THE LATEST GEAR - TESTED BY EXPERTS
SUUNTO VERTICAL TITANIUM SOLAR
£725 Promising top-notch battery life and navigation, is this the knockout punch Suunto has been looking for?
We love the rugged look of this watch, while the strap has plenty of holes for you to achieve an ideal fit. That’s needed, too, because this is a pretty hefty piece of kit, with the unit measuring 49mm across and 13.6mm thick and weighing 74g. That’s similar to Garmin’s Fenix 7 (£749.99; 47mm diameter, 14.5mm thick, 79g). As with the latter, the weight is noticeable and whether or not you get used to it is entirely personal. We’ll also note that the arms connecting the watch to the strap also dug into our (admittedly) slim wrist during testing, causing some discomfort.
Useability is reasonable, with three buttons complementing a touch screen. While the buttons are easy to use, we found the touch screen wasn’t as responsive or as smooth as we’ve experienced with Garmin. Also, when recording an activity you’re only able to use the touch screen with the map.
When it comes to navigation, however, the Suunto excels, allowing you to download offline topographical maps for free. It’s easy to do via the app and you can pick the region you require, while you can import GPX files or create routes in the app, too. This is all easy to read via the large watch face. On land the dual-band GPS performance is impressive, on par with other market leaders, though it falters in open water, with navigation proving inaccurate.
As you’d expect, there’s a huge list of sports for you to track, including triathlon, which work well and deliver plenty of data. As far as wrist-based optical heart rate sensors go, it’s largely accurate with only a few deviations, but it doesn’t match up to the precision you’ll get from a heart-rate strap.
Additional training features include training load, recovery time, fitness level, fitness age and VO2 max, while there’s a host of extra data waiting for you in the easy-to-use Suunto app. It’s also possible to connect a power meter via Bluetooth, while for running you can rely on the watch’s own run power readings. You’ll also find your usual gamut of standard features, like steps, music controls (though there’s no music storage), phone notifications and sleep tracking, though we didn’t find the latter to be particularly accurate.
What really impressed us was battery life. Ignoring solar, Suunto says the Vertical delivers up to 60 hours of battery life in its most active setting with GPS firing to its max. That increases to 90 hours when used in ‘Endurance’ mode, w
