The Suunto Aqua headphones could be the ideal companion for people who pound the pool – so what happens when you hand them to someone who only dabbles in the public bodies of water at best?
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| IP68 rated for water resistance | Suunto App treats the Aqua headphones as an afterthought |
| Wide array of swim-specific measurements | Offline music playback is seriously limited |
| Good battery life, plus included power bank | A custom charger is still problematic if it breaks or goes missing |
Score: 3.5/5
 |
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In this review
Suunto Aqua Specifications
Suunto Aqua Design
Suunto Aqua Performance
Suunto Aqua Battery
Suunto Aqua Conclusion
Ethical Disclaimer: Suunto sent me the Suunto Aqua headphones for review purposes, and I don’t believe they’re asking for them back – most headphones shouldn’t be shared amongst people anyway, but especially fitness ones where sweat is involved. Eugh.
In any case, as always, this gets them reviewed and that’s all. Suunto has no input on my review, and will be able to see this at the exact same time you do. Once again, ethical disclosure is important here at ART (and should be elsewhere, but it is what it is.). For more on ART’s Ethical policy, click here.
Design
Open Ear headphones are a good choice for those keen on fitness activities outside, because they afford you the ability to listen to music, podcasts or other audio sources without losing your awareness of your immediate surroundings.
There’s no shortage of choices from some of my favourites such as the Shokz OpenRun Pro 2 all the way through to considerably less appealing fare like the frankly awful TrueFree F2 Open Ears.
If your exercise of choice is swimming, however, your choices are more constrained, because the nature of immersing headphones in water, even if they’re not plugging straight into your ear canals would quickly be fatal for most headphones. The Suunto Aqua headphones, as the name suggests, are a set designed specifically for swimmers, with the headline feature being IP68 rated water resistance.
As I’ve written about previously, water resistance isn’t the same thing as water proofing, though Suunto’s claims around the Suunto Aqua is that they should be good for up to 2 hours at a depth of 5 metres.
They’re designed for heavy pool swimmers in other words, though if you want to keep them going it would be highly advisable to rinse them off after each swim, as water resistance degrades over time and pool salts and chemicals are not friendly to it at all.
The Suunto Aqua’s design follows the classic setup of most open ear headband style headphones, with a connecting strong cable that loops around the back of your head hooked up to two earpieces with a front mounted bone conduction speaker set and controls and batteries sitting behind your ears.
The Suunto Aqua ship in either a plain black or more ostentatious Lime Blue finish; it’s the latter style that Suunto sent me for review.
I mostly run, and that has comprised the vast majority of my testing time with the Suunto Aqua headphones, but that did give me an appreciation for their relative comfort level.
They weigh in at 35g, a tad heavier than the comparable Shokz OpenSwim Pro Headphones and their 27.3g weight, though you’re not bearing all that weight on your ears in any case.
The design – as with most headphones of this type – leans the heavier battery compartment to the back of your ears, so the impact on the top of your ears is lessened.
Over many 5km runs, I’ve few complaints, though a more run-specific pair is more comfortable. Again, these are for swimmers first and foremost, so that’s only a minor issue really, and if you are a multi-sport athlete these work well in this respect.
The Suunto Aqua headphones have simple controls with play/power/volume buttons sitting on the right earpiece behind your ear, while the front of the left earpiece has a multi-function button. This again is very much in line with the standard way most of these sets are built.
My one observation here is that while there’s always a bit of muscle memory learning in terms of where buttons are when they’re effectively hiding on your own head, the multi-function button on the Suunto Aqua is really flat and sometimes a little difficult to hit while I was working out.
Outside the headphones, Suunto also provides a simple carrying case, though it’s a soft felt kind of bag that doesn’t feel terribly pool-friendly, as well as a charging dock and cable in the box.
Performance
The Suunto Aqua headphones connect over Bluetooth, and you can just fire this up when you first take the Suunto Aqua headphones out of their packaging and get to using them in the most basic fashion if you want to.
The idea however is that you’ll also pair them up via the Suunto app for iOS or Android. Suunto has an entire ecosystem of smart fitness wearables and its app is largely built around helping athletes train in their sport of choice.
Not shockingly, for the Suunto Aqua that’s swimming, though it’s worth noting that swimming is all that the Suunto Aqua headphones will cover. If you want other metrics tracked, you’d want to hook up some other smart wearable… and clearly Suunto would prefer that be a Suunto-branded product if you wanted to share metrics more broadly.
My one complaint with the Suunto app is that it somewhat treats the Suunto Aqua headphones as a second-class citizen.
Fire up the Suunto app and you’ll be greeted with an interface for tracking your workouts, direct buttons to find and check the status of Suunto Smartwatches… but where are the headphones lurking?
They’re lurking in the user profiles menu, which is just downright confusing really. From there you can update their firmware, enable or disable multi-device pairing, set sound modes more easily and check your ability to jump and the flexibility of your neck. For what it’s worth, Suunto’s jump assessment confirms that I’m not in fact Spider-Man, and that my neck could do with being more flexible. Neither statistic is particularly surprising to me.
You can also set up motion tracking, so you can go somewhat hands-free. This is limited to call answering/rejecting and song skipping, however, though with the state of flexibility of my own neck, that’s maybe for the best. Trying to get me to tilt my head precisely to adjust volume would probably lead to me shattering my spine somehow…
While Bluetooth support is all keen and peachy, most swimmers will be aware that Bluetooth doesn’t work all that well – or more frequently at all – if you’re submerged in water. Like the comparable Shokz OpenSwim Pro headphones, Suunto’s solution for this is the inclusion of 32GB of onboard storage for Mp3 files so you can instead opt for offline playback that doesn’t need any kind of wireless connection.
The Suunto Aqua headphones have a specific underwater mode designed to make your sounds more audible when you’re swimming. For everyday use, it’s best to mostly use the outdoor mode, even when indoors, which boosts bass just a little to give your music or other audio a little more kick.
Audio quality was decent for listening while running outside of the water (or technically in it – it did rain on me once while I was testing them out), though you’ll still get better audio from a set of in-ear buds, and you do have to play the typical games of shuffling the headphones around to get the best cheek fit to ensure that bone conduction gives you the best possible audio output.
The Suunto Aqua’s microphones are workable, though it was quickly apparent to callers that I was on some level of Bluetooth headphone, if calling matters to you.
I did test the Suunto Aqua headphones while swimming, but only briefly, and I should say that I’m not a competitive swimmer of any style at all, so the actual swim training parts of the Suunto Aqua were rather beyond me, as was my access to swim for all that long. The audio side of matters works acceptably well, though I was struck with the thought that while my ears were underwater, I wasn’t aware of much other ambient sound anyway.
This then raises the issue of what you’re going to listen to, because in 2025, it’s fair to say that far more people use streaming music services than those that have heavy libraries of Mp3 files in the first place. Suunto’s made an odd choice with its offline playback mode, however, and it’s one I don’t much like. The headphones have a selection of tracks already in the device’s memory, so in theory you do have something to listen to no matter what.
The problem here is that you can’t remove them at all – or even directly see them when plugging the Suunto Aqua headphones into your computer, which is how you transfer files to the inbuilt 32GB storage.
I get that they’re copyright protected and that should be respected, but as it stands if you just drop your own music into the base directory of the Suunto Aqua headphones – and you have to, they don’t support subfolders – then you’ll end up with a mix of their music and yours.
It would be hugely preferable if, at the very least, Suunto offered an in-app option to tell the headphones “ignore the embedded tracks”.
In theory – and according to Suunto’s own App – you should be able to create playlists for the Suunto Aqua headphones, but I cannot for the life of me work out where or how, and standard working .m3u playlists don’t seem to be respected by the Suunto Aqua at all.
Battery
The Suunto Aqua headphones are rated for up to 10 hours of playback, which does give them an hour of claimed battery life over the Shokz OpenSwim Pro Headphones. I can’t say that I’ve swum for 10 hours in them – and local Mp3 playback drops claimed battery life to just 6 hours – but in my own observational tests, that 10 hour figure is reasonably likely, at least while the batteries are nice and new.
The Suunto Aqua headphones use a custom charging dock that connects via USB-C to a compatible power source. I’m not a big fan of custom chargers simply because you’re stuffed if they’re lost or broken, but Suunto does borrow a trick here from the wider wireless headphones world.
The dock isn’t just a way to line up the charging pins with a cable, but also a battery in its own right capable of providing two extra full charges to the Suunto Aqua headphones. That’s an impressive 30 hours of playback time, though you’d have to take a swimming break after every ten hours to allow them to actually recharge. I suspect most swimming coaches would probably see that as a good thing.
Suunto Aqua: Alex’s Verdict
The Suunto Aqua headphones are fair for their price as long as you’re quite dedicated to your swimming, and especially so if you’re already heavily in the Suunto ecosystem for other devices.
Straight Bluetooth playback works well, and I could see them being a good fit for triathletes wanting the music to never stop, though you’d have to deal with the annoying way that they work with offline music – or get used to skipping the inbuilt tracks a whole lot.
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Suunto Aqua: Pricing and availability
The Suunto Aqua headphones retail in Australia for $299.
|
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