THE BEST DEALS OF THE DAY
two minute review
With the Suunto 9 Peak, the Finnish sports watchmaker essentially takes its top-of-the-line Suunto 9 and gives it a slimmer, sleeker look.
It offers the same features as previous Suunto 9 models to make it perfect for the great outdoors with over 80 tracking modes, key environmental sensors including an altimeter and compass, and the ability to download routes using Suunto heatmaps. to find the way to the majority. popular places to run, walk and bike.
Major satellite systems are supported for accurate tracking outdoors, and the "snap to path" feature aims to improve tracking when it comes to ensuring a strong tracking signal in uneven locations. The watch also has an optical heart rate monitor and a blood oxygen sensor, and there are smartwatch features in the form of music controls and the ability to view phone notifications from the wrist.
The Suunto 9 Peak experience can be frustrating at times, largely due to the slow software and touch screen. Suunto's companion app is also a bit too busy for our liking.
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(Image credit: Michael Sawh)- Suunto 9 Peak (Suunto) on Amazon for €569
GPS accuracy is good, but by no means perfect, and navigation support is basic and lacks the full mapping features you might find on other watches. Battery life is respectable for a week of heavy use, with the ability to last longer if you're willing to sacrifice tracking accuracy.
The problem with the Suunto 9 Peak is that for all its beauty, running watches from Garmin and Coros can offer more for a similar price and give you a better overall experience.
Price and release date
Suunto 9 Peak was launched on June 17, 2021 with a price of €609 / €699 / AU €999. Offering most of the same features in a larger package, the Suunto 9 Baro is available for €419 / €499 / AU$699.99.
Design and display
- Beautiful combination of titanium case and bracelet.
- Touch screen very slow and slow
The Suunto 9 Peak is by far the best watch Suunto has made so far, but it's not perfect.
We'll start with the good points. The Suunto 9 Peak has a nicely sized 43mm case, giving it a more unisex appeal than most other outdoor watches. This case is dominated by a nice, slim titanium bezel that pairs well with the 22mm light blue strap option on our review sample.
It's reasonably slim at 10,6mm and the total weight of 52g doesn't seem like a heavy load to carry around on a daily basis and during exercise. To give you an idea of how thin it is, the 7mm Garmin Fenix 47 is 14,5mm thick and weighs about 20g more.
If you need to take it for a drip, the Suunto 9 Peak has a water resistance rating, which means it's safe to dive to 100 meters. There are three physical buttons on the right side of the case and a 1,2-inch, 240 x 240-pixel transflective display covered in sapphire glass.
This screen offers touch support, although it is not very impressive. Switching between screens is painfully slow and touches can be slow to register. There's also the issue of a thick black bezel around the screen, which eats up available space.
In terms of visibility, the screen holds up well to bright outdoor light, but it can get smudged easily, and that large bezel means you're losing more room for your data fields to breathe. There's an LED backlight to improve visibility at night, though it's not extremely bright.
There's a lot to like about the overall design and look of the Suunto 9 Peak, but the touchscreen lets it down, which isn't great and means you'll have to rely on stiff physical buttons to get around.
sports monitoring
- 80 sport modes
- Heat maps to find popular routes
- breadcrumb navigation
Suunto 9 Peak offers more than 80 sport modes, including indoor and outdoor activities, with basic sports like running, cycling and swimming all covered. Activity profiles marked "basic" will only track duration and heart rate, not the richer metrics offered for other activities.
In terms of sensors, you get a digital compass and a barometric altimeter to track elevation, as well as ascents and descents in more mountainous terrain. There's support for all five major satellite navigation systems, with a choice of four GPS recording modes depending on how much battery life you need to play.
There are also rich weather-focused features like storm alarms, temperature readings, sea-level pressure data, and sunrise and sunset times.
There is an optical heart rate monitor to measure exertion levels during exercise and offer continuous heart rate monitoring. If you're not confident in heart rate accuracy, it also works with external heart rate sensors. There's also the SpO2 trend sensor to help track blood oxygen levels.
Unfortunately, the tracking experience with the Suunto 9 Peak is severely hampered by that sluggish, sluggish display, and it takes ages to pick modes and fiddle with settings.
That said, the Suunto 9 Peak was quick enough to pick up a GPS signal after our first few rides. We tested it against the Garmin Epix (Gen 2), and overall both watches showed similar distance and pace measurements (although the peak pace recorded by the Peak 9 was optimistic compared to the Garmin).
Closer examination of the routes taken often turned up inaccuracies, such as suggesting we were running through the canals rather than alongside them. Suunto offers its 'snap to routes' feature to help with those GPS issues in more difficult to track areas, although this relies on you loading that route first. This makes it a more useful feature for errands, where you'll stick to those busy routes.
Heart rate monitoring performance wasn't too bad for us overall, either. On most steady pace runs, it was 2-3 bpm with a heart rate monitor chest strap. In runs of two hours or more, there seemed to be a greater difference between average heart rate readings with Suunto above 20 bpm on a chest strap monitor. There seemed to be more disparity in the numbers during activities, so there seems to be a bit of smoothing in the post-training data.
It wasn't good news for on-the-spot readings, either, which tended to be around 20 bpm faster than a chest strap and Garmin and Polar's trusty optical sensors when it came to those daily readings. Taking blood oxygen readings is also time-consuming, and while they seem largely accurate, they don't seem to be usefully stored anywhere in the watch or app.
We also took the Suunto 9 Peak for a pool swim and found it to perform well on basic stats like following distance, average pace and delivering similar SWOLF scores to the very popular Form smart swim goggles.
There are also training-focused features, some of which work with the popular TrainingPeaks platform. Interval workouts can be created and it works with third-party apps, including TrainingPeaks and, of course, Strava. It keeps you informed about training load and recovery and measures VO2 Max, which you can view after training in the watch logbook. Go to Suunto app and you will be able to see dedicated graphs comparing fitness level and fatigue.
Suggested recovery times after running and swimming didn't seem exaggerated and largely matched Garmin's suggestions. Using an external heart rate monitor will give you the most useful and insightful advice if you want to take full advantage of these features.
Any good outdoor watch should be able to help you find your way and give you comprehensive outdoor data. The Suunto 9 Peak offers features in this department, but they pale in comparison to what you can get from other watches for the same price.
You can create and import routes in the Suunto companion app, including following its helpful heatmaps to find popular routes based on your activity. Then you can sync them to the watch. However, from there, things get simpler. You'll have some pretty basic breadcrumb navigation to get around. It's generally good to use, though the lack of any kind of rich map detail gives you very little idea of the surrounding terrain or what might be in your way. The likes of Garmin and Coros offer richer mapping experiences by comparison.
Outside of tracking, Suunto 9 Peak can act as a daily fitness tracker, counting steps and monitoring stress through heart rate variability metrics, which you can view in more detail in the companion app. It's the same story with sleep tracking, which captures sleep duration, sleep quality, and heart rate data. Just make sure it's an enabled feature because you'll need to set it up on the watch first, which isn't very clear up front.
There are some smartwatch features here too, but again they're hampered by the slow touchscreen. You can control music playback and receive app notifications, and there's an option to reject calls with preset responses if the watch is paired with an Android phone. However, the slow nature of screen interaction makes these features quite difficult to use.
Battery duration
- Seven days of regular use
- Up to 14 days in smartwatch mode
When it comes to battery life, the Suunto 9 Peak offers the same battery numbers as the standard Suunto 9. So you look at seven days when you follow and receive phone notifications. This increases to 14 days if you only use it to tell time.
As for tracking, it has a range of GPS battery numbers with the best accuracy giving you 25 hours. If you're willing to sacrifice that supreme accuracy, you can get up to 170 hours.
Suunto has also included its smart charge reminders, which pay attention to your activity history and suggest moving...