Suunto’s new fitness watch offers guided training and sleep quality insights
Suunto has launched its Fitness 3 sports watch. Announced earlier this year, this is both a personal training companion for active people and elegant timepiece for everyday use.
“In design, we always rely on the key design elements of Suunto: robustness, accuracy and reliability, but with Suunto 3 Fitness, we wanted to look even further,” waid Suunto Design Manager Timo Yliluoma.
“We designed it to be smaller and lighter than any of our previous connected sports watches.”
The Finnish company already has a rich portfolio of sports-watches. The main novelty of Suunto Fitness 3 is that its making more of physiological analytics from Firstbeat. The two companies have a working relationship going back over a decade.
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Suunto 3 Fitness comes with a Valencell’s optical heart rate monitor which is typically seen as very reliable when it comes to quality of readings. It is this data that Firstbeat’s analytics engine taps into to provide personalized information and guidance.
The most novel new feature is a 7-day training plan that is automatically created by the watch based on a user’s fitness level and overall exercise history. Miss a few sessions or push a bit too hard? No worries, the timepiece will adjust your training plan accordingly.
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You’ll also get real-time guidance with heart rate zones during a workout and a VO2max score. The latter is a heart rate-based fitness indicator that determines your current fitness level. While useful, it is by no means groundbreaking as many sports watches and even some fitness trackers offer this.
Interestingly, the device uses wrist-based cadence for measuring speed and distance in walking and running activities. Which means that you can track speed and distance indoors, too. No built-in GPS, though.
In addition to the fairly standard 24/7 activity metrics, Suunto Fitness 3 taps into your heart-rate variability data to detect all-day stress. While we’ve seen this with some Garmin devices, the device is taking it up a notch by placing this information into the context of your body’s resources.
Stress and physical activity deplete your body’s resources and rest/recovery and sleep replenish your body’s resources. To this end, in the morning the device will provide you with an overall Sleep Quality Assessment. This is a single metric (ranging from 0 to 100), that tells you how well sleep has supported the replenishment of body resources.
The watch is water resistant down to 30 meters, and has sports modes for running, swimming, cycling and gym training. It offers a 5-day battery life with 24/7 activity tracking on. There is also an all-new Suunto app to go along with the tracker.
Suunto Fitness 3 will be available on Amazon (check price) and suunto.com from April 25th. There will be five colors to choose from including Gold, All Black, Ocean, Sakura and Black.
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