Suunto Vertical
With long battery life, superb accuracy and a large screen, the Suunto Vertical is the perfect companion for climbing high peaks, heading out on long expeditions and training for demanding activities.
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- Provides extremely long battery life of up to 500 hrs. of continuous exercise tracking in tour mode and up to 60 hrs. in the most accurate dual-band GNSS tracking mode
- In time mode, the watch provides up to 60 days of battery life
- Plan and analyze your routes with the help of 3D maps, heatmaps, road surface information and slope gradient in the Suunto app
- Intuitive maps tell you all you need to know about the landscape; contour lines, water, paths and other important landmarks are available in 3 different map styles
- Free-of-charge global outdoor online maps can be downloaded with the Suunto app
- Includes 90+ sports modes and connects to partner services like Strava, Training Peaks and Komoot
- Maintain spatial awareness in the mountains with the altimeter, barometer and compass
- Storm alarm and up-to-date weather forecasts help you stay out of bad weather
- Includes an integrated wrist-based heart rate sensor in the watch
- Military standard tested
- Bezel material is stainless steel
- Weighs 86 g
- Sapphire crystal glass
- Watch diameter: 1.9 in. (49 mm)
- Compatible with a wide selection of easy-to-change 22 mm accessory straps (not included)
Imported.
View all Suunto GPS Sports Watches| Best Use | Multisport |
|---|---|
| Average Battery Life | Performance mode: 60 hours; endurance mode: 90 hours; ultra mode: 140 hours; tour mode: 500 hours |
| Battery Type | Lithium Ion |
| Display Size | 1.4 inches |
| Illumination | Backlight |
| Altimeter | Satellite-based |
| Compass | Yes |
| GPS/Satellite Detectable | Yes |
| HRM Included/Integrated | Yes |
| Heart Rate Sensor Type | Wrist-based |
| Average Heart Rate | Yes |
| Heart Rate Target Zone(s) | Yes |
| VO2 Max Estimate | Yes |
| Recovery Advising | Yes |
| Tracks Steps | Yes |
| Pedometer Type | Digital 1-axis Accelerometer |
| Pace Alert | Yes |
| Interval Training | Yes |
| Tracks Calories Burned | Yes |
| Water-Resistant Depth | 100 meters |
| Pool Lap Recognition | Yes |
| Stroke Recognition | Yes |
| Sleep Tracking | Yes |
| Alarm | Yes |
| Time Display | Yes |
| Stopwatch | Yes |
| Visual Map Display | Yes |
| Basemap | Yes |
| Preloaded Map | None |
| Programmable Routes | Yes |
| Number of Routes | Global |
| Number of Waypoints | Global |
| Preloaded Geocaches | Yes |
| Customization | Apps Data Fields Watch Faces Widgets |
| Smart Device Notifications | Yes |
| Data Exchange | Bluetooth |
| Compatible Fitness Accessories | Heart Rate Monitor Foot Pod |
| Gender | Unisex |
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Decent for the price point
I bought this watch before going on a Glacier trip in Alaska. I've had this watch for 5 months now, and here are the pros and cons: Pros: Excellent battery life, lower profile, looks great, more sports and activities to log than you can ever learn, great fitness tracker with useful training metrics, and useful coaching functions. Cons: Clunky user interface (lags), heart rate sensor is a hit or miss (inaccurate readings while working out), can't easily trim workouts if you forget to turn off tracker. recommendations: buy an external heart rate sensor to pair. I bought the polar H10 and it works great.
Just get a Garmin
I got this watch four months ago and it has never lived up to its price point. Recently it stopped connecting to my phone and has been stuck on the “pair” screen after I factory reset it. The customer support is highly unreliable. There is no phone number to call and the only way to directly message Suunto is through social media. Everything else you have to submit a service request form. The menus are slow and clunky. You can’t receive text messages or iMessages if you’re on an iPhone. It really only alerts you when you get a notification from a third party app like gmail or Snapchat. It doesn’t tell you the weather, it just tells you the weather from the last location and time when you synced with your phone. It handles time zones very poorly. For example, have the sunset notification turned on and when I travel from the east to west coast it will notify me for the sunset in another location. Syncing it to your phone doesn’t fix this, you have to go into the settings and manually turn the sunset feature off and on again. I’ve had to factory reset the watch twice since I’ve purchased it and each time it clears the activities you’ve done and the maps you’ve downloaded. Downloading offline maps is nice but takes a very long time. I had a Suunto 5 for about three years previous to this watch and it worked much better. I don’t think Suunto have managed to create a high performance watch that matches some of the more expensive garmin watches and if you’re gonna get a Suunto just get one of their cheaper options.
Battle Tested on the PCT
In 2023 my wife and I hiked the Pacific Crest Trail. I started off recording our daily grinds with an ancient Fenix 5 that I had purchased for her a long time ago. I burned that out about 2 weeks in, mostly due, I think, to the age of the watch. After the Garmin, I transitioned back to FitBit which I had typically used for lifestyle monitoring over the past 10 years. The FitBit failed miserably trying to keep up with the 10-13 hour workouts in an environment where it was offline most of the time. So, about the time we bailed on the Sierra due to the historic snowpack and made our way up to Cascade Locks to head back south, I paid a visit to the Portland REI and picked up Suunto’s newest activity watch - the Vertical. I have never looked back. I chose the Vertical over its Garmin competitor mostly because I use a Suunto D4 for diving and I love it. I have nothing against Garmin and use many of their products - including a Varia for biking which is bulletproof, but the D series watches are the gold standard for diving so when it came time to choose a watch for another 4 months of hiking, I went with Suunto. This is what I love about it. Monster Battery Life: If there were no other pro’s about this watch, the battery life alone would still outweigh the cons - it’s insane. On the Pacific Crest Trail, it was not unusual for us to hike up to 13 hours a day and we were almost always in the double digits for duration. Despite this, the Vertical had no problem stringing 6-7 of these marathon days together on a single charge. Coming from FitBit, which struggled to support a single day, this was impressive. The Vertical supports a number of recording modes, the highest of which is “Performance” which allows navigation and mapping features while recording, not to mention operation of all the biometrics the watch has. The next step down is “Endurance” which supports everything Performance does except for mapping and navigation. I usually operated in Endurance mode. There are 2-3 options below Endurance which could stretch the battery life even further. Note that the watch I purchased was not even the Titanium model which is outfitted with a solar array in the watchface that is supposed to stretch the battery capability even further. Oversized Watch Face: Both Garmin and Suunto have finally realized the futility of including mapping and navigational capabilities on a watch with a standard sized face. What’s the point of all that mapping capability if you constantly have to squint to see it? The Suunto Vertical offers a massive watch face which allows someone to clearly see the route and contours in front of them. App Interface: One of the reasons I really liked Suunto was the work they have done on the App. It’s a nice interface that allows a quick summary of your biomarkers as well as a complete review of your workout history. The mapping/planning side of the app is intuitive and I was able to quickly take routes that I built in Gaia GPS and transfer them in the IOS operating system directly to Suunto for quick upload to the watch which I then used for guidance on the trail. The app also allows route planning on the Suunto interface but I didn’t really play with that because the transfer from Gaia GPS was so seamless. Navigation: The navigational capabilities of the watch are beautiful. I have to say, I didn't use them very often for hiking the PCT as the trail was always clearly marked and burning the extra battery wasn’t worth the small benefit. I have used it several times for mountain biking in new areas with many junctions where I don't want to constantly dip into my pocket for my phone and the navigation in this situation was superb. I look forward to backcountry skiing/mountaineering with it where lots of off trail navigation is demanded - I think it will be fantastic. Off-line Syncing: This is one area where Suunto has a direct benefit over its competitor, Garmin. Garmin, to my knowledge, does not allow for syncing the watch “off-line.” That is, without cellular service on your phone, I don't think the watch can transfer new workouts to the memory on the phone for later upload. I experienced this with my old Fenix in the first weeks of the trail. I had to go up somewhere high to find service to upload new workouts before the watch cleared its memory and I lost them. The Vertical and Suunto App allow for transfer of the workouts from the watch memory to my phone's much larger memory for later upload - in fact, that seems to be how Suunto intends it to work, so for expeditions or thru-hikes, where many days of workouts are accrued without service to upload them, this watch would be an excellent choice. Massive Memory: The Vertical comes with something like 24 gigs of memory which is plenty to hold a number of downloaded map packs for reference on the trail. I currently have all of Washington, Oregon, California and British Columbia downloaded on the watch which hardly touches its memory bank. I haven’t played with the Suunto Marketplace but my guess is there are lots of fun features and tools that can make good use of all that memory. There aren’t many downsides to this watch, but if i had to name them they would be as follows. Ergonomics: The watch is oversized, which I mentioned as a benefit above. One thing I noticed on the trail is that it impinges pretty hard on the end of my Ulna bone (bone on the outside of the wrist). It’s not something that really bothered me and I've gotten used to but even now, when I take it off, there is definitely an impression of the watch bracket in that area. TCX File Corruption: I have noticed that, on exceptionally long exercises (10+ hours) while operating in performance mode and navigating, the watch will suddenly return to the point of origin and stop recording new gps coordinates on the TCX file. This has the effect of making it look like I suddenly flew back to the point of origin 10 hours into the hike and stayed there for the remainder of my time. I expect this is just a firmware issue that Suunto will work out and, since I usually record in Endurance mode, rarely saw it happen but when it did, I was always recording in performance mode while navigating. Most workouts are far less than 10 hours so I am guessing very few users of this watch will ever have it happen to them. I have had no issue recording a workout in performance mode while navigating on 3-4 hour bike rides so this really isn’t an issue that bothered me. Charging Cable: I hate when companies build their products with proprietary charging cables. It’s just a sham to make more money but almost everyone does it. I had hoped that, because Suunto builds their watches in Finland and because the EU is getting sticky about companies making proprietary cables, the Vertical would have a standard USB port for charging but, alas, they do not. The magnetic, circular charging station is prone to shifting if bumped and I have, more than once, come back expecting my watch to be charged only to find the contact had been broken and it hadn’t charged. All in all - I love this watch. Above all else, Suunto set out to make a robust watch that could handle any activity you wanted to use it for and the result is a bomber, built-for-purpose timepiece that can stand up to anything for long periods of time. So excited that Suunto has an adventure watch that can compete with the best the market has to offer.
It worked fine before the software upgrade
This has the potential to be a great product. My complaint is that Suunto pushed out a software upgrade that disabled features I was using. When I bought the watch a few weeks ago, it was a breeze to set up and I could scroll through all of the features (widgets) by simply swiping right or left. They just pushed out an upgrade to the software that limits you to 1 single widget, so if you want to use your stopwatch and GPS at the same time… you can’t do it anymore. Want to check the weather and know the sunset time? Sorry! That’s too many widgets at once! I read the punch list specs for the software upgrade 2.39.44 and there is no mention of limiting the access to a single widget. There is another more recent upgrade listed on their site, but it similarly doesn’t mention fixing the issue of accessing multiple widgets. Lastly, I did reach out to Suunto who proudly stated the watch is working correctly (single widget access is their only current option) and gave me boiler plate gibberish about passing along my feedback. I’ll update my review for this product if they actually follow up or fix the issue.