BUG: Watch Shows Distance in Feet Instead of Miles
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When using Imperial settings, all run activities, laps, and intervals show distance in feet until 1 mile is reached, and then it switches back to the normal “1.01, 1.02” miles. If I decide mid run that I want to do some interval reps or a few manual laps of something, I won’t be able to see “.25” for my lap mileage, but will instead only see it as 1312 feet. Not really very useful when running, and I don’t see an option to stop this from happening.
Does anybody have a fix for this? I just got the watch and I’m not sure if this is typical of the software or not. A reddit user said the same thing happened to him after a recent update. This feet/miles issue is a pretty big deterrent and had I known about it, I might not have purchased it.
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I want to add that in general runners in the USA never use feet for distance. They tend to use miles, meters (for short intervals), or fractions of a mile. So showing feet for any kind of measure of distance in the watch UI is misguided.
The same applies to a distance remaining to a turn or waypoint shown on all Suunto watches - if it is shorter than 0.1 miles the remaining distance is shown in feet, which is rather confusing. I’d rather see 0.06 miles than 316 feet.
Also, in general people in the USA don’t remember how many feet are in a mile
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@sky-runner Yes, thank you for this! I spoke with a customer service rep today who could not understand that most American runners, if not all, would never use feet to measure distance, nor do we want to calculate fraction like 2,356/5,280 mid interval.
I’m not sure why the watch even displays this setting. It’s incredibly frustrating and just not useful, and shows that the software designers are not thinking about the user experience.
Hopefully this can be changed, otherwise I really am looking into a return and going back to Garmin.
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This is the response I got from Suunto Customer Support:
“This behavior is a known software quirk in Suunto’s Imperial unit logic rather than a defect with your individual watch. There is currently no setting on the watch or in the Suunto App to force decimal miles (such as 0.83 mi) below the 1-mile mark.”
“Why This Happens & Which Watches Are Affected
The “Sub-Mile” Conversion Logic: Suunto’s software designers modeled the Imperial unit display directly after the Metric system—just as Metric switches from meters (850 m) to kilometers at 1.00 km, Suunto’s Imperial logic defaults to displaying feet (0 to 5,279 ft) for any total distance, lap, or interval under 1 mile, only switching to decimal miles once you pass 5,280 ft (1.00 mi).
Affected Models: This behavior is specific to watches running Suunto’s newer UI architecture—most notably the Suunto Run (which runs a distinct, streamlined RTOS/Lite operating system compared to older models) as well as recent firmware builds on the Suunto Race, Race S, and Vertical. Legacy models (such as the Suunto 9 Peak Pro and earlier) displayed decimal miles from 0.00 mi upward, which is why long-time American users have frequently flagged this regression on the Suunto Community Forums.”So that’s that! No way to change it, you just have to read 2,436 feet and try to estimate what that means.
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