Stay in shape with the Suunto 3 Fitness Watch’s Recovery & Fitness Tracking
Suunto 3 Fitness is a beautifully robust fitness watch with smart features, designed for people with an active lifestyle and values their health and well-being. The watch creates a personal training plan that adapts to your fitness needs. You’ll get real-time guidance while exercising to help you maximize your workout routine.
- Light, thin and durable waterproof (30 m) sports watch with 5 button color display for training and 24/ activity tracking to support a healthy lifestyle
- Long 5-day battery life with activity tracking mode on, up to 30 hours with connected GPS training mode, regular software updates
- Creates personalized training plans and has built-in sport modes for running, cycling, swimming, gym, yoga and more
- Shows your fitness level and instant heart rate and has a calorie and step counter (last 7 days)
- Includes GPS tracking via mobile phone connection and tracks also your stress and recovery as well as your sleep duration and quality
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phnichols –
This device seems to be very polarizing – you either appreciate what it does from a training perspective or you don’t care for it’s less than robust smart watch features.Folks, it’s intended to be a fitness device with a smattering of smartwatch features along for the ride. Don’t buy this if you want to answer calls from your wrist. Don’t buy it if you want to leisurely scroll text messages while in a meeting.Buy it if you appreciate the training features of the device- accurate heart rate, tons of distinct sport profiles that give you unique data (indoor rowing gives stoke counts, strokes per minute) while devices like Fitbit just provide heart rate for that sport profile. I shouldn’t leave out the HRV monitoring of your “resources” or the adaptive training plan that will adjust to your actual workouts. Great feature.No, it doesn’t have a touchscreen or GPS. Suunto sells many devices that do have those features. No, there aren’t 200 watch faces.It’s a training device, folks.
CINTIA ROJO ORTIZ –
It’s a beautiful design! My husband is loving it and it has kept him motivated to work out. The watch tells him to speed up, slow down, programs his next workout depending on the recovery time. Not amazing foe heart rate and swimming, and even though it doesn’t have GPS included you can connect it to the phone.
J. Edge –
Disappointed! As a user of two versions of Suunto Ambit I was eager to try the Suunto 3 fitness for a casual activity tracker and everyday watch. The Fitbit Charge 2 I have been wearing is an excellent device but seems to be worn by every middle-aged American I know. I was looking to be different.First, unless you are viewing the watch in a brightly lit room or outside you will likely need to use the backlight to see the numbers on the watch face. Now Sunnto says the device has a backlight but it makes so little difference in the viewability of the watch screen I wonder why they even tried on this feature. Multiple configuration options I clung color settings make little difference. More brightness is what is needed and unfortunately there is none there.Next is the notifications and alerts settings. Very basic controls. One cannot both toggle on notifications and toggle off audible alerts for those notifications. Having the suunto three play a ridiculous audible alert in a meeting room when that daily robocall from Jamaica comes in is intolerable and inexcusable. Then finding the right button to silence it? Impossible. You can ask Suunto 3 to play a vibrate alert but you cannot tell it to be completely silent, it still plays audible alerts at unwanted times. Notifications – off; useless feature.HR sensing during activity is poor. My expectations are not high on this one anyway but the cheaper Fitbit was much better. My avg HR during high intensity Nordic skiing was measured 20-30 beats/min lower than with a chest strap and ambit measured HR. Measurements were very erratic as well.Sleep analytics are odd. It gives an “efficiency” or “effectiveness” score but the watch not literature provides any explanation as to how that is calculated. On the other hand, Fitbit has very interesting, detailed, and helpful sleep analytics. The data from Suunto very vague. Fitbit provides explanatory info as well as advice and tips on how to get better sleep through their app.Watchband – flimsy looking and feeling. Has a “sticky” feel to it and cannot be fit loose enough to let it move freely. As such, the band clings to the skin and has already caused rub abrasions with just daily wear. Ambit and Fitbit have similar material for the band but are thicker and have a rigidity that allows the band to not feel like a rubber band or strap.I really wanted to like this watch and unfortunately tried to like it for a few weeks to long and missed the return window. Will be buying from REI on these things from now on but they (and Suunto) we’re showing out of stock at the time. I think Amazon was also out of stock because once I placed my order it was on hold and took about 10 days for it to be shipped and In that time Suunto site reported “in stock”. So the point is, Amazon was also out of stock but did not want to say so.Anyway, clearly there are people who like this watch but I have found it a $250 drag and it sits on my nightstand at home. God willing Suunto will provide software updates to fix the most problematic issues: poor brightness and useless notifications/alert settings. I would be willing to try a different band if the functionality improved somewhat.
Linda S Leong –
Awful ‘fitness tracker’. Passable ‘workout tracker’.I have a Suunto t4, which is by far the most motivating workout tracker I have owned. Unfortunately, the elastic band on HR chest straps are a consumable item and it has been getting hard and expensive to replace them for a 9 year old watch. I bought this watch because the technology company behind its features, FirstBeat, claimed this watch suggests a workout plan, which would be the ‘coach’ feature I liked on the t4.However…Most of the watch displays contain tiny text. If you are over 35, you may not have the near-distance-vision necessary to read the display…unless you exercise with reading glasses. Much of the data is only visible on the watch and does not save off to the phone app.Wrist HR. Evidently, the HR monitor of this watch is not for me. Despite trying a number of places on my arm, it is often off base, sometimes wildly off base. This pretty much ruins every feature for me. The graph of the last 12 hours of HR monitoring can only be viewed on the watch. This data is not saved off to the phone application.Condition divination. The watch estimates if you are Stressed, Inactive, Active, or Recovering, given that you have constant HR monitoring turned on. A record of these states is also not saved to the phone application.Step counter. As typical, you cannot ‘pause’ the step counting. Out of the box, the watch was more of an ‘activity’ counter, but after some watch updates it is now more of a step counter. Only a daily step total is uploaded to the phone application. Oh, and you will need to run software on your PC and use the USB cable to perform watch updates; the phone app cannot update the watch, although it will teasingly tell you when an update is available.Active calories. I’m not sure what counts as ‘active calories’. And again only a daily total is uploaded to the app.Sleep tracking. Unlike other fitness devices, the watch appears to solely use heart rate to determine if and how you are sleeping rather than movement; my wrist-HR fail thus kills sleep tracking for me. You cannot tell the watch when you actually hit the hay; the watch guesses at sleep/wake time, with no way of editing if the guess is way off – I guess you aren’t supposed to be doing ‘quiet time’ before you go to sleep? On the watch you can see a microscopic graph of how your heart rate went during the night, but only for the previous night. Prior nights are summed up into total/awake/deep durations. And a mysterious quality percentage. Which now, after some phone app updates, *are* saved off. If you are trying to discern your ‘sleep cycles’, it’s not possible with this watch.Workout tracking. Given that you have your phone, heart rate data gets saved to the phone while the workout is active. If you choose a distance type of workout (i.e. walking vs. indoor rowing), then GPS data from the phone is saved and correlated with the heart rate data. If you choose to do a plan-recommended workout, the watch will try to keep you in the target effort range. However, since my HR reading fluctuates wildly, the watch can tell me to “slow down” one moment and then “speed up” a second later. The fluctuation would also make the workout score (the ‘Training Effect’) more meaningless.While I could ‘fix’ this by getting a compatible chest strap…Workout coaching. For the workout planner to do its thing, the watch needs to grade your fitness. It grades your fitness by examining your past 30 days of HR performance while walking or running over a GPS-measured distance of 1 mile or more. While this could be considered an improvement over the T4’s arbitrary levels, since I hardly exercise outdoors (three seasons of pollen allergies), then none of my workouts qualify and I don’t get a fitness score. Without a fitness score, The Plan stays stuck on suggesting an ‘easy’ workout every other day. The documentation suggests you can manually put in a distance for a walking/running workout and thus get a treadmill workout to count towards your fitness score, but it never seemed to work.
jeff mejia –
I purchased the Suunto Traverse and the Suunto Fitness back in early November 2018. This review is more about the Suunto Fitness. Years ago I spent hundreds of dollars on the Garmin products only to find that the longevity wasn’t quite what I’d expect from something so pricey. Fast forward about 5 years and I got sucked into trying it again with Suunto.Quite frankly a quick answer as to if the watch is worth the money the answer is a resounding NO. Within 3 months the watch started to fall apart. This watch is advertised as being able to monitor anything from swimming to anything rugged if that’s your sport. As to measuring what’s going on the Fitbit that I was using prior to the Suunto was much more accurate.I’ve gone back to the Fitbit and the Casios I was using prior to the Suunto. I recommend not spending the money.Also forget about the Protection Plan that is offered through Amazon with your purchase. I tried twice to report my watche’s need for repair and was never responded to. There wasn’t anyone from Amazon I could reach about it either. Save your cash on that one.All in all I wanted to like the watch and was hoping for a better experience with it but I should have learned from the Garmin experience.
Ron –
Color is perfect options are exceptional
Vini –
Fantastic watch. Sturdy and has everything you can imagine. I have been using it daily for the last 2 months to track my sports activities and sleep quality.Embedded heart rate monitor is great and works very well. Lots of other features as well. Gets GPS from my phone.Smart watch options are convenient (message received, caller ID etc…).Always update to the latest firmware to get latest options (stress status, workout program etc.).
Liz Hayden –
I bought this as a gift for my boyfriend who is working towards fitness goals. It has helped him immensely, it’s a great watch.
Lyndsay –
I have had nothing but issues with this watch. It doesn’t record accurate distance or times, if you want a watch that has its own GPS, DO NOT look for it in this watch. After wearing it a handful of times now the clip has now broken off. I am super disappointed as I paid a pretty penny for it. Customer service was no help. After recalibrating multiple times, and clearing all data multiple times it still doesn’t work. You have to have your phone on you to connect the GPS. If you take running seriously this is not the watch for you.