2.5/5

£429 | Buy from Suunto

TL:DR

The Peak 9 from Suunto is billed as their top tier smartwatch and it’s certainly got the looks to back that up. Unfortunately, the interface is clunky and cumbersome to the point of despair and even with the inclusion of some interesting features and over 80 supported activities, we’re not sure the Peak 9 can keep up with the competition from Garmin and Coros.

 Positives

• Beautiful design

• Premium materials

• App is excellent

 Negatives

• Mighty screen bezels on an already small screen

• Unbelievably slow and cumbersome

• Only offers breadcrumb navigation

The Lowdown

• Over 80 Sport modes

• Sapphire and glass construction

• GPS Navigation

• Weather functions

• Touch Screen

• 100m water resistance

Suunto have been in the GPS smartwatch/activity tracker game for a while and the Peak 9 is the latest iteration of their flagship GPS sports watch; it’s a delicate wafer of glass, titanium and silicon that claims to offer a premium look at feel that is – beyond measuring. Their words, not ours.

We spent a few weeks with the Peak 9 putting it through its paces on various trudges up hills in the Lake District and general day to day use.

The Peak 9 is a svelte device, quite a contrast to our trusty Coros Vertix 2 and even makes the Garmin Instinct 2 look portly; weighing in at a mere 52 grams which is about 40% less than the Coros and is actually the same as the Garmin, but remember the Garmin is made from polymer. The Peak 9 is hewn from a block of grade 5 titanium which is super tough, hard wearing and hypoallergic which could be a deal breaker for those with sensitive skin.

It's a good looking device on first impressions, the super thin bezels encircle the sapphire glass screen to produce a very understated yet premium looking product. On the back is the heartrate, blood oxygen sensor and various other sensors that the Peak 9 derives a host of metrics from.

The strap on our model was a very unoffensive dark blue silicon number with metal hardware that added to the premium feel. Something we really liked was the removable ‘stud’ to fasten the loose end of the strap down to the band.

Power up the Peak 9 and you might be in for a nasty surprise. That beautiful slab of sapphire glass? It’s now got a honking great bezel that really detracts from the overall sleekness of the design and makes the screen considerably smaller than initial impressions may indicate. The screen is touch sensitive but this does mean it is a fingerprint magnet. Some devices with touchscreens have a remarkable ability to fend off grubby smears, but unfortunately the Peak 9 doesn’t have such powers and after a minutes of swiping and tapping the screen bared similar resemblance to a kid’s iPad screen.

Regrettably the performance of the touchscreen does not stand up to Apple’s fabled displays, at least not from this decade or the last. The screen is of the capacitive kind so uses the same technology as pretty much every touch screen in the past 10 years but it seems the software isn’t quote up to scratch. Inputs are slow and laggy to the point of frustration and navigating the menus becomes incredibly tedious as the watch struggles to keep up with even the most deliberate of inputs. There’s 3 buttons on the edge of the case which can be used to navigate through some menus but we couldn’t work out which menus required touch and which required buttons to navigate.

The 1.2” display has a resolution of 240x240 which displays on screen text crisply and the backlight automatically dims to preserve your battery life and means you don’t dazzle yourself when looking at the watch in the dark. Whilst on the topic of battery life, the Peak 9 will run for about 14 days on a single charge but this is in ‘time mode’ if you want the Peak 9 to deliver notifications and offer 24/7 tracking the battery will only be good for 7 days. It will remind you to charge the device when it’s getting low so hopefully that’ll reduce those emergency charges just as you’re about to head out the door on a run.

It doesn’t just have to be a run or even a cycle that you record with the Peak 9, as Suunto has packed in tracking for over 80 activities: from a smattering of running flavours to orienteering, fishing, bowling and frisbee. There’s even the option to track a motorsport activity which is a first in our books.

While scrolling through the list of activities, you’ll notice some are marked as basic which means the Peak 9 will only track duration and heart rate as opposed to deeper metrics available on other activities. A host of sensors including a digital compass and barometric altimeter mean elevation gain and loss is more accurately measured rather than deriving from GPS data. Whilst out on the hills of the (very wet) Lake District, we loved the weather centric features such as the storm alarm which alerts you of sudden pressure changes which can indicate storm systems and temperature readings. The Peak 9 is rated to a depth of 100m so even the heaviest shower won’t be an issue.

The Peak 9 faces stiff competition across the board but one of the key attributes of a good outdoor watch is the wayfinding capabilities. Both the Garmin and Coros watches we’ve reviewed offered excellent navigation, the Garmin using breadcrumb trails and the Coros offering full mapping. The Peak 9 is in the breadcrumb camp, routes can be added via the companion app which has a fully-fledged route planner which we were big fans of. Our gripe with breadcrumb trails is that the offer no sense of the topography around and as we learnt from fumbling about in the rain in Wales (there’s a rain based theme emerging here), it’s important to be aware of details whilst navigating. We wouldn’t want to use the Peak 9’s navigation to guide us through completely unfamiliar territory, but we’d use it perhaps on a new route in a familiar area where it isn’t a complete disaster if you get a bit lost.

All of these features were well thought out and well implemented but the whole experience was ruined by the frankly awful touch screen. The Peak 9 offers activity profiles to be tuned to personal preferences, but we got so frustrated and bogged down with the slow and laggy interface we gave up and just used the standard profiles and data fields.

When we did eventually wrestle the Peak 9 into action, the GPS traces were reasonably accurate in open spaces but became a little wayward under tree cover or nearby to tall buildings.

The Suunto mobile app is very well featured, offering training insights and workout analysis to your hearts content. Data can be set to automatically upload to Strava and TrainingPeaks if you really want to geek out. The route plotting capability is quite impressive and intuitive, offering a fully mobile experience rather than poorly implemented re-hashes of desktop versions.  The activity analysis is one of the strongest points of the whole Suunto experience for us, there was so much data presented in a straightforward and easy to understand manner that we think other platforms could learn a few things.

Our time with the Peak 9 was a tale of 2 halves. We love how it looks, the sleek titanium chassis is a really classy object, and the mobile app is one of the best we’ve dabbled with. On the flipside of this very one-sided coin is the user experience of the Peak 9. It’s one of the slowest and clunkiest devise we’ve used in a very long time. Initially we thought we were doing something wrong, it’s that slow. We’re not sure we could put up with the lack of speed and it’d probably cause us to have a meltdown before we’d even stepped out the door in the morning.