Suunto is one of the oldest names in navigation, moving its expertise over to sports devices to rival the likes of Polar and Garmin.

Looking to disrupt the smartwatch space, the company has announced the Suunto 7, a Wear OS-based device that wants to give you Suunto's sporting expertise with a full smartwatch experience too.

Core to this device is the hardware that it's running on. Sitting on Qualcomm's 3100 Wear OS platform, the clever thing that Suunto has done is move the sports functions to the co-processor, meaning that sports tracking runs on the lower power cores rather than the battery-draining application cores. 

That, says Suunto, will mean that the Suunto 7 can give you long battery life for tracking - 15 hours of run tracking for example - from a single charge. 

There will be support for up to 70 different sports, collecting data from the GPS, heart rate monitor and ABC sensors (altitude, barometer, compass), so give you all the sports stats you need. That should deliver the full sports watch experience, for those who want an uncompromised experience.

There's offline mapping included in this, and the Suunto 7 will cleverly download the topographical or street-level maps for your area while it's charging. It will also download the appropriate maps if you're in a new area, so you'll always have proper maps when you head out for a run or ride. 

Suunto is also giving you access to heat maps for major sports, so you can see popular running routes at a glance, giving you a good sense of where it best to go running. 

That's on top of all the services that you expect from Wear OS, supporting all those Google services, with the Play Store in place to expand the range of apps that it offers. 

It's a touchscreen device, but the Suunto 7 also has button controls, meaning that you can navigate and control the sports functions with a button press, which is a lot easier if you're running or wearing gloves.

There will be five designs available, meaning there's a selection of colours to choose from and it will be available from 31 January. 

The Suunto 7 will be priced at €/$479.

Suunto 7

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