The Suunto 5 Peak and Suunto App
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The Suunto 5 Peak and Suunto App

Byrichard

A few weeks, or even months ago, I noticed that the Suunto and Sports Tracker apps play very nicely with the Apple watch, especially Sports Tracker. For this reason I spent quite a bit of time playing with the sports tracker app with the iphone. In fact it almost convinced me that I would get a new apple watch, to play with sports tracker.

Apple Watches are Expensive

The Series Four Apple Watch I have now is over four years old with a charge cycle every day of those four years. As a result of this the charge does not last as long as it used to. It barely survives the day now. It loses 25 percent when I’m sleeping with it on my wrist.

I considered replacing the Series Four with the SE because the SE is the cheapest apple watch available but it’s still over three hundred francs. The Garmin 45s is about 150 CHF and so is the Suunto Peak 5. The Garmin 45s is a speciality watch, focused mainly on running, and to give you VO2 max info. The battery lasts a day or two before it is desperate for a new charge.

Buyer’s Remorse with Garmin

Although I like the Garmin Instinct now I had problems with the Garmin Etrex 32, the Garmin Instinct, and was disappointed by the Garmin 45s. I wasn’t so happy with the strap, with battery life and with visible GPS mistakes. I am happy with the Etrex SE but it still feels a little limited, unless you love geocaching. If you like geocaching then this device is awesome. I am not yet a fan of geocaching.

The Suunto App

I have been tracking workouts with Sports Tracker, which was then bought by Suunto before becoming the Suunto App and they have recently used AI to provide a text based coach. It tells you how you’ve been sleeping, how you’ve been working out, what type of workout you’re doing and more. It also provides a heat map of your workouts for the previous month automatically, without paying a premium, since you already paid for their watch, via the Suunto app. The Sports Tracker does want payment for certain features.

The Suunto Peak 5

For a while I was sad to see that Suunto had dumped their watch os for Android’s watch OS instead and I expected them to fold and give up. It has been a few years since then and Suunto is still around and adding features, which is why I decided to plunge and revert to Suunto watches. The Suunto Peak 5 is the cheapest watch they sell, for 139 CHF if you’re not bothered by colour and looks.

I have now worn the watch for several days and worn it 24 hours a day for several days, with no wrist problems, skin problems, app problems or battery problems. It did nag me twice. It nagged me once for starting a workout without waiting for the wrist HR monitor to be ready, and a second time for not waiting for the GPS to be ready. Other than that it has been fine

What I’ve tracked

I have tracked at least two walks, two bike rides and more. I have also used it as a timer and alarm clock and these features worked fine too. It took a few days before I setup the sleep function but for two or three days my sleep has been tracked.

Compared to the Spartan Wrist HR Baro

Compared to the Suunto Spartan Wrist HR Baro it’s small and elegant. It fits nicely on the wrist. Instead of having a strap that has a think through which you thread the strap it has a button, like with the apple watch but for the end of the strap. It doesn’t flap around or get loose when you’re showering or doing sports. With the Garmin Instinct and other watches it’s easy for the strap to come lose and flap around.

No Buyer’s Remorse, So Far

The Suunto Peak 5 is not a new watch. It has been around for years. I didn’t get it because I was annoyed that Suunto had changed OS, but also because I felt that it was not an upgrade compared to the Suunto Spartan Wrist HR baro. It has fewer features but that can be used for fitness training. Due to the heatwave I haven’t been pushing as hard as I would with lower temperatures.

Amused by the Old Charger

One of the surprises when I opened the packaging was the charging cable. It’s the same as I had for the ambit 3 and other devices, rather than the spartan. The new cable is shorter though, so it’s nice that I can now choose between using the old charging cable when I need more reach, or the new one when I want to save on weight, or waste less energy on cable resistance.

The Case for Cheaper Watches

The range in price for Suunto watches is from 139 CHF for the Suunto Peak 5 to over 800 CHF for the Peak 9. The normal range is from 300 CHF upwards. In contrast the Apple Watch SE starts from 255 CHF upwards, but it has to be charged almost daily and it is fragile.

In my experience, and as you can read from certain reviews watches like the Peak 5 cost less but give the same user experience as the more expensive watches. Several reviews speak about how good the GPS is, and how light the watch is. They also speak about how good the battery is. It’s ideal for my use case.

And Finally

The Suunto 5 Peak, despite being a cheap watch provides a lot of functionality. The Garmin 45s is cheaper, lighter, and smaller, but it doesn’t feel as well finished and the GPS is more erratic. As I struggled with the conclusion to this blog post I checked the GPS track of my walk yesterday. I was geocaching at two points so I looked at the squiggles when I was under trees and a bridge and the tracks are crisp. I am using GPS and Galileo combined.

So far I am very happy with the Suunto 5 Peak. If you’re looking for a low cost tracker, to use daily, then it works well.

Of Casio, Suunto, Garmin and Apple

Of Casio, Suunto, Garmin and Apple

Byrichard

These four brands create watches. Casio creates rugged watches with batteries that last for a decade or more, and pair with mobile phones to track walks and more. Suunto and Garmin have fitness/sports trackers that measure activities, whether sailing, climbing, running, walking, cycling, scuba diving or more. Apple in contrast creates fragile, mediocre watches that cost as much as mid to high range watches and yet their battery lasts for one day, if you’re lucky. I even heard that Apple watches with 4g last half a day between charges. Charging a watch twice a day is unacceptable.


The article that triggered this reaction says that the Apple Watch encourages people to spend more on smartwatches, as if this was a good thing. It isn’t. These are throwaway products. The type of people that would buy an apple watch plan to change it every two years.


If you pay 800 USD for a watch I’d expect to keep it for a decade or more, not two watch generations, two years.


I might have bought two or three devices recently and the one that I am happiest with is one of the cheapest options. The Garmin Forerunner 45s. For 100 CHF you have a GPS sports tracker that tracks your runs, walks, bike rides and more. The battery does last for three or four workouts before needing a charge but it gives you all the functionality you need, for a fraction of the price, and it’s small.


I don’t want the Apple Watch to be dominant, because I see it as a crap product, and I feel that such a product pulls down the rest of the market. I slid away from Suunto because of WearOS and I gravitate towards Garmin because it still has proprietary software for the moment. I don’t want a smart watch. I want a sports tracker. I also want it to be affordable.

Sports tracker: 1004 hours tracked across multiple devices over the years.
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Sports tracker: 1004 hours tracked across multiple devices over the years.

Byrichard

For years now I have been tracking my sports activities with sports tracker on a variety of mobile phones, dive computers and sports tracking watches. I have gone canyoning, hiking, swimming, skiing, snowboarding, climbing, to do via ferrata, explored caves and trained indoors. In that time I have not had too many injuries and I have taken hundreds, if not thousands of photographs.

These activities have been in France, Spain, Switzerland, Italy, England, Poland and maybe in or two countries that I have forgotten about.

Sports tracking has progressed enormously since I started tracking activities. In the beginning I was using the N95 8gb and the battery lasted for about an hour. I then switched to various iphones and android devices before deciding that mobile phones were crap. That’s when I moved over to the Suunto Ambit 2 and later Suunto Ambit 3 devices. Since then I have been very happy tracking my physical activities.

One key step was when Suunto and Sports tracker decided to share data between their services. At this moment I could track with the Suunto Ambit 3 and share to Sports tracker without four or six steps per activity. Since then the service has been reliable.

 

 

Suunto and Sports tracker collaborate.
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Suunto and Sports tracker collaborate.

Byrichard

I have been using sports tracker for years. I first used it on the Nokia N95 8GB several years ago. This was an excellent app that allowed you to track your moves using the mobile phone as a GPS. The limitation of such an app was battery life on mobile phones. The battery usually did not last more than an hour at first and eventually progressed to two hours or more.

The first Suunto Device I used was for diving. I used the Suunto D9 dive computer for many months before upgrading. As I satisfied with this device I bought the Suunto Ambit 2 and eventually the Suunto Ambit 3. The reason for buying these watches is battery life. As normal watches they can last for 100 days, losing about one percent a day. If you use them as fitness watches then they easily last for a day or more.

When you’re doing via Ferrata, hiking, cycling or doing other sports you want the device you use to track your fitness efforts for as long as you’re going. That’s where Sports trackers and other mobile phones had their weakness. Mobile phone apps sometimes crash. If you’re pushing yourself hard during a workout you do not want to reach the end of a workout with no data.

Another frustration I often encountered was with Movescount, Suunto’s social sports app. At the end of quite a few workouts, I was unable to sync my workout data and analyse my progress. At the time,

I wanted to see Suunto and Sports tracker combined. They’re both Finnish companies and they both excel at specific tasks. Suunto for the hardware and Sports tracker for the analytics. By combining the two we have the best of both worlds.

Communications between Movescount and Sports tracker has been available for several weeks at this point and it works flawlessly. I have hiked, cycled, walked, sailed and climbed and each activity has synced without problems.

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Amersports and Sports tracker

Byrichard

Today Amer Sports announced that it has bought Sports tracker. Sports Tracker is an application that I have been using since I had the Nokia N95 8GB. I used it on symbian, iOS and Android devices over the years. What I love about this app is the way it displays information about the work out. It gives you several screens while you are exercising with the option to select which information you want to see most.

Once you arrive home and synchronise the workout with the web interface you can see the information displayed above. You can choose whether there is a topographic map, a normal map or satellite imagery. It is simple and intuitive to read.

Suunto make devices that I like using. I have used the Suunto D9 diving computer, the Suunto D4i diving computer, the Suunto Ambit 2 and the Suunto Ambit3. Suunto dive computers are small diving computers that you can wear in day to day life. When you are passionate about diving this is nice.

The Suunto Ambit family are more interesting for people who do land based sports. I used the Suunto Ambit 2 and 3 when doing via ferrata, hiking, cycling and other sports. The advantage of these fitness watches is that they have long battery life. This means that you can be active for two or three days before worrying about the battery dying. In this respect they are far better than mobile phones for fitness activity tracking.

Suunto products and Sports tracker do not communicate natively. Suunto products synchronise with movescount. From movescount you need to export the GPX workout files and import them to Sports tracker. I would like to see Suunto devices communicate directly with Sports tracker. In my eyes the best option would have been for Sports tracker to buy movescount and for them to take over the web interface for Suunto. They both provide interesting web interfaces and combining the two would have been mutually beneficial.

Time will show whether Amer Sports with links to sports tracker, precor and Suunto will come out with an interesting amalgamation of the three products/services. I look forward to finding out.

 

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Sports tracker on the N95

Byrichard

It’s fun to walk fast and far, especially in the countryside where there are fewer people to avoid. I often walk for fourty minutes to an hour at the end of the day to think about the day and process all that’s happened. Recently though I realised one of the shorter walks is almost 3000 steps thanks to the N95 pedometer.

That’s because with the N95 you have a built in GPS and the ability to download applications. One of these is the sports tracker that allows you to track a number of variables across four to six screens. There’s the map view, map view with relevant details, co-ordinate view, speed view, pedometer and then three or four graphs, some for time in relation to speed, distance over time and height in relation to speed.

You can zoom in and out of the graphs as you’re walking. If you do this more than once it creates a series of tracks that you can easily translate to KML and importe to Google Earth so the world can see your walks. Of course keeping your privacy from some people may be desirable.

It’s a fun little addition to the n95 although the biggest drawback is you need to have it out in front of you to keep track of the satellites.