Switched from a garmin forerunner 965 to a race s
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After owning 2 garmins (a forerunner 935 and a forerunner 965) it’s time for me to switch back to Suunto. Main reason? Bugs. Lot’s of bugs. But now it’s time to make a quick comparison.
As a sportwatch, there isn’t much difference. I still run 60+k a week and train on roads, tracks and off road. Didn’t expect any change there.
But there are other areas that are different and you don’t read about it in reviews.
On a Suunto I can set alarms for 1 day, workdays or everyday. Problem is, my workweek is only 4 days. On a garmin you can specify alarms in more detail.
Both Suunto and Garmin has something like a morning report. There is literally no info on these reports that I need first thing in the morning, so I find both equally useless. But on garmin you can turn that off.
The vibration on my Suunto is much more powerful than on my garmin. Or, better said, the garmin is quite weak and I do miss alerts.The move alert on a garmin I find half-baked. You only get an alert that you sit still for to long but you cannot look back how well you did throughout the day. The one on Suunto is even worse, alerting you only after 2 hours. Both should look how well Apple implemented this very important alert (sitting still for too long is not very healthy)
Both brands offer tbt navigation (an important feature for me). The garmin app can add tbt alerts on a route, with Suunto you have to use kamoot. A bit more clumsy. Managing synched routes on your watch is way easier on a Suunto. In the app you simple select which routes you want on your watch and can unselect unwanted. With garmin it is cumbersome to remove routes. And due to bugs, many times unwanted routes suddenly reappear on your watch.
The garmin app isn’t very good in adding tbt alerts. Quite often I get a tbt alert for only a bend in the road.
A really big problem is an annoying function garmin recently added: forced audio tbt alerts. Either your connected phone or your headphones will give spoken tbt alerts and those cannot be turned off. Obviously a lot of users complained. Garmin is aware but couldn’t be bothered.On a garmin you can pause a activity to resume later. On Suunto you cannot not. But I experience quite some bugs on my Garmin with this function, so I avoided it.
The (auto)lap screen on a garmin can only show 2 datafields. On my suunto it shows 3. Unfortunate, on my suunto I cannot choose which ones.
Optical heartrate sensors don’t work for me. The garmin might be slightly better but by far not good enough to ditch a cheststrap. Outside activities both are good enough to determine rest heartrate and hrv. Hrv on my suunto is lower than on the garmin. My feeling says the garmin sometimes gives ridiculous high values. Suunto between 43 and 54, which is to be expected for my fitness and age. Garmin was sometimes over 80.
Sleeptracking is rubbish on both watches. Both watches produce quite some data. Garmin produces the most, but some are unreliable and/or useless (like endurance score, which just says I upped my training load. Yeh, duh! I prepare for a longer trailrun, I know my trainingload is up). But if you want to quantify your life to the max without questioning quality, by all means buy a garmin.
Garmin has loads of bugs. So far I haven’t found annoying onces on my Suunto. (I work as a programmer. I’m quite annoyed by bugs)
Battery life on the Suunto seems a bit better that on the garmin. Garmin with it’s autoselect gps mode on, used 10% battery per hour. But I suspect that is due to some bugs in the firmware. I studied a fitfile and saw the watch was switching modes like crazy (unnecessary for where I live). But I don’t need gps on the best settings. Even a Suunto ambit 3 I had 10 years ago did a good enough gps job.
I like the suunto app better than the garmin app. Additional plus, the battery of my iPhone lasts longer. (I reported a bug, that the garmin app regularly uses loads of power, but garmin couldn’t be bothered to look into it)
The charge cable on my suunto is better. But that is mainly because I don’t like the plug garmin uses.
The weather service on Suunto is better that on Garmin. Garmin uses a service with very few weather stations (only on major airports) so local weather is often not local at all. To stop people complaining, garmin removed the location from the app, so how you cannot even judge how relevant the weather is. Suunto also shows air quality for my location, garmin has an airquality screen, but it doesn’t show a thing. Weather on my suunto isn’t always synced (although I allowed background updates and always access to my location,
Garmin has a calendar/agenda view on their watches. Suunto hasn’t.
Garmin has 2 buttons on the rightside, the top one for start and stop activities, the bottom for lap. Suunto also uses the bottom one for laps, but sometimes the digital crown is in the way. Stopping an activity on a suunto is a bit weird. It doesn’t work on the maps/breadcrumb screen. Also, you have to press the top button, then the bottom one, and lastly the digital crown to really end and save the activity. On a garmin, if you just want to end an activity it’s only 2 buttons clicks.
The rise to wake gesture works so much better on my Suunto. Specifically when I do high intensity intervals on a track, too often I struggled with my garmin to wake the screen. With Suunto I never have this. There is a delay before the screen is turned on, but it will always recognize the rise.
Suunto has some sort of minimalistic watchface after a certain time which also disables touch. If you know, it’s fine. (I frequently had it with my garmin that a shower caused all sorts of activity on the screen, including turning of alarms without me noticing)
Quite a long story. So far, I’m happy to be back at Suunto and given the ridiculous prices garmin asks and their focus on feature quantity and not feature quality, I don’t see myself going back to garmin. If you have comments, tips of questions, feel free to react.
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@elbee Do you use maps? I have an Epix Pro and the Race S for a test and the maps on the Epix are soooo slow, whereas on the Race S it is a pleasure to use. Are they more usable on the 965?
Like the alarm, you can only have one timer on the Race S and you cannot predefine them. I regularly use different timers on my Epix.
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@2b2bff yes, I do use maps. Maps on my old forerunner 965 are hard to read. Garmin has an autozoom option, which doesn’t work. And a tap the screen to manual zoom, which often doesn’t work.
So far, I find the maps on my suunto a bit more clear and easier to see. But have to say, on my old ambit 3 and forerunner 935 I only had breadcrumb navigation, and that worked fine. I accidentally forgot to turn on maps on my race s, so used breadcrumb, and I followed the route just fine. Maps isn’t a must have feature for me.In the end you win some and loose some, switching brands, but I’m glad I got rid of all the garmin annoyances.
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You get tbt alerts when you create a route in the Suunto App. Simply turn the switch on before saving.
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@wmichi yes, when you create a route. But not when importing a gpx. For trailruns you sometimes get a gpx file. Or I use strava to generate a loop of a certain lenght. That doesn’t produce tbt alert by only using the suunto app. (I realize I could be more clear in my initial post. I hardly make routes myself. I use existing gpx files or auto generated routes, mostly by strava)
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@elbee In fact, and at least in android, you can get TBT from an imported GPX. If you edit the imported route, moving one point or adding it you should get TBT indications.
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@cosme-costa editting an import route in my experience is really difficult. You add one planning point and the whole route changes.
Would there be a better way?
I didn’t really want or need the TbyT but it would be handy to edit a route. I end up having to go to Kamoot.
Suunto Vertical
Suunto 9 BARO
Garmin Fenix 3, 5
Suunto Vector -
@cosme-costa just tested this. You don’t even have to move a point. I had the option to turn on tbt directly after I imported the gpx file.
Suunto Race S
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@Audaxjoe In Android, at least, you can add planning points that you can move, the trick is to add enough of them to not mess the route. I mean, if i have a route that passes in point A and B and I want to modify the route between the two points I add one point in A, another in B and some in the middle and i move them to the places where I want the route to pass.
For me it works for smallish/medium modifications. -
@2b2bff said in Switched from a garmin forerunner 965 to a race s:
@cosme-costa just tested this. You don’t even have to move a point. I had the option to turn on tbt directly after I imported the gpx file.
Yeah, the slider is there but if you do not move one point the TBT indications doesn’t appear, I just have checked.
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@cosme-costa yes, totally appreciate that. But if you have a long route, you add one planning point and the whole route moves.
It is fine on route plotted in SA but in my experience very ineffective on imported routes.
Suunto Vertical
Suunto 9 BARO
Garmin Fenix 3, 5
Suunto Vector -
It sounds so much easier to import the route in kamoot, which autosyncs to suunto. No editing needed. Suunto could do it in the past. My Ambit 3 could do tbt with imported routes in movescount 10 years ago, but it seems Suunto had different priorities with their app when the migrated from movescount.
Well, it is what it is. Not the end of the world.
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@Audaxjoe Yes, but if you add 3 points and only move the middle one the route is not moved. As I said, not useful for big modifications but quite handy for smallish modifications.
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@elbee Yes and no, maybe you do not have a komoot account or do not have the correct maps in komoot, so this is a solution. You do not need to do big modifications, really.
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this is such an interesting post to me as I am also an ex-garmin user (ancient FR 45), trying out the race s, and getting annoyed with a few things which are making me think to bite the bullet and get a FR 965, but this has given me pause!!
A really big problem is an annoying function garmin recently added: forced audio tbt alerts. Either your connected phone or your headphones will give spoken tbt alerts and those cannot be turned off. Obviously a lot of users complained. Garmin is aware but couldn’t be bothered.
a big pull for me with the garmin was that i could use spotify with it direct, leaving my phone behind. but that issue would make that useless, and to see that this has been around for 8+ months with no fix is wild.
The charge cable on my suunto is better. But that is mainly because I don’t like the plug garmin uses.
yeah this kind of ‘magsafe’ charger is much better. can’t believe garmin are still using plugs in 2025, for $500+ watches no less!
Garmin has 2 buttons on the rightside, the top one for start and stop activities, the bottom for lap. Suunto also uses the bottom one for laps, but sometimes the digital crown is in the way. Stopping an activity on a suunto is a bit weird. It doesn’t work on the maps/breadcrumb screen. Also, you have to press the top button, then the bottom one, and lastly the digital crown to really end and save the activity. On a garmin, if you just want to end an activity it’s only 2 buttons clicks.
strong agree. the maps thing is particularly annoying (and unnecessary). i feel like a running watch should allow you to always blindly stop and resume activities with one or two button presses. also the touch screen seems to not work in some contexts (eg stopping and ending a run).
one thing i can’t seem to get nice on my suunto is the smartwatch notifications. on garmin i could turn the notifications on for ‘during activity’ (useful), but for suunto it’s either on or off for everywhere. so after a run i need to turn on DND or turn the watch off to avoid having it beeping and vibrating, when i have my phone covering that anyway.
what was pulling me to the 965 was the on-watch map routing, and the ability to connect spotify and payments, but mostly it was because the basics of starting/stopping activities and how the buttons worked seemed logical and intuitive to me, whereas with suunto i feel like i’m finding all these weird quirks where things don’t work how i would expect them.
BUT the 965 seems huge, expensive and ugly to me, whereas the suunto S is extremely cute and feels expensive, despite being about 40% cheaper. plus the garmin app has never made any sense to me. i think my worry is that (like Garmin), suunto don’t seem to have a great feedback loop of user feature requests/bug reports. you can find the same/similar issues with maps and notifications logged in the forums months or even years back.
nothing is perfect, but i am going to keep trying with my race s to see if i can live with this stuff.
