The Suunto Run does a fine job of tracking my run fitness, but some of its other functions are just a little too simple to be truly useful.
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| Lightweight design | UI is totally geared towards exercise |
| Great battery life | Terrible charging cable |
| Suunto app gives lots of insight into fitness metrics | Music player is of limited utility |
Score: 3/5
In this review
Suunto Run Specifications
Suunto Run Design
Suunto Run Performance
Suunto Run Battery
Suunto Run Conclusion
Ethical disclaimer: The Suunto Run used in this review was sent to me by Suunto for review, and to my understanding, they’re not going to ask for it back. That’s probably for the best, as you’ll see, but it does raise questions of impartiality.
You can read about ART’s ethics policy here in detail, but the short form is that it makes no difference whether a product goes back or stays with me in terms of its end review.
Never has, never will, I’m old school that way and quite proud of it. Suunto has had no input into the content of this review outside of providing the watch for review in the first place.
Far more reviewers should be upfront and honest with their audiences, but I am but one man and there’s only so much I can do. Now, on with the review…
Actually, no. Ethically, I feel compelled to say that that there’s some content below (it’s in the design section) that is not for the weak of stomach.
Don’t say I didn’t warn you. I’ve never had to put a content warning on my reviews before, but here we are.
Design
Suunto has a wide range of fitness-centric smartwatches you can buy, though it’s not a brand that I’ve tested much myself in the past.
The Suunto Run sits near the bottom of the Suunto family in price terms, selling in Australia for $449.95 outright.
Editorial note: The original price listed in this review was as advised by Suunto, but apparently the RRP has changed, so I’ve updated accordingly.
That gets you a smartwatch with a 46mm diameter round AMOLED display with a resolution of 466×466 pixels. Controls sit by default on the right hand side of the watch face with an upper button used mainly for fast launching exercise routines, a digital crown for selection and beneath it a simple back button.
The interface is also touch sensitive, but Suunto pretty clearly intends most of your interactions with the Suunto Run to revolve around these buttons, and around exercising specifically. Touch does work, but it’s not particularly fast compared to hitting a button, which also just feels more satisfying somehow.
Suunto sells the Suunto Run in Australia in four different colour finishes; All Black, Coral Orange, Frost Grey or Lime. Suunto sent me the All Black variant, and it’s certainly an apt colour name given that the watch body and strap are indeed in bright fuchsia pink.
OK, they’re not, I was just checking if you were paying attention.
The All Black model is all in black, and presumably quite popular in New Zealand.
I do appreciate the idea that you can make a lower cost fitness wearable in multiple colours, however, so that folks who want a more extroverted “fun” tone can go wild, while those who want something a little less showy can do so without concern.
Suunto provides large and small straps with the Suunto Run, connected with a very small pin connector. It did take me a little while to get that looped in, but once in place it worked quite well. For what it’s worth I used the small strap on my wrists.
The Suunto Run is also rated for water resistance, albeit not with a specified IP rating. Instead Suunto claims it’s water resistant up to 50m with no other specifications provided.
Those who know me will know I’m not a keen diver, so I can’t speak to whether or not this is a particularly swim-friendly timepiece, though I did inadvertently end up testing its water resistance in a far more disturbing way.
A quick warning before you continue: The following is not pleasant, but it is true. It’s also true that you probably shouldn’t be eating or drinking anything while reading it. Consider yourself warned.
During my review period with the Suunto Run, I have of course run with it and sweated on it, as you might expect. That should be well within scope for any fitness wearable, because humans sweat. This it handled without issue, and a quick rinse dealt with any issue there.
However, what I also ended up doing while wearing it was helping to clean out the house of an elderly relative.
I won’t get into too many specifics here for privacy reasons, but let’s say that the house in question was in a calamitous state of disarray.
This was to a level that can only be called revolting in the most literal sense, thanks to the absolute infestation of rats within the property.
When I say absolute infestation, I mean it.
I’ve never had to utter the words “washing machine full of live rats” before in my life, and hope to never have to do so again.
Rats are not particularly picky about where they choose to expel bodily waste, and it was everywhere, including some containers that sloshed… liquid and solid “material”… directly over my arm and as a result over the Suunto Run.
Yes, I was wearing serious rubber gloves, but it still got everywhere.
Believe me, as nasty as that sounds to read, you didn’t have to live through it.
The only thing I could do was rush to a sink and thoroughly scrub both arm and watch.
The Suunto Run was repeatedly dunked in water, cleaned, dunked and cleaned again. For about five minutes, possibly more, I don’t know because I wasn’t wearing the watch while I was cleaning it over and over again.
I honestly didn’t know what would come of it, and I’m pretty darned sure that it would contravene the warranty to clean it to the level I felt was necessary.
To its credit, it came through that with flying colours and no damage (save for the damage to my psyche) whatsoever.
No water damage, no odour, no worries.
There are of course more heavy-duty fitness trackers out there for the more extreme endurance athletes, but this was (inadvertently) impressive proof of its endurance, albeit not a test I’m going to repeat ever again.
tldr version: Alex had a highly disturbing way of testing water resistance, but it’s over now.
Performance
You don’t give a smartwatch a prefix like “Run” without it being at least a little obsessed with tracking faster human motion. While the Suunto Run will indeed track running via the Suunto App, it’ll also cover a number of other fitness activities, including swimming, mountain biking, aerobics, snowboarding and Tennis, to name but a few. There’s a selection of 34 in total, which isn’t as high as some other trackers, but ample for most everyday uses.
I run as my activity, so I can’t really talk to whether or not the Suunto Run could lead you to glory on the hallowed grounds of Wimbledon, but then I do figure that most folks buying the Suunto Run would probably do so because running was their passion.
The Suunto Run does a fine job not only of tracking my running, including heart rate and nicely accurate GPS, but also of then providing post-run analysis of where I’ve done well (rare) or poorly (all too common).
This works through the Suunto app to then provide guidance on how best to improve my overall fitness and running prowess, and all of this works very well at the kind of level that I’m at. I can see that some more serious hyperathletes may want even more data to hand, but then Suunto has more powerful smartwatches for that kind of approach.
The Suunto Run also supports notifications from your paired smartphone, although these are less well handled than running. By default they’ll flash up at the time the notification comes in, but if you miss them, they’re then tucked away within the control panel widget, accessed with a swipe and then a tap to get into the notifications panel.
Notifications are hidden several taps away. This is less than optimal.
Quite why Suunto doesn’t make this a left swipe from the main UI eludes me, because notifications are such a basic part of the smartwatch experience.
Then again, given that the Suunto Run only has a handful of available watchfaces and no actual app store, it’s really more of a semi-smart fitness tracker than a true smartwatch anyway.
The Suunto Run also supports direct music playback, and here I had a feeling of trepidation. Why trepidation? The Suunto Aqua headphones also support the same kind of functionality, but did so with a clunky interface and preinstalled songs that couldn’t be removed or muted as part of an overall playlist, something I truly disliked back when I reviewed them.
Also read:
Suunto Aqua review
Like the Aqua headphones, the Suunto Run doesn’t interface with any of the popular music streaming services – your Spotify, Apple Music, Tidals and so on – for music, instead only supporting transferred files in MP3 format.
You do get a selection of them pre-installed on the watch on the off-chance that you’re not ancient the way I am, and thankfully, unlike the Aqua, you can remove them if they’re not to your taste.
This still leaves you needing to transfer files over to the Suunto Run in order to have offline playback, and this proved challenging on two fronts.
Theoretically all you should need to do is connect up the charging cable to the watch and then to your computer, but here I hit two distinct problems. The Suunto Run didn’t register as a device on a Mac at all, and even on a Windows PC, it rather constantly fell over transferring files. Some of this was due to the the transfer speed being glacially slow, but most of it was due to the included charging/transfer cable being incredibly prone to dropping the connection entirely.
Even once I’d jumped through those hoops and transferred over some MP3 music – with a reminder to my Australian audience that if you do still own CDs, it’s 100% legal to rip MP3s of them for this kind of format shifting work – the interface for playback isn’t terribly good.
You’ve got to pair a set of headphones specifically to the Suunto Run, then select the music playback setting, then switch to “offline music”… and then and only then can you actually start playing anything.
In theory.
Most of the time, even with shuffle enabled, the Suunto Run app only wants to play one track at a time, stopping at the end. You can in theory get around this by creating playlists on the Suunto app on your phone, but every single time I tried this, the step where you save them back to the watch failed. Every single time.
Unless you want to run only with your watch and nothing else, I wouldn’t bother with the music playback function at all, because as it stands it’s only vaguely functional some of the time, and annoying all of the time.
If you’re happy taking your phone along as well, use any streaming service – or even music files stored on your phone – for a far superior exercise/music experience.
Battery
Suunto’s claim for the Suunto Run is that its battery should be good for up to 12 days of usage under regular conditions, or up to 20 days on effective standby mode – more using as a straight watch than a fitness tracker – though that 12 day figure does work from the basis of the always-on display being disabled.
During my review period while using the Suunto Run for its primary exercise purpose, I’ve managed to hit 8-10 days without too much issue, and I can see how 12 days might be feasible for those who had fewer notifications coming in than I do on a typical day. Using it just as a watch without exercise saw a very repeatable 5% battery drop day on day, which lines up nicely with that 20 day overall claim too.
That’s the good news about the Suunto Run’s battery life, but there is a downside.
The Suunto Run uses a custom pogo pin based charging cable, supplied in the box that finishes out with a USB-C connector, but it’s an incredibly fiddly process getting the watch to properly charge or work for data transfers for music.
It sits really badly on its connector with a very weak magnetic connection that’s broken very easily indeed. More than once I’ve woken up in the morning to find that it had failed to charge thanks to being only marginally off base. It’s not a good design element, and not one that’s easy to fix for, so you’ll need plenty of patience to get it to power up properly.
Suunto Run: Alex’s Verdict
Suunto’s core selling proposition is to fitness fanatics, and within that space, I can totally see the appeal of the Suunto Run. It’s lightweight and does a very good job of covering fitness activities with detailed tracking metrics and an app that supports not only ongoing measurement but also sensible building of strength and endurance along the way.
It won’t suit every athlete, mind you, and it’s not without its issues.
Music playback feels like a function that there more to seem like a good idea rather than one that’s been well implemented, and the charging cable does have a problematic design.
At its asking price you’re also getting closer to the true smartwatch space if the more app-centric approach to fitness tracking is something you want.
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