Suunto Ambit 2 Review

My Garmin 405 running watch has been great for clocking all of my runs despite the fiddly bezel 'swiping' system used to access the watch menus and despite its relatively poor battery life (which I've resolved by carrying a duracell portable charger). That said, particularly after some tricky times navigating (or failing to navigate) in hill fog in the dark on a couple of my Bob Graham attempts last year, I have really wanted to upgrade to something that can also provide me with some proper gps navigation options. 

I looked at the Garmin Fenix and the Suunto Ambit and more recently the Ambit 2 and have also looked at conventional gps's like the Garmin Montana and such like, which also have mapping software, and finally decided on the Ambit 2 Sapphire - it does everything that I want, looks smart in a rock solid sort of way and is hopefully as tough as old boots!

Admittedly when I first bought my Ambit 2 I didn't completely understanding all of its functions but now, having had it a while, I have a really have tried and tested it and know my way around it really well.

Recording tracks, or moves as Suunto calls them, is similar to the garmin. You enter exercise mode on the watch, select running (there are many other exercise modes like cycling, swimming or triathlon but I've taken all but running mode off of my watch), press enter, the watch picks up a gps signal and, when its confirmed, you're ready to go. You can prime the watch to auto record laps (for each mile say) or alternatively you can manually confirm laps on the hoof if you want to and, when you finish the run, you pause the exercise, save it and its job done. Then when you next plug the watch into your computer your 'move' is uploaded to Movescount.com and Bob's your uncle.

Where the watch is especially useful is the number of viewing screens on offer whilst running - my Garmin 405 has 3 pieces of data on view and thats it but on the Ambit 2 just one of my running viewing screens has 3 sets of data displays in view - a smaller display at the top, a main display big and bold in the middle and a further display at the bottom that can be cycled through for 5 separate pieces of running data. So that screen alone offers 7 separate pieces of running data, 4 more than my Garmin 405. I've set my watch up to show my 'current activity duration' at the top, 'distance run so far' in the middle and 'average speed', 'altitude', 'ascent', 'time' and 'battery charge' on the bottom. It looks like this and I press the bottom left 'view' button to cycle through 5 options on the bottom display:

Not exactly hurtling along then!

But it doesn't stop there as, in addition to that display, I can add extra viewing screens too, mainly to make use of the easy to see middle display, with each separate view accessed by pressing the middle right 'next' button on the watch. Somewhat ludicrously I could have as many as 7 additional screens all showing up to 5 pieces of data (in addition to my main screen with its 7 lots of data) but I've exercised a degree of common sense and have set my watch up with just three main running data screens, the first as above with distance shown in the centre, the second showing the duration of the run as the middle display and the third showing my average speed - the secondary displays on these extra screens are less important really but can also be tweeked to show what ever you want (from all the choices available). Luckily I'm not a nerd or anything like that or I'd be fiddling with these all of the time!

Same run as above but with the duration of my run as the central thing to view:

The top reading looks remarkably the same as the middle I know but it is actually my current lap time

This all sounds like you have to spend an absolute age fiddling and fannying about with the settings on the watch but you don't - instead this is all done very easily on-line at Movescount and when next your watch is plugged into your computer the displays all update accordingly. Its a doddle actually:

Part of the on-line control room at Movescount.com

Movescount.com records all of my moves and displays them on-line with a shed load of data, graphs and map views available. The feature I particularly like is the ability to view a run track, colour coded to show a certain aspect of the run (i.e. for altitude it would show my line as red when I'm say above 2,000 feet, orange in a height range below that, yellow through to green at lower levels). In the same vein here's the running speed view:

So I spent just over 2 minutes running at less than 2 mph and over 12 minutes running in excess of 7.8 mph etc.

The Movescount page is totally personalised to me and shows all of my runs in far more detail than I'll ever need but, additionally, I can also share my moves with the Movescount community and search for other peoples moves anywhere in the UK or the world for that matter - if I find a route I like in the Lake District for example I can upload the gpx file for that route and use it to then navigate by (see navigation below). I can easily extract my own gpx files too should I want to save them elsewhere (Strava or Garmin Connect where all of my old runs are) or upload them to Bing maps in OS view.

An additional advantage of Movescount is that runners all around the world can develop their own little running apps and share them so that others can download them to their watch ready to use. I haven't delved into this much but, certainly for serious runners or just serious running geeks, there seems to be thousands of apps available.

Navigation is the real extra that this watch has given me. At its simplest I can be out in the hills in the middle of nowhere and just use the watch to identify my location. I just go into Navigation -> Location, the watch finds a gps signal and then tells me where I am - I've set the watch to BNG (British National Grid) so I get a map grid reference and, providing I have the right map with me, hey presto I know exactly where I am. The watch can also display location in a myriad of other formats, latitude and longitude being the obvious one but also overseas mapping formats too.

I can also save up to 100 POI (points of interest) to my watch either by visiting a location and saving it there and then (eg I'm on top of Blencathra, I save my current position as a POI, name it Blencathra and its stored on the watch, job done) or by pre-programming a series of POI's in Movescount on-line and uploading them to the watch.

Most usefully I can import a gpx file of a route into the watch and then follow this route in the Navigation screen of the watch. When I'm loading the route it asks me which way around/along it I want to go (eg A to B or B to A), I select accordingly and then I have a clear line to follow on the watch. I can also edit a navigation track in Movescount to add POI's to the track - so for instance when I recently attempted the Lakeland 100 race, I downloaded the gpx track of that race from the UTLD website and then edited in all of the race checkpoints as POI's.

The arrow shows my current facing

Mind you If I've downloaded some random guys idea of a particular route from the internet that doesn't mean its the right route and its important to scan over any route you've chosen to ensure its going where you want to go first.

When I'm following a route, my line is automatically set at a scale of 0.25 of a mile but, if I'm off of that track, the view will pan out to a larger scale to suit so as to give me a view of where I ought to be and where the correct line is. In addition to this 'line' navigation view, I can flick to two alternative navigation views (by pressing the 'view' button funnily enough) - one showing the route in its entirety and my position along it and the other showing my distance to the next POI and a pointer of the direction I need to be going in - this last view is especially helpful when you are close to say a peak you want to get to and would like to know how far away you are.

I can also record my current run track and navigate at the same time. So with both my run being tracked and a navigation route loaded, when I press the 'next' button on my watch I can flick through my 3 running mode views and my navigation mode in turn. If I set the compass to be in view too (see 'also tells the time' below) I then have 5 screens that I can easily alternate between. Still with me? ☺

In my latest Bob Graham failure, I was both recording my run track and using the navigation based on a gpx file I uploaded from Movescount. I had excellent navigators with me on each stage too but the watch still came in extremely useful a few times when we were slightly unsure of our line in all the hill fog and pissing rain. Unfortunately I accidentally stopped the recording of the running track of my BG attempt at Rosset Pike and, although I discovered this soon after, the weather was terrible at the time and I didn't want to slow down our BG attempt just to fiddle with the watch and reset it:

I'd also been recording laps at every peak and road stop..... other than Red Pike where I clearly forgot. Doh!

The navigation though worked brilliantly throughout. Here again I'd also added all of the peaks and road stops as POIs on my uploaded BGR route so navigating to each peak was fairly straightforward, even in all of the dire weather.

The Suunto Ambit 2 also tells the time too☺amazingly and, in this time view, if I press the 'next' button a screen shows my current altitude and the air temperature (a barometer alternative view is possible instead) and if I press 'next' again I have a compass view, showing me where north is and my current heading. I can also add this compass screen to my running and navigation viewable screens whilst actually running so, although I usually carry a proper compass with me, the watch compass is always easily accessible. Oh and its water resistant to 100 meters too (whatever resistant means) and certainly is also designed to be used by swimmers and triathletes - it does recommend in the manual though not to use the action buttons while immersed. There are also two timing modes - stopwatch and countdown and I assume they do exactly what it says on the tin although I haven't used either.

Veiny or what?

And finally battery life. If the Ambit 2 is just used as a watch to tell the time, the battery will last approximately 30 days without the need for recharging whilst, if I'm recording a run using gps set to obtain a fix every second, the battery will last about 15 hours but I can of extend this by simply carrying my duracell recharger and my watch cable with me and recharging the battery as I run along. Alternatively I can set the watch to obtain a gps fix every 60 seconds the watch battery will last up to 50 hours, although personally I prefer to carry the recharger and be able to record the most accurate track..

The one area I do have to be wary of is just how much running data can be stored on the watch - thus far my longest duration run was circa 22.5 hours for the Lakeland 100 and, when I finished on top of the LL100 data there were runs going back for the previous week with at least another 12 hours of running data. So I think I'm good to go for runs of up to 34.5 hours and others have told me that 40 hours is possible.

In summary a truly brilliant watch and hopefully one that I will get many years of solid use out of...