Suunto 7

[jw cou]

@Dimitrios-Kanellopoulos thanks for the tips about the touch to wake. I deactivated it, and can now easily go through 2 days with 2 x 1 hour gps activity and 1h listening to music without charging…
Battery sorted, I can now see what I’m missing in the WearOS SA 🧐

[Dimitrios Kanellopoulos]

@jean-william-cousin right eh? In the end who needs touch to wake … Oh oh I hope I didn’t get Google pissed

[A Former User]

@Dimitrios-Kanellopoulos said in Suunto 7:

In the end who needs touch to wake

Not so simple. If you don’t have touch-to-wake, when a notification comes, your watch buzzes, and there’s a notification dot shown on that ambient watch face of yours, you’d have to press a button or tilt your wrist to get the screen to activate, then swipe upward for notification.

With touch, you just swipe upward, without moving your wrist or pressing anything. Very convenient when you want to read notifications while driving Oh oh I hope I didn’t get cops pissed.

[Dimitrios Kanellopoulos]

@NickK Ok. valid point. Din’t think of that honestly. I am starting to feel old.

[A Former User]

@Dimitrios-Kanellopoulos Nah! You are good But I do feel that usability is vastly improved with touch-to-wake. That being said, always on screen would be even better. You pay the price of convenience with the battery. Nothing comes free.

Still, to each his own. Somebody is fine throwing his watch on the charger a few times a day. Somebody wants to charge every 2-3 days at most. At least, we have magic toggles to play with to get us where we want.

[Anders Yngman]

Hi all that’s using the Suunto 7! Are you satisfied with how it get’s your heart rate and distance (with no GPS)?

[pilleus]

@Anders-Yngman better than any other of my Suunto watches with OHR (S9 and Spartan Trainer).

I am very satisfied!

[A Former User]

@Anders-Yngman OHR is a huge improvement over all other Suunto devices. Distance without GPS… Will know tonight when I run on the treadmill. The runs I did outside were real good if not exactly as good as the latest firmware S9 with Stryd. Trouble is: I had my phone with me, so the watch got fused GPS, with fixes coming from the phone most likely.

[Saketo Nemo]

My first impression

some healty problems prevented me from testing it better but for now:

• 2 times in the pool, whr surprisingly precise. I do not have a comparison with the hr band, but the cardiac progress has followed my exercises. with s9, in the same conditions, i had very bad results.
• 1 bike ride: slow, very slow, post blood donation. Excellent tracking (ok, cycling is easy) and here too, whr absolutely plausible despite several stretches on the bumpy.

Autonomy
Settings:

• animations passed from 0.5x to 0

• automatic brightness removed and set to 2

• no wake up with wrist rotation.

• By bike: 10% per hour, playing occasionally with maps and occasionally checking beats and rhythm

• swimming: 3% per hour.

• airplane mode: 1.5% per hour

Nice to have: shutdown by covering the screen with the palm of your hand
Maybe on Saturday I will try it for a trail with a lot of difference in height, together with my S9. Let’s see how the barometer and tracking will behave during the run.

[Lozen]

@Saketo-Nemo just a stupid question for which reason the WHR is so incredible better than S9? Valencell installed the same equipment or not?

[sartoric]

@Lozen
It seems different, just looking at it. Maybe is a sort of v2 … but I’m not even sure is still Valencell. I’ve never check

[Lozen]

@sartoric in the net the sensor is the same, at least this what is declared so I don’t know where this substantial improvement is coming from. Surely WearOS should not have impact on this incredible improvement

[sartoric]

@Lozen
For sure the weight helps, maybe the shape of the base …

[A Former User]

@Lozen said in Suunto 7:

@Saketo-Nemo Valencell installed the same equipment or not?

It’s not Valencell anymore. Different sensor package, different algos backing it up.

[The_77]

@Lozen I remember Ray said that they ditched Valencell for this one in his hands on?

So about that heart rate sensor – that’s a big shift. The company has ditched Valencell’s package and gone with a combo-dish from LifeQ’s algorithms and a sensor from PixArt. LifeQ may actually ring a bell – as back about five years ago we saw TomTom employ them for their optical HR sensors in some of their wearables. It wasn’t all bad at the time, but LifeQ doesn’t list many partners since then on their site (nor much recent info at all on their site) as to other examples of who might be using more recent sensor packages.

[Lozen]

@The_77 oh, you are right, thanks I didn’t read it but in any case he didn’t mention anything about the substantial improvement regarding with the OHR (on top he has some nice words for the current company producing the sensor, don’t know why ). I am so curious because in the forum there were a lot of people mentioning the bad opinion of WHR (generally speaking) and now they have completely changed the opinion and it seems ok for almost all the Sports. So it means that the improvement is really huge

[The_77]

@Lozen I think he had it for one day in Vegas before giving it back and I saw the other day on twitter he doesn’t have one for test purposes yet, hence no oHR commentary?

[pilleus]

[A Former User]

@Lozen said in Suunto 7:

in the forum there were a lot of people mentioning the bad opinion of WHR (generally speaking) and now they have completely changed the opinion and it seems ok for almost all the Sports.

Who are those reformed people?

Walking/running was a foregone conclusion as this is one nut that’s been cracked thoroughly by everyone in the industry.

I did some testing of H10 paired to S9 vs S7 for gym workouts linked up the thread. Things like stationary bike looked real good, as did indoor rowing, though rowing had been fine even for Fitbit as of few years back. Bodyweight exercises were hit and miss. Stretching was hit and miss, though on a closer look at the data, mostly miss. Strength and plyometric exercises are total no go.

@Saketo-Nemo reported good performance in the pool. @pilleus reported good bike performance outdoors.

So, in general we’ve got a solid OHR sensor for common, most popular sports. Sadly this is no solution for strength/weights, nor situations where you can’t wear your watch (team or impact sports).

Needless to say, at least part of the improvement is due to Suunto 7 being slimmer and having a flatter profile on your wrist. Also, can’t say for anyone, but OHR generally works well for me.

[Lozen]

@NickK thank you for your feedback, I already read the comment fo the people in the forum. The bad opinion was related with the WHR performance in S9, in the forum there are a lot of such kind of feedback. Good that for walking/running/swimming/internal rowing, outdoor bike it is performing well (of course based on the feedback received). As I mentioned before, it was a surpise for me but happy that now there is a reference for WHR and Suunto could apply the same approach (e.g. Technology & shape) to the future watches