With the Suunto vertical the Finland based brand releases a watch that has alle the functions many fans of the brands have been craving for years. Beside offline maps, dual band GNSS and a solar charging function Suunto has added a weather forecast and a Flashlight. But how does the watch in real life?
As an Suunto ambassador Ive been able to test the watch since a few weeks and here are my personal experiences.
Exterior
The new watch comes with a 50mm Brezel and weights 57g without a wristband. The 3 Buttons have a nice click when pressed and my impression is that they are less likely to get pressed accidentally when you flex your wrist. There are two variants, the steel variant without and the titanium variant with solar charging. Booth come with sapphire glas which is very resident against scratches.
GPS:
With the new Dualband GNSS the accuracy should be improved, for me personally there wasn’t much of a difference. When starting a new move it takes depending in the location your starting between 10-25 sec till GNSS (GPS) connection ist established. In terms of elevation data I couldn’t find much a difference to my Suunto 9 peak pro.
Solar charging:
The small Solarcharging compartment an the side of the display helps to expend the already great battery life. I tested it on my balcony exposing it directly to the sun at a slight overcast and It took 1.5 hours to charge one percent. So you can charge your watch without a cable if needed but it takes some time.
Battery life
The new watch comes with an whopping 60h of tracking in best GPS mode and up nearly 500h in tour mode. The everyday usage is up to 50 days. I turned on the enhanced sleep monitoring and I train 4-6 times a week for a total of 8-10 hours and I charge my watch once per week as a reference.
Offline maps:
I always thought this is a nice gimmick when people using a Garmin watch talked about it., But after using it a few weeks, I don’t want to miss out on it again. It comes so handy when you’re on the track and unsure where to go to just swipe over the map and check it instead of searching for your Mobile. Also with a track on It things are way more obvious to choose the right path. YOu download the maps directly on your watch. The watch itself has an Wifi Module and downloads it directly on the watch via your local network. The internal memory is 32 Gb, this will fit most of Europe on the watch. It takes some time to download the map, but as you won’t do this too often its not a big deal. Downloading Switzerland took about 1 hour.
Other features:
The new weather forecast is pretty cool as its quite helpful. It syncs every hour with the Suunto App, so you’ll need to have Internet connection on your phone. It also provides informations like Air quality. A feature that I use every day is the flashlight, this comes in super handy when you wake up early and search for your keys or so.
Should you upgrade or buy?
If you’re looking for an extremely durable and long lasting watch ready for all kinds of adventures this watch won’t let you down. Especially users of the Suunto Ambit 3 peak or the Suunto 9 Baro definitely should upgrade. But I personally think the new features are so helpful that even Suunto 9 peak / peak pro Users should consider an Upgrade.
I hope this was helpful for you. If you have any questions, just write me an Email. Below you find the link to the official Suunto Vertical Website
http://www.suunto.com/suuntovertical
And hers a youtube video I made about the watch.
Disclaimer: Suunto has just giving me the watch and didn’t tell me what to write about the watch.