Suunto Race 2 In-Depth Review: New Features Worth The Upgrade?

Suunto has just announced the new Suunto Race 2, a watch that aims to take the existing Suunto Race 1 and provide it with incremental hardware updates to give Suunto more capabilities for future updates. But additionally, Suunto says they set out with one key goal: Make the optical HR sensor not suck (they used slightly different but still very honest language, themselves, but that was the gist of it). Suunto has had a long history of really bad optical HR sensors, and the #1 goal here was to fix it. Obviously, that’s something I put to the test.

Additionally, the company increased the display size, increased the battery claims (to the longest dual-frequency GPS battery claim of anyone in this AMOLED size class), and also added a handful of software updates that other watches get as well.

I’ve been putting the Suunto Race 2 through its paces over the last near-month, across a wide variety of workouts from swim to bike to run to padel (yes, really), and plenty more. All in the quest to figure out if the improvements meet expectations. As usual, this unit is a media loaner, and will get back to Suunto, and I’ll go out and buy my own.

What’s New:

Here’s everything that’s new compared to the original Suunto Race, assuming you take into account all of the (many) software updates that unit received since launch nearly two years ago:

– Increased AMOLED LTPO display size to 1.5” (was 1.43”)
– Retained same watch case size (49mm)
– Display pixels are 466x466px
– Increased display brightness to 2,000 nit display
– Decreased thickness to 12.5mm (was 13.3mm)
– Decreased weight from 83g to 76g (and 69g to 65g for titanium)
– Still uses 22mm bands/straps
– Upgraded optical heart rate sensor
– Changed charger design to suck less (its much better)
– Added new MCU to double processing speed
– Increased memory by “a boatload” for futureproofing
– Increased GPS battery life to 55hrs in dual-frequency mode (from 50 hours)
– Increased smartwatch battery life to 16 days
– Improved elevation charts/guidance
– Added in waypoints to their existing elevation ClimbPro-like feature
– Added multi-sensor saved pairings (finally!!!!)
– Added ability to have direct voice guidance with Suunto Wing 2 headset
– [App] Updated Suunto Coach training plans to support AI prompts
– [App] Added Recovery State to app
– Increased price from $449/EUR to $499/EUR for stainless steel cases (and $549/EUR to $599/EUR for Titanium)
– Retains Sapphire glass display on all models

For those playing inside baseball on underlying platforms, this unit seemingly solidifies which decision Suunto has made regarding whether or not to adopt the one-off Suunto Run underlying tech platform. As you might remember, that unit doesn’t share the same architecture as all the other Suunto watches (and is the reason it doesn’t have Suunto Apps). At the time, the company had hoped that new architecture might lead to faster software development, and faster responsiveness on the watch itself, in the future. Even at launch of the Suunto Run, they were open that they weren’t sure that was working out as they hoped. This seems to solidify that.

And ya know what, I respect a company effectively implying ‘Look, it’s just not delivering on the promise we hoped’, rather than burning the house down Sonos-style. In any case, onto the review!

In the Box:

Here’s the box, and the goods inside said box:

Pretty much everything is to be expected here, however, most notable is the new charging cable. This cable not only no longer sucks, but also snaps correctly and perfectly to the watch contact pins. This is much appreciated. Likewise, the new braided styling to it is visually nice as well.

Ok, with that, let’s start using it.

The Basics:

First up, I wanna run through some of the general day-to-day basics of this watch, before we get into the sports and workout pieces. So this section will cover things like the hardware bits, activity tracking, sleep tracking, etc…

The watch hardware functions identically to the initial Suunto Race, in that it’s got a full AMOLED touchscreen, while also having 3.5 buttons. I say 3.5, because the Digital Crown acts as both a scroll wheel as well as a button you can press in.

The touchscreen meanwhile, had its brightness increased to 2,000 nits. As most companies will tell you, it’s rare that they’ll leverage that full brightness; most of the time it’s far dimmer. Which is fine, even the 1,000 nit screens had more than enough brightness for the sunniest of days/locations.

I’ve had no issues seeing the Suunto Race 2 screen, despite being summertime and me being in bright sunny locations. Inversely (and sometimes almost more importantly), I’ve had no complaints this time around with Suunto’s bedtime performance. Specifically, around the display and how it acts at night, as to not blind you. Suunto has made enough tweaks in their software to finally grasp the idea of a proper do-not-disturb schedule and corresponding nighttime display settings. Its great.

In any event, let’s talk widgets and some of the bits there. To begin though, you’ve got the watch face. This is lightly customizable, with a new watch face for the Suunto Race 2. But you won’t find anywhere near the customization of watch faces (or 3rd party watch faces) that you have on COROS or Garmin. However, since I tend to be a ‘default watch face’ kinda guy, it didn’t really bother me. I like this new watch face showing activity time over the past four weeks (the current week-to-date time is displayed on the right).

Meanwhile, if you scroll down from there you’ve got the widgets. This includes things like steps, sleep, heart rate, blood oxygen, HRV, resources, training status & recovery bits, etc…

As always, you can tap into any of these to see more details about it.

One of these being sleep. The Suunto Race 2 has correctly nailed the times I fell asleep and woke up each night, which is the main thing I care about. It also tracks sleep stages/phases, but as I note, that’s not super important to me (and from an accuracy/comparison standpoint, the so-called gold standard is only ~80-85% accurate, so comparing against something that inaccurate isn’t super useful).

(In case you’re wondering about those orange days…welcome to transatlantic flights and getting reviews done.)

The Race 2 also tracks HRV at night, which is your heart rate variability. It does this on a per nightly basis, giving you an average for the night. Last night’s being a bit lower for me, almost certainly due to the few beers and few glasses of wine here on vacation with friends (or, my best attempt at doing vacation). HRV is lowered not only by fatigue from training or lack of sleep, but also from factors like alcohol.

Suunto doesn’t show the HRV values over the course of the night within the watch though, something most of their competitors do. Nonetheless, if I look at how these values compared last night to the other devices I was using:

Suunto Race 2: 41ms
Garmin Venu X1: 48ms
Whoop 5.0 MG: 41ms
Oura Ring: 43ms
Polar 360: 41ms

There will be slight differences based on what time it thinks you went to sleep and woke up for each device, due to averaging (for example, the Garmin had me going to sleep at 1:26AM, whereas Suunto was 1:06AM. Both had me waking up at ~7:15AM). Plus of course any measurement differences and sampling differences.

In any event, all of this data is further available in the Suunto app, on your smartphone. Suunto doesn’t really have a website platform anymore for desktop usage, so everything is through the iOS/Android apps. Here you can look at your total stats and dig into them in more depth as you see fit.

That said, some of these stats don’t match. You can see for example ,on the app it shows 4h 31mins for sleep last night, but the watch shows 5hr 57mins. Likewise, HRV status shows 38ms for last night on the app, when reality on watch was 41ms. Resources does match though, at 97%/98% (within the realm of most recent sync). And since I’ve only made about 8 very-quiet-do-not-wake-the-kids steps this morning since waking up and writing this section, that also is good enough on correct. Nonetheless, not sure what’s going on there.

Moving to something entirely different, when it comes to smartphone notifications, the watch will display basic smartphone notifications – including many emojis. However, you can’t respond to those notifications from the watch (just clear them).

Meanwhile, there’s no offline payments (e.g. NFC payments), or listening to music offline from the watch. You can control music on your phone though, using the music controls widget on your watch:

It does seem like Suunto is slowly putting in the building pieces for offline music, and that would certainly be logical given their umbrella brand doing lots in the music playback space, along with Suunto itself offering more headphones, such as the new Suunto Wing 2 headphones.

In fact, if we look at the new charger for the Suunto Race 2 (the one that doesn’t suck anymore, thankfully), it locks and stays in place nicely, but furthermore, it’s got both two charging pins, but also now two data transfer pins:

Suunto says that could allow them in the future to do higher speed transfers of larger things (e.g. maps, music, etc…) via a wired connection, versus the slower (within a wearable anyway) WiFi connection. They said that at the moment that’s within the realm of future proofing, but is definitely something they’re thinking about. Likewise, with the Suunto Race 2 & Wing 2 headphones allowing voice guidance, Suunto made a point of acknowledging that, as it stands today most people are still going to use their phone for music playback to those Suunto Wing 2 headphones…but, that perhaps that’ll change down the road to a fully on-watch experience.

Point being, through my conversations with Suunto, they kept going back to ‘future proofing’ when talking about much of the new hardware, including the expanded base storage, the doubling of processing power, increasing of operating memory, etc… How all that plays out, remains to be seen, but I’d certainly rather have them thinking about it, than not.

Sports & Workouts:

It’s almost a certainty that if you’re buying a Suunto watch, you’re planning on doing some sort of sporting goodness. And, Suunto continues to deliver in this department, both to existing watches and new watches alike. Back in March for example, the Suunto Race series got 22 new sports profiles as part of a firmware update. This matches the trends of other companies in the space, expanding sport profiles to allow for better categorization.

Still, most of the features that are new to the Suunto Race 2 are on the hardware front, not the software side. There are a handful of new software features worth mentioning though. Nonetheless, I’ll also cover some of the sporting basics.

First up, is selecting the sport you wish to endure pain within. To do so, simply tap the upper-right button:

Here you can then swipe/rotate down once to get to the list of sports (under the ‘Trail Running’ sport that is pre-selected in my case, above). There are no more than 110 of these sport profiles:

Once you’ve got your sport profile selected, you can modify various settings for that sport profile, including adding routes as well as adding/enabling SuuntoPlus apps. In fact, one of the updated SuuntoPlus apps is the Climb app. This app will show upcoming elevation details for the climbs as part of Climb Guidance.

You can disable this if you want to, since it’s technically just another app. And part of the challenge of shifting core features to SuuntoPlus apps is the fact that you can only have two enabled at a time. So that limits you a bit. Suunto did make changes a few years back to put some apps into the ‘Guides’ category (sorta an offshoot of sorts), but even those should frankly sometimes be built-in features.

In any event, we’ll come back to the updated Climb Guidance piece in just a minute.

Before we do that, I want to mention the new sensor pairing feature. For the better part of a decade, Suunto has only allowed one pairing per sensor type. For example, only one power meter pairing, or one heart rate sensor pairing, etc… Now, that finally changes: You can pair multiple sensors of the same type – for example, two power meters (one for each bike). As with other companies, you can only concurrently use one sensor of the same type at a time (e.g. you can’t record two power meters concurrently), but having them there is great.

You can also tap into it and see sensor status information, such as battery type. I’d love to see them iterate quickly on this to allow sensor naming (e.g. ‘Gravel Bike Power Meter’, ‘Road Bike Power meter’, etc…), as some of their competitors do. But this is a huge step forward.

Speaking of configuration, when it comes to sports modes, you’ll configure all your data field/page settings within the Suunto App itself on your smartphone, such as below. You can include up to 8 data fields per page (7 of which are customizable, one of which is the timer):

Whereas other settings like battery modes, intensity zones, map type, workout targets, etc… are typically done within the waiting screen on the sport mode you want:

Once everything is ready to roll, you can tap the upper-right button to start your workout. This begins the timer, and then you can iterate between your configured data fields:

All of this worked perfectly fine for me across all of my workouts across all scenarios. Once your workout is complete, you’ll get a summary screen of that workout, and a slate of data metrics you can look at:

Likewise, you can also look at this information on the Suunto App in more detail:

When it came to battery life with the Suunto Race 2, they claim up to 55 hours in GPS dual-frequency/multi-band mode, in a gesture-based configuration. So, does it hit that? Well, seems pretty darn close. Below is a 3hr+ ride that I did, in dual-frequency, gesture-based, but with a power meter sensor attached (still optical HR sensor enabled), and as you can see, pretty darn close:

Obviously, once you enable always-on display, enable navigation, etc… the battery times begin to plummet (like all brands).

In any case, the post-workout data extends beyond just the singular workout and includes other metrics like training load and recovery. One of the first metrics, which isn’t exactly training per se, is the ‘Resources’ metric. This is roughly akin to Garmin’s Body Battery, and look at sleep and overall readiness:

Next you’ve got TSB, CTL, and TSS. These are all TrainingPeaks metrics, which Suunto has an agreement with.

Users of TrainingPeaks will appreciate those metrics, but inversely, users who aren’t TrainingPeaks users will probably find these a bit confusing, compared to simpler terms.

However, I will (yet again) disagree with Suunto here on the display of training load (TSS), which resets each week. So right now, it’s just showing me my workouts from Monday-Weds, which at the moment doesn’t include a ton since it’s been a quieter week. But it truncates all of my weekend workouts (depending on if you have it set to reset on Sundays or Mondays), which can carry training load into the week.

Whereas other companies will use a 7-day rolling training load value, which is more useful in most cases, since it closely reflects the load your body is feeling. Suunto argues that’s what you can TSB for, and to an extent that’s true, but ultimately, there’s a reason TSB is different than TSS (Pro Hint: because it’s actually a different metric).

Lastly, there’s the Recovery Metric, which is taking into account now just training load, but also your sleep and overall activity levels:

Ok, with most of the sports bit covered, let’s swing into following routes and other navigation-related tidbits.

Navigation & Mapping:

The Suunto Race 2, like other Suunto watches over the last few years, includes full downloadable topographic maps for almost anywhere you’d travel to. In order to download these maps you’ll crack open the Suunto App and then select the map area you want. Suunto has divided these up into very small pieces, which can be both good and bad. Generally, this is good when you want to download the nearby region very quickly at the last minute, though inversely, can be cumbersome if you travel a bunch, since you constantly have to remember to download regions/towns/etc when you travel.

For example, I’m in France right now, and there are some 27 different map regions in France under the Suunto scheme.

Nonetheless, it gets the job done, and one of the new features via recent firmware update is the ability to download these map regions without the charging cable (as long as you have WiFi it can connect to). Previously, you always had to place it on the charger, but now you can just force it nonetheless. Suunto’s maps include both light and dark (night) versions of the map regions.

Next, in most cases you’ll want to have a route to follow for your outdoor adventure. You can create these in various platforms, such as Komoot, Strava, or, Suunto’s own app. That app is actually pretty good for creating routes, and also showing heat map data. You can also import .GPX files as well. In my case I did both. For some routes, I did them in Strava:

And then for other routes, I did them in Suunto’s app. One advantage of Suunto’s app is being able to add in the waypoints and give them custom names/labels, which then will render on maps and most notably on the Climb Guidance page.

Once you’ve done all that, note above how it says ‘Use in watch’, you’ll need to have that selected. Suunto does this by default, as long as the route is created within their platform. But, if coming from Strava/Komoot/etc, you’ll have to manually toggle it in your app, in order to get it to sync. As I noted on my recent COROS NOMAD review, this approach is just kinda cumbersome. Given I’ve already set it as a favorited route from that 3rd party platform, I wish it would just show up automatically on my watch.

With all that set, you’ll go and load up the route within the navigation section of a given sport profile. You technically don’t have to open up a sport profile to see just the map and browse around, but, in terms of navigation, you’ll want to select something (e.g. hiking, trail running, cycling, etc…).

Then, out on your activity you’ll see your route overlaid atop the maps, as well as turn instructions. All of which is pretty straightforward and identical to the past.

Likewise in the past, if you go off-course, you’ll get an off-course notification.

However, there is one update here, which is updated Climb Guidance. Now, you’ll see the waypoints atop the Climb Guidance page, and it’ll zoom in to show you the sections on the Climb Guidance page to the next waypoint. This is a nice little touch:

Otherwise, things work as with before. Which means that while Suunto has the topographic maps offline on the watch, all of the routing must be decided by apps off the watch. In other words, if you go off-course, it can’t smartly re-route you back on-course. It’s just giving you a compass pointer of how to get back on-route, but not actually getting you back on a newly created route. Likewise, it can’t generate routes offline either, since that requires an entirely different map type (both COROS & Polar are the same here).

That’s the key difference to Garmin’s watches with maps, in that they are fully routable. Of course, the flip side being that Garmin’s Instinct 3 series (price-wise, most similar here) doesn’t have maps. Instead, the closest watch price-wise would be their now-older Forerunner 955 & 965 watches, both of which have maps.

But keep in mind, it’s frankly quite rare that I ever need re-routing while hiking/running/etc. And even rarer that I create routes on the watch itself. I virtually always create routes pre-activity. Note that when it comes to cycling however, I see re-routing as absolutely essential, given the likelyhood of road closures, etc… But most cyclists that ride a lot tend to have dedicated bike/cycling GPS units, most of which support automatic re-routing.

In fact, Suunto actually has an interesting tie-in with Hammerhead and their Karoo series, whereby your data gets synced between those two platforms seamlessly. Thus, rides on the Hammerhead Karoo series show up in your Suunto account as if it were a Suunto ride. And inversely, Suunto heat map data is available on your Hammerhead Karoo unit. All of which works super well for me.

GPS & Heart Rate Accuracy:

As always, in this section I’ll look at the accuracy of the watch, including both optical HR sensor performance (since it’s new), as well as GPS performance (because every watch is unique, even if the same chipset, as is the case here still using Sony). In fact, there’s some surprises on both sides.

Let’s take look at the optical HR sensor performance first. We’ll start off with a relatively steady-state run, and then get more and more complicated. Here we can see it compared to the COROS NOMAD’s optical HR sensor, along with a chest strap on the other two watches.

As we can see, they’re very very close to each other. The one interesting divergence is about 2 minutes into the run, clearly at some sort of stop-light. The chest strap says I dropped down to 110bpm, whereas the two optical HR sensors had me at 80bpm. Both are plausible to be honest, so I have no idea which group is right or wrong.

Instead, let’s just make life more difficult with some intervals. In this case we’ve got the NOMAD & Race 2 again, but alongside a slate of 800’s followed by 400’s. Plus a warm-up/cool-down. This was on a relatively cool day, which may be why we see the struggles on the optical HR sensor early on. We also see both optical HR units struggle on the 2nd interval. Beyond that though, they were largely fine.

Next, another interval workout, including some sections going both uphill and downhill (last two 800’s were downhill, hence the lumpy bit on the 3rd 800m set as I adjusted to uphill. As you can see, compared to the chest strap, these were almost perfectly spot-on. We’ll save the other optical HR sensor watch unseen for another day.

Next, switching over to cycling, for this outside ride, this was very good for not just Suunto, but most optical HR sensors on the wrist for outside cycling. This is easily the best Suunto performance I’ve seen from an optical HR sensor while riding, ever.

Looking at my many other rides and some indoor rides, all of the workouts are essentially in the same ballpark. A handful of very small errors here and there, but overall quite strong – a massive improvement for Suunto. They had set out to improve the optical HR sensor performance as a key goal for this watch, and they definitely did it.

Now, switching over to the GPS side of things, we’ll just start right off with some hard stuff – New York City, straight through the tall buildings:

Along the river under an overpass area, but still with tall buildings on one side, it did quite well:

This set is compared to a Garmin Forerunner 970 (dual-frequency), a COROS NOMAD (dual-frequency), and a Garmin Venu X1 (not dual frequency).

If we look at other bits of this run though, there’s just little bits were the Suunto Race 2 isn’t quite as good as I’ve seen from Suunto in the past, or, the other units. Nothing major, just not as perfect:

You can see it the next day again on another run (no Venu X1 on this one, it’s battery died just before the run, and times were tight!), The Suunto Race 2 seems to have many little differences/errors. None of these are major errors, but just imperfections compared to Suunto’s other recent watches being really really really sharp.

And here approaching Times Square, we see that while this is super challenging for all units, the Race 2 struggles the most:

I saw the same on cycling. Again, at the highest levels, everything looks perfect:

But, when I zoom in a bit, we see little quirks, like this turn in the upper left corner:

Had I not had multiple units, you’d likely never notice these. But, with a whole host of different watches, these small differences become apparent.

Likewise, with swimming, let’s start with the night before Suunto’s turn. This swim (on the precise same buoy-to-buoy-to-buoy-to-buoy-to-buoy route), the Garmin Venu X1 & COROS NOMAD were really solid:

But the next morning, for the Suunto Race 2 & Forerunner 970, neither were great. The Forerunner 970 was bad as usual (all of my openwater swims with it have been bad), but the Suunto wasn’t awesome either. Obviously, it easily beat the FR970, and wasn’t horrific, but still, not quite as crispy as the others above.

Still, getting back to land-based activities, most of it is GPS nitpicking, only really visible if you have multiple units. But ultimately, that’s sorta why you read this section (written by someone whose job it is to nitpick). As a rule of thumb, when units get the little things wrong is easier spots, they tend to get them equally or far-more so wrong in harder spots. It’s impossible for me to predict every hard spot you’ll get yourself into, thus, I try and cover as many scenarios as possible to give you the best understanding of how the watch is going to perform.

In any case, the new optical HR sensor is a massive improvement here, so that’s awesome to see.

(Note: All of the charts in these accuracy sections were created using the DCR Analyzer tool. It allows you to compare power meters/trainers, heart rate, cadence, speed/pace, GPS tracks, and plenty more. You can use it as well for your own gadget comparisons, more details here.)

Wrap-Up:

The Suunto Race 2 is an incremental update, aimed squarely at keeping up with the times, rather than driving major upgrades from existing Suunto Race 1 owners. And there’s nothing wrong with that. Suunto seems to be establishing a two-year hardware refresh cycle, and this cycle was clearly designed to ensure the underlying hardware is ready for whatever Suunto plans over the next few years. Likewise, I continue to appreciate Suunto ensuring that virtually all of these new software features are there for existing Suunto Race owners, heck, even before today’s launch in almost all feature cases.

The new optical HR sensor is a huge improvement. To Suunto’s honesty bank credit, when they said they surveyed existing Suunto Race owners about what they did/didn’t like, the existing optical HR sensor accuracy was high on the list of dislikes. They clearly set out with a “you have one job” approach to this watch, and they definitely understood the assignment. The optical HR sensor performance is very much in the pack of acceptable options. It’s not quite industry leading, but it’s well within the range of “good enough for the vast majority of workouts/days”.

The only thing that gives me a bit of pause is actually the slight steps back in GPS performance. I’m a bit surprised here, given how strong the Suunto Race 1 & Suunto Vertical have been. As I noted recently elsewhere, Suunto was definitely in the industry leaders camp when it came to land-based GPS performance. But this seems to have moved them back into the chasing pack (to use a cycling term). Hopefully, that’s something they can continue to tweak, but success in updates is always extremely hard to predict.

Nonetheless, this is still a great deal within the overall endurance sports watch space – especially with industry-leading dual-frequency battery performance. Kudos on that.

With that, thanks for reading!

FOUND THIS POST USEFUL? SUPPORT THE SITE!

Hopefully, you found this post useful. The website is really a labor of love, so please consider becoming a DC RAINMAKER Supporter. This gets you an ad-free experience, and access to our (mostly) bi-monthly behind-the-scenes video series of “Shed Talkin’”.

Support DCRainMaker - Shop on Amazon

Otherwise, perhaps consider using the below link if shopping on Amazon. As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases. It doesn’t cost you anything extra, but your purchases help support this website a lot. It could simply be buying toilet paper, or this pizza oven we use and love.