Suunto 9 Baro Features

The battery life is certainly Suunto’s main selling feature for the 9. It’s charge can last up to 120 hours in the ‘Ultra’ mode which keeps up GPS tracking but deactivates wrist heart rate tracking. In ‘Endurance’ mode, battery life is 40 hours with wrist heart rate and GPS tracking. These battery modes can be selected when you’re about to start your activity.

On top of this impressive battery life, Suunto have fitted an optical heart rate monitor. Although it won’t perform as well as a chest heart rate monitor, we found this a great solution for on the go heart rate measurements where a chest strap is a little too overkill.

For those of you who are looking for improved heart rate readings, then all it takes is a simple pair up with an aftermarket heart rate strap used through the inbuilt Bluetooth on the device.

Navigation on the 9 is relatively basic, compared to the rival Garmin Fenix 5 Plus. This has been done through the use of a simple breadcrumb navigational trail, which isn’t displayed as a fully featured OS map, like on the Fenix series. It would have been nice to have map features on a watch of this price, but I understand that would come at the cost of a larger housing (due to need for internal memory) or a smaller battery.

Whilst the navigation may be slightly lacking on this device, I found the ’search for location’ feature incredibly useful. With the click of a few buttons from the navigational menu of the watch, you’re able to get GPS coordinates of your location (I did find that it took a while to find a GPS signal, however).

This not only helps in your own personal navigation, but if things do go wrong in poor weather, you can use this watch to find your location in minutes, saving valuable time not having to fumble around with a map and compass to take a grid reference.

Bottom Line

I’ve spent the past five weeks with the Suunto 9 Baro on my wrist. Activities have ranged from multiple trips ski touring in France to hiking in Iceland whilst also keeping up my fitness between these trips by running in London.

Overall, it’s become an essential companion to take with me during all of my activities. The ability to track and look back on the finer points of my ski touring and running trips have been an invaluable tool in keeping a log of what I’ve done and monitoring my fitness gains (and losses!).

Battery life was the selling point to this watch and this really is where the Suunto 9 shines. I took it on hut-to-hut ski tours and it kept up with me over three days of GPS tracking (GPS was switched off during the evenings). The device automatically adjusts the settings to conserve power when you do find yourself running out of juice and with no way to charge it.

Once back from each trip, I was able to take a look at the GPS positioning to find where I had travelled in relation to the map, I could look at my heart rate zones in specific areas of the tour and my timings for each section – a brilliant training companion which helped me to hone in on specific training improvements.

Knowing that you’ve got a personal GPS device on your wrist has been a great confidence booster when ski touring in real backcountry terrain. The ability to gather almost instantaneous location information could one day prove invaluable if things take a turn for the worse.

A couple of downsides to note. Firstly I did find that the screen can become hard to read in direct sunlight, particularly when in the sleep mode, forcing you to press a button to wake the watch back up. I’ve been running the watch at 50% brightness.

Secondly, I wish they had placed the function buttons on the left hand side of the watch. As someone who wears a watch on my left hand, when I found myself reaching for a hold and flexing my wrist while climbing, the back of my palm would sometimes unintentionally press one of the buttons and change the function. At times the recording of my exercise would be paused until I noticed what had happened. This can be avoided by wearing the watch on the right arm, but left is what I’m used to.

I’d have loved to see local mapping functions built into the watch, along with some more classic ‘smartwatch’ features, such as an Apple Pay type feature, or Spotify use built in for Bluetooth head phone users, but still, I understand that you can’t get it all in such a small and affordable package.

All in, this is an extremely nifty device and it’s impressive to see this amount of features and battery performance squeezed into a relatively affordable package. The Suunto 9 will have you geeking out about the finer details of your trips, and it’ll become an invaluable travel companion for those of us who spend a lot of time off the beaten track.

£499
White or Black
suunto.com

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