If we had to sum up the Suunto 3 Fitness in one line we’d say it’s a fitness watch for beginners. If you’re already completing Ironman events, on to your fourth marathon or like to create your own training plans, then this probably isn’t the watch for you. If, on the other hand, you’re just starting out and striving for fitness, this has a lot to offer.
With optical heart rate-powered training plans and a sleek wear-it-everyday design, the 3 Fitness is Suunto’s attempt to bring some of its sports tracking skills to the masses.
With an entry-mid level price tag of £169 / $199 / AU$279 (or £199 / $229 / AU$299 for the Gold and All Black models), this watch has been developed with one main purpose – to help improve your fitness levels – but it’s worth noting that this will better suit those coming from a fairly low base.
The Suunto 3 Fitness is a bold move away from the big, robust and multi-skilled adventure watches we’re used to from Suunto, such as the Suunto Spartan Trainer Wrist HR. This is an everyday motivational tool rather mountain conquering aid.
It’s also Suunto’s response to recent offerings from Garmin and Polar, who have been busy making their sports watches look sexier – to appeal to those who want something they can wear 24-7 – and pack more smartwatch skills, to fend off the incursion from the smartwatch mob including the Apple Watch 3 and the myriad Wear OS devices.
And for the most part what Suunto has done here is pretty solid. There’s no built-in GPS which will definitely put some people off, but despite that you get a lot of clever fitness features for your money.
There’s the usual pace, distance and calories sport tracking for running, cycling, swimming and walking, plus optical heart rate on the wrist for in workout and 24/7 heart rate tracking. You also get activity and sleep tracking and it’s waterproof to 30 meters, so you can use it in the pool.
But where the watch gets really interesting is the inclusion of adaptive training - guided workouts to help you improve your fitness. This is supported by recovery time advice and even a way to see the stress your body is under in real time, what Suunto calls Resources.
Away from the fitness features, Suunto has also brought smart notifications to the 3 Fitness with alerts fired from your paired phone. But more on that later.
Design, screen and interface
- Lightweight but plasticky design
- No touchscreen
- Silicone strap isn't as comfortable as we'd like
A simple but good-looking timepiece that you’d be happy to pair with your Sunday best, the Suunto 3 Fitness comes in five designs. There’s Ocean, Sakura, Black, Gold and All Black. You’ll pay a premium for the latter two.
We tested the black and from the moment you pick this watch up you realize it isn’t the most premium watch in the world. From the gleaming silver bezel, to the underwhelming and slightly uncomfortable strap, the overall flavor you get from the Suunto 3 Fitness is plastic.
Because aside from the stainless steel bezel (that also feels plastic), it is all plastic. This does have a benefit though, it means at just 36g, it’s extremely light. Much, much lighter than anything we’ve seen from Suunto before, and that’s a good thing.
The classic round screen is a decent size but is basic in terms of resolution and color reproduction. It's not going to dazzle you with quality, and the low power screen needs to be angled in the light just right to give you the best view. Even with the backlight on the stats on the screen are a bit washed out, though they are large enough to be easy to read on the move.
There’s no touchscreen here, and some will find that lack of swipe and tap annoying. We’ve tested enough watches where the touchscreen is fiddly to use when things get sweaty or you’re moving at pace, that we can forgive that.
What we’re less eager to ignore, is the thin silicone strap that’s not entirely comfortable, a problem for a watch you’re supposed to wear all day. It’s elegant, even a bit dainty on larger wrists, but it’s not entirely sporty and we found it pinched a bit.
Suunto has made it easy to switch out for an alternative, though we couldn’t see where to get those alternatives. The black strap we had on test also picked up dust really easily and was hard to keep looking clean, somewhat ruining those sharp looks we mentioned earlier.
There are five buttons for controlling the watch, all easy to hit and responsive enough. Scrolling through screens and the features is fast and fluid, there’s no screen-to-screen delay, however, while this is probably the simplest Suunto we’ve come across, some of the controls continue to be slightly baffling.
The menus come with neat arrow clues that prompt you to press the middle button to go deeper into a set of stats or to hit down to see other items in a menu, all very helpful until you realize there are lots of occasions where following these arrows bounces you back to the start. That makes for a confusing user experience.
This is still a watch you have to learn. There are quite a few important things hidden behind a hard press of the middle button too, for example. The initial calibration, to ensure the accelerometer can more accurately track your walk and run distance and pace, is one of these.
It’s not made clear when you first fire up the watch that this calibration is even necessary. There’s also no prompt to tell you when calibration has been successfully completed.
It’s never a good sign when you have to reach for the user guide to understand how to use a running watch but sadly that was the case with the Suunto 3 Fitness. We’d definitely appreciate a little more hand holding on setup to walk us through these steps.
Features and tracking
- Training plans adapt to your needs
- Can give real time feedback on how much strain you're under
- No GPS
The standout feature on the Suunto 3 Fitness is adaptive training. After an initial calibration (one run and one walk of 15 minutes with GPS connected) the watch uses estimated VO2 Max scores to assess your fitness levels and automatically generate a rolling 7-day training plan to help you improve your fitness.
The training plan adapts to your personal needs based on your profile, recorded exercises and fitness level and the aim is to improve your fitness gradually without over training and putting too much stress on the body. If you skip a session or do a little more than you’d planned, the 3 Fitness adapts your schedule accordingly.
While this makes it ideal for anyone who is just starting out, we thought the lack of any way to tell the watch what your overall objectives are, made it feel a little untethered. Most people need a goal that goes beyond ‘just get fitter’ to motivate them and that’s not addressed here.
What’s also quite strange is that Suunto hasn’t made a bigger deal about the initial calibration/fitness test when you first set up your watch. Considering this will form the basis of your training plans, we’d have liked a prompt to calibrate, instead we stumbled on the need to do this.
The sessions – and the adaptive analysis – are based very heavily on heart rate zones. The watch tells you when you’re working at the right intensity to hit the target for your sessions.
Unless you tell the Suunto app your maximum heart rate (there are various tests you can do to find yours), it will estimate it based on your age and gender. While this is common, it’s not the most accurate measure and so if you can we’d advise seeking out an alternate test to get this right. So many of the training features rely on this it’s quite crucial to be as accurate as possible.
In addition to the adaptive training plans, the Suunto 3 Fitness also provides a recovery time recommendation after each workout, based on how hard and how long you just trained, as well as your general overall fatigue.
The big omission here is GPS. That’s right, there’s no built in GPS on the Suunto 3 Fitness, instead the watch uses an accelerometer to calculate your running and walking speeds. Unless you run with your phone, in which case it’ll piggyback your phone’s GPS to provide distance and pace stats.
Another good but badly-explained feature on the Suunto 3 Fitness is Resources. A bit like some of the readiness measurements you can find on the Garmin Fenix 3, this gives you feedback on how much strain is on your body in real time.
During our tests we were suffering with a big cold and the watch picked up on this to show us we were under more stress than usual. That’s a really useful insight but again we had to research what this feature meant, it’s not made apparent on the watch or in the app itself.
When it comes to smartwatch features, Suunto basically offers a stream of notifications from your connected smartphone, you get everything from your phone, including emails, texts, Google Chat alerts, phone calls and more.
However there’s no subtlety here, you can’t tailor which apps you accept alerts from and after just 6 hours we found ourselves switching them off entirely to end the constant nagging and uncomfortable beeping in meetings.
Heart rate accuracy
- Erratic readings
- Post workout picture seemed broadly accurate
Many of the features on the Suunto 3 Fitness revolve around heart rate and so accuracy here is essential. The sensor is provided by Valencell Inc, one of the best in the game, so that’s a great start.
We tested the Suunto 3 Fitness up against the Apple Watch 3 with optical wrist sensor and a Polar H10 chest strap and we found the Suunto to be a little erratic.
At rest, more often than not it read 15 beats per minute higher than the Apple Watch and took far longer to stabilize. One strange quirk of the Suunto’s instant heart rate tracking was that every time we raised our wrist to check it, it initially read 72 BPM before slowly dropping to what we know to be correct, closer to 50 BPM.
During workouts we also found there was a bit of a lag between what we were seeing on the Suunto and our other devices, though the overall picture post workout followed a similar pattern.
Sleep tracking
- Sleep tracking seems accurate if limited
- Gives you a sleep quality score from 0 to 100
The importance of good quality sleep to achieving any fitness goal is now widely recognized. Bad sleep can derail even the most motivated people and well laid plans. So the addition of sleep tracking on the Suunto 3 Fitness is a win, even though it’s fairly basic.
That is, of course, if you can get over the idea of wearing a watch that’s not entirely comfortable, to bed. Let’s pretend you’re okay with that for a second.
The Suunto asks you to load in your normal bedtime routine, setting your sleep and wake up times. During this window it then uses the accelerometer to spot movement and follows your heart rate variability during sleep to assess the quality of your sleep.
The variation is an indication of how well your sleep is helping you rest and recover. Sleep quality is then displayed on a scale from 0 to 100 in the sleep summary, with 100 being the best quality.
We found the sleep tracking to be accurate, in as much as the total sleep time seemed to match what happened in the real world. However, with no feedback on the times you nod off or wake up, it’s hard to know whether it picked up the wake-up times 100% accurately.
This highlights some other quite significant limitations here too. It can’t automatically spot if you fall asleep earlier than your set bedtime, or in fact sleep longer than your wake time. These simply aren’t tracked unless you set your sleep window with hours either side as a catch-all.
Suunto 3 Fitness app
- Pairing and syncing often fail
- Nicely designed, detail-packed app
There’s a new partner app to go with Suunto’s new watch and we had high hopes that this would kill off some of the bugs that have long been a frustration with the old app, Movescount. Sadly, that’s not quite the case. One big bugbear remains and that’s pairing and syncing.
Pairing the watch with the app was a nightmare. It took us at least a dozen attempts to pair the watch, and after quite a lot of meddling in the watch and phone Bluetooth settings. Even when we had successfully paired, the app didn’t always sync first time. These are the kind of glitches that really let Suunto down.
That said, the new Suunto app itself is nicely designed and offers some great features and good additional information that you don’t get on the watch.
There’s a Strava-style feed that features your latest workouts and those of your connected friends. You can add photos, like workouts and then dig deeper into the stats.
You get duration, distance, average pace, average heart rate, max heart rate, calories, recovery time, Peak Training Effect (which indicates the impact of a training session on your maximum aerobic performance), cadence and EPOC (excess post-exercise oxygen consumption), along with heart rate charts and your heart rate zone breakdown.
The diary view lets you tab between Exercises, Activity, Calories and Sleep with graphs that give you a quick overview of how you’re doing day to day and over a week, month or year.
However, a huge omission here is that there’s no way to sync your sessions to Strava.
Battery life
- Battery lasts up to around 5 days with general activity tracking
- Training mode without GPS cuts it to roughly 40 hours
- Using connected GPS gives you around 30 hours
According to the official stats the Suunto 3 Fitness battery should last for up to 30 hours while using connected GPS, up to 40 hours in training mode without GPS and up to 5 days with 24/7 tracking and mobile notifications.
In our tests we found the numbers held up pretty solidly. During a week where we trained just once but tracked daily activity and sleep, we managed to squeeze out just shy of 5 days before needing to charge.
For a week where we put in three workouts of up to an hour, plus the usual daily usage and activity tracking, we managed to get 4 days. However, in both cases we’d switched off most of the smartwatch notifications, so with this on you can expect to take a hit.
Verdict
The Suunto 3 Fitness has a lot of clever tools for anyone just starting out on their fitness journey, with its heart rate monitor and training plans taking it well beyond a simple activity tracker.
But the lack of GPS and inability to tailor the training plans to specific goals hold it back, especially for those who are already serious about their fitness.
Its slightly uncomfortable fit doesn't help either, but then it is fairly cheap, so depending on your needs it could be a good choice.
Who's this for?
The Suunto 3 Fitness is a for anyone looking to improve their general fitness and well-being, more than likely starting from a beginner level. If you’re interested in heart rate training but need a bit of guidance how best to apply it, then this is a perfect tool for that.
In the early stages of getting fit it’s also important to find the balance between working hard enough and not pushing too hard, and this watch can definitely help newcomers with this.
Much more than a fitness tracker and much less than a top-of-the-range running watch, this will suit anyone ready to invest a bit more in a coached assault on overall fitness.
Should you buy it?
If working out without your phone is important to you, don’t buy this watch. If you want a watch that feels premium on the wrist, don’t buy this watch.
However, if you’re looking for a budget-friendly way to bring some data-driven guided coaching smarts to your training then this is a strong option.
First reviewed: May 2018
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