Suunto X10 review
by naisan on Sep.25, 2008, under gadgets, GPS, GPS Watch, Suunto X10
AFter one day of wearing the Suunto X10, military edition, I have to say this is one extremely functional watch. But there are downsides as well. Since all the stuff I’ve seen online just talks about the good, I will dispense the bad:
1) plebian style, bordering on G-shock: this thing is pretty ugly. The texture of the watch is great, and the underside of the band is nice, but it is high off the wrist, lacks any metal or coolness, and the white bezel and little colored (painted) dots on the fron look cheap in real life. I was honestly tempted to return it and keep the all-black Suunto Core (a Black/orange Core with a black strap and buckles) based on looks alone (even though the Core has no GPS).
2) unreadable in low light without the backlight: compared to the Core, the x10 military is not readable at all in low light without the backlight on. And if you think that the contrast settings will help, they do not. Setting the contrast higher than 6 causes streaks all over the negative face, and below 3 washes out the color of the letters.
3) won’t fit under almost any sleeve at all – too high. While not a huge watch, this watch is *much* bigger than say a Garmin 405, and much higher than a Suunto core. It’s also much higher than my Bell & Ross 46mm, which is around 11mm high – that’s a big thing.
4) REALLY stiff buttons – the kind that are so stiff that you will leave a depression on your finger – but you will *not* press one by accident!
And the annoyances:
a) even though this is a GPS watch, and updates time, and compass declination based on where you are, it will not figure out what time zone you are in! That’s kind of dumb. I understand having a setting that keeps a person in a certain time zone, but I don’t understand why it can’t do a lookup from the GPS. not that hard. And the second time zone will sync seconds, but not anything else with the satellite sync on the main time zone (based on GPS fix). I can hope for a firmware fix I guess, but I am also guessing that this would require a lookup table in the internal memory of the device.
b) no dive pressure: the core has this – why take it away?
There’s a lot of cool stuff as well – some of that tomorrow!
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November 30th, 2009 on 13:32
User review
I have had my X10 now for a year and two months. I have sent the watch in for repairs as my bezel pealed off and the bezel kept clipping out. Suunto repaired it and after this my battery time was way down, so I sent it back again as they did something wrong in the repair process. Suunto then replaced my watch with a new one! The problem is two days later the new watch’s bezel started un-clipping again! Well to say the least my new watch is now back for repairs again:-( This is a great watch but I would not recommend it as the bezel is a great problem (That Suunto does not want to acknowledge) and you cannot keep sending a watch to the repair centre for a new bezel every month for the rest of your live.