If you want to make a fashionable statement about your sporty lifestyle, the Suunto 7 offers you a Google Wear OS smartwatch along with sporty DNA from the Finnish watchmaker.
I have the All Black version – Suunto also offers the Black Lime, Graphite Copper, Sandstone Rosegold and White Burgundy colours. Here you can see the watches displaying various modes and screens.
Suunto is a Finnish adventure instrument maker known for its design and innovation in sports watches, compasses and dive computers since 1936.
The 84-year-old brand makes the rugged, adventure-proof Suunto 3, Suunto 5, Suunto 7 and Suunto 9 for casual, enthusiast and professional sportsmen and women.
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Really love the beautiful heatmap watchface of the Suunto 7 sports smartwatch. Been using it since its debut in Singapore back in September.
These watches are design tested in Finland to be shock-proof, water-proof, and dirt-proof.
Its Suunto 3, 5 and 9 emphasizes autonomy and sports features that do not require connection to the Internet.
Powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon WEar 3100 platform, the Suunto 7 offers connectivity to the Web via Google Wear OS to enable lifestyle smartwatch features that its brethren do not enjoy – namely Music, payments and an app platform.
Basic Specifications of Suunto 7
The large AMOLED 1.39-inch display is 1,000 nits and has 454 x 454 pixels.
The Suunto 7 comes with 1GB RAM and about 4.5GB of usable storage space.
It has NFC for contactless payments, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.
The sporty smartwatch is light at 70g with a 24mm strap that’s available in assorted silicon, leather and textile.
The 50mm watch case is made of reinforced polyamide with the bezel in stainless steel and gorilla glass screen – it is water resistant to 5 ATM / 50m.
Navigation-wise, it uses GPS, Glonass and Galileo.
Out of the box, I like the characteristic muscular design of the Suunto 7, with the apps Button on the upper left side and three buttons on the right.
The watch takes about 100 minutes to charge fully on the charger that comes in the box.
Upon power up, you see, on the ultra-bright OLED touch-sensitive display, the iconic default watch face using the “heat-map” that Suunto pioneered.
I love it because it looks really cool – it shows the activity level in the geological area around you – depending on your physical location.
You can choose the size of the geographical area you want to display, and one of 15 activities (eg. running, cycling, hiking etc) you want to show.
In terms of sports workouts, it offers more than 70 modes, from running and cycling which is what I do, to skiing and surfing – for when you venture out of Singapore.
During these workouts, the Suunto 7 provides exercise tracking such as GPS location, heart rate, steps, timing, pace and speed, and even a barometer for elevation readings.
Outside of workouts, the watch also tracks these data though at lower sampling intervals to conserve battery life.
Where to Purchase
The Suunto 7 debuted in Singapore in September 2020.
It is priced at S$749 in Singapore.
You can purchase it in Singapore either online or at Advance Lap (1 Stadium Place, #01-36 Kallang Wave Mall, Singapore 397628).
Vivid, full-colour offline outdoor maps are available to enable you to keep track of your location, discover best training routes, offline route navigation and view heatmaps of fellow athletes around you.
During and after the workout, you can view these data for detailed training insights on the watch itself or on the Wear OS app (on both Android and iOS phones) or Suunto app on the smartphone.
At the moment, these data are split between the Wear OS and Suunto apps on the smartphone. I hope in the future, Suunto will push out an update that will port all the workout data from Wear OS app to the Suunto app, so that I can just use the latter as a one-stop app to peruse all the exercise data.
I like that the Suunto app provides recommendations for exercises and trends, as well as connect with other users on Strava.
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Unboxing of the Suunto 7 sports smartwatch in Singapore.
You can also get personailsed coaching from Google Fit, or thousands of other apps from the Google Play store.
The Suunto 7 does not come with a speaker, but it enables you to play the music on a Bluetooth connected earphones and control music playback from the watch.
If you’re a fashionable sports enthusiast looking for a sporty smartwatch for both daily wear as well as exercise workouts, this is a good smartwatch to go for.
I like the physical rugged design and the beautiful display – especially the heat map display. It does not come cheap though, with a price tag of S$749 in Singapore.
I find that using the Suunto 7 in continuous GPS Tracking mode with the low-power Always-On display mode, showing key data while using minimal amount of battery – the battery can last more than 12 hours so I won’t run out of battery in the middle of a workout.
The battery-saving GPS mode leverages Suunto’s FusedTrack algorithm to combine data from the watch’s various sensors to enhance location accuracy – this consumes less battery during longer workouts trying to get GPS fixes when the signal is weak.
I like the low-power, ‘always-on’ sport display. For your sports, the display will always be on, showing you key data and using a minimal amount of battery.
For usual smartwatch usage, such as checking time and notifications etc, the battery easily lasts for at least 48 hours.
Tags: reviews, smartwatches, sports, Suunto, watches
Can I attach my heart rate strap to the Suunto 7?
No you can’t do that for the Suunto 7. But you can do that with Suunto’s other sports watches eg. Suunto 5 and Suunto 9.