Suunto 7 smartwatch review By Finder Australia

Hi, I'm Chris stead, technology editor at finder. com. edu, and today I'm reviewing the sunto7 smartwatch. Now Finnish outdoor tech, specialists unto have reached a new territory with the sunto7. They have traditionally worked on GPS sports tracking watches, and this does have a lot of GPS sports tracking capabilities, but for the first time ever they've rolled in the where OS operating system from android and to add some smartwatch capabilities, so is the sumto7 the perfect marriage of both sport and smart. Now in terms of design, the sun tow 7 is a very beautiful watch.

It really is quite nice to look at, despite being a bit large I'll talk about that in a second, but you're. Looking at a really nice soft comfortable, strap a really sturdy stainless steel case gorilla grass over the top, which will give you that protection against cracking, although it's not sapphire, so you may get some scratches on it, which is a bit of a downturn from what the swinton9 offers you're. Also looking at four buttons around the outside. That allows you to operate it uh when you're moving um or, if you're wearing gloves. Obviously it's a sport watch.

You could be wearing gloves, and that gives a lot of extra use when you're on the go. I love the heat map, backdrop that comes on the default watch face. So that's a heat map of the surrounding area and where people tend to do their riding or their cycling their feeling. What you choose you can customize that between 15 different activities- and that gives you an idea of what's going around it just looks really cool. I really like that feature as well.

Now, it's quite sturdy as mentioned it will go down to 50 meters in the ocean. It's shockproof it's dustproof. It comes in five colors. So on the designed front, the sun tow seven is a real winner, as mentioned. It is big, though now I'm a pretty large human, I'm six foot, four 100 kilograms, and you can see the size of it just there on my wrist, it's pretty size.

It's got a 50 millimeter diameter. Now I do get used to it quite quickly, like I barely can feel that I'm wearing it right now, however, if you're a smaller human being and particularly if you've got thin wrists, this could be a problem and something to think about. As I review the performance of this watch, I'm going to break it down into two categories and that'll be for a reason, is you'll come to see now we're going to look at the sports watch side of things first and there's way too many features here for me to go through. If you have a look at the center website, there's pages and pages of tracking information and different sports that you can, you can track trace over 70 sports in there that you can track, and you can download maps from wherever you are for use offline or when your online just download it automatically as soon as you're plugged into a charging device. On top of that, however, that it isn't quite as feature-rich as the sun tonight or even a suntan five, you move it.

You lose out in a couple of the tracking features and in particular of note it doesn't connect to third-party peripherals, such as, like a heat chest, monitor sorry heart, chest monitors which is annoying, and it doesn't track your sleep as well, which is a bit annoying as well. This is probably because of the smartwatch features that have come in. Obviously, we've had to lose a few of the sports watch functionality. So that's something to keep in mind as well. However, if you're a data lover, and I'm a data lover, it's really quite awesome um the steps I found the steps slightly, uh overestimated, not massively, but slightly I've always made all the watches that I've tried out all the different smartwatches.

Do things very differently in that regard, I found the withing steel hr sport to be the most accurate so far, and when compared to that, I found that this watch did overestimate the steps slightly. It took him, maybe 50 or so steps over a thousand steps, so not massive, but it does work out a lot if you're on giant runs, then again it's for comparisons, really isn't it. So does it really matter if it overestimates just as long as you're, comparing to the same watch every single day? You know how your fitness is going. The GPS tracking is on point really impressed by that the maps that come with the smartwatch that download the smartwatch are really detailed. I love the contours and the altitude.

It gives you a good idea of. What's around you, as mentioned the heat maps as well, give you an idea of some of the routes that you can follow, and I found the GPS tracking to be very precise. You can set routes uh on the Shinto app as well, that can then download to the watch, so you can follow a pre-set route that you've already put in, which is pretty cool. I did take this surfing. I do a lot of surfing, and I was really impressed with the tracking in the surf uh when I looked back on it at the watch on the app later on, I could see exactly where I paddled out, where I got caught in the rips.

Even some of the waves that I caught so very on point with the GPS tracking, very impressive from that regard and diving into the data is a lot of fun too. You know I love looking at that stuff. Personally, I was able to see like how fast I went on my fastest biggest wave stuff like that, so that kind of thing is really cool. What's not so great is that the tracking of all that information is separated into three separate spots. You've got stuff, you can look at on your watch specifically stuff in the sun toe app and then stuff and google fit, and so it would really be nice if those were all kind of together in one place, you can share them on social.

Your results. You can't connect to third-party tracking software online as well as an option uh, but really for the future. Moving forward, this all needs to be together in one cohesive place, so you can look at it and really dive in now. It's the smartwatch side of these CentOS 7 union, where things begin to struggle a bit uh. This is the first times onto's ever incorporated aware OS android operating system into its one of its watches, and it does struggle.

It really does struggle um. As mentioned some sports tracking features that we've seen in the Swanton 905 are missing. I'm assuming this is because they're crammed in the smartwatch features, so there's a bit of a loss there, but theoretically on paper, there's a lot to gain. You've got Google Pay, so you can swipe and pay with NFC support, obviously Wi-Fi connectivity, so you can download maps and so forth. Google play apps are available, so you can download the calendar, you can download weather.

You can even look at Spotify. You can't actually really activate Spotify directly through the watch. Furthermore, you can just play and pause if you can't play it through the watch. It plays up your phone or another device, and you can theoretically receive notifications phone calls. That type of thing social messages or through your phone there's also Google Assistant on the phone.

However, I've found this to be quite cumbersome because you have to go through a few menus to even get to the point of using your voice, and by that point you might just look it up somewhere else. Um now, as mentioned, I did struggle with all this stuff to harmonize in a perfect way. Spotify, for example, would sometimes play I wouldn't play other times that would pause um. I found a setup process to be really quite complicated and challenging uh it kept disconnecting me. Even if I was just staying my same home Wi-Fi, I would just lose Wi-Fi connections.

My Google account would stop um being synced correctly. The phone itself would not sync all of a sudden. I have to re-sync it there's a lot of buttons, a lot of swiping going on. It's really challenging to remember what everything does, but you're getting used to the watch, and it was a frustrating process overall, just getting a thing set up and working in a harmonized way, and as mentioned, I didn't even get a lot of the things working in particular, I couldn't get the phone calls to come through. I couldn't get the notifications to come through from my watch uh from my phone to the watch, even after I'd had everything synced perfectly and go into the troubleshooting, so definitely there's some work that needs to be done there.

You know when it does work. It is fast and responsive I'll, give it that much it just trips over itself, too much um and furthermore, it does burn battery quite hectically uh the first day that I was kind of using this that didn't even get 24 hours out of the battery. Yes, I was testing it. I was playing with it a lot. The screen does have an always off uh mode.

So it's off right now, for example, when I bring it up to my eyes like this, it comes on, and it goes off again quickly, so you can just check things. It's doing its best to save the battery, but with all the smartwatch with all the GPS tracking, with everything going on. Realistically, you need to charge this every single night. When you go to bed- and I guess it doesn't track sleep anyway. So it's not such a big issue, but it's definitely a bit of a downer.

For me, I'd like to see it, uh perform better from the battery side of things. The sim207 sets a promising future for a smart sport watch, but at the moment it is a complicated marriage and, as a result, it's difficult for me to recommend until there's been some really significant. Firmware updates now for a full review of the sunto7, a full buyer's guide on how to buy a smartwatch and a comparison of all the smartwatches on the market check out, finder. com. of and until next time, stay healthy.

Source : Finder Australia