The humble smartwatch may be exciting, but battery life is rarely on its side. At least not in the way Finland’s Suunto looks to deliver with.
Wearables are everywhere and in all shapes and sizes, but if there’s one bit of consistency they share beyond the obvious expected feature of health tracking, it’s this: battery life is often not the part that manages to impress.
There are the few odd surprises, such as how you can find a week of battery in a Fitbit band, a good two weeks in select Huawei watch models, and up to a month in the Withings analogue-styled ScanWatch Horizon smartwatch, a model with a small screen and the rest using old-school watch design. But by and large, wearables with screens are not battery friendly, and you can expect to need to charge one every day or two, sometimes sooner.
That’s not going to be to everyone’s liking, and may be why manufacturers are trying to come up with different solutions.
Finland’s Suunto has its own play on that coming with a high-end model, the Suunto 9 Peak Pro, a model of wearable that gets a 1.2 inch screen, built-in GPS, activity and heart-rate tracking, and some fairly solid durability aspects, with a sapphire glass covering, a choice of titanium or stainless steel, and a military spec MIL-STD-810H rating, making it waterproof down to 100 metres, too.
The Suunto 9 Peak Pro won’t go with one of the standard smartwatch operating systems, missing out on Android, but it will have a way of tracking health and talking to your phone, connecting using the Suunto app on either iOS or Android, complete with route tracking that can display as a 3D animation.
And it also aims to offer some pretty staggering battery life, with up to 21 days using tracking and mobile notifications with the GPS not in use, or up to 12 days (300 hours) with the GPS.
Depending on the mode you’re using, the GPS is good for up to 40 hours in performance mode, 70 hours in endurance mode, and 300 hours in tour mode, with the ability to connect to up to four satellite systems and up to 32 individual satellites at the same time.
You can also decide to use the 9 Peak Pro as “just a watch”, with it expecting to hit 30 days of battery life before needing a charge, reaching a month of use, something modern wearables can struggle to hit.
“The Suunto 9 Peak Pro is engineered with a new, more powerful chipset architecture that boosts the performance to a new level while having the best-in-class battery life compared to similar-sized products on the market,” said Damian Commane, Head of Suunto for Australia and New Zealand.
“While extending our deep heritage in sports watches and precision instruments, the Suunto 9 Peak Pro’s comprehensive tracking capabilities and sleek design has allowed us to deliver our most premium product yet,” he said.
Pricing for the Suunto 9 Peak Pro in Australia isn’t necessarily inexpensive, though, with the stainless steel model retailing for $759.99 locally, while the titanium model hits $959.99, with both in stores and online now.
