Suunto Vertical 2 review: Catching up

It’s always fun to see a bunch of physical buttons, and you get big ones too. You won’t miss these wide flats even when accelerating. The silicone strap has a nice stretch, and while the button clasp is a little tricky to get into place, this watch doesn’t budge.

Suunto has jumped on the flashlight trend, with an LED light bar on the front of the case. You can adjust brightness levels and there are SOS and alarm modes to emit a very noticeable pulsating light pattern. This is the light I have found useful for rooting indoors as well as for night outings.

The biggest change is the introduction of a 1.5-inch AMOLED display with a resolution of 466 x 466. This replaces the dull, albeit very visible, memory-in-pixel (MIP) display. Suunto also ditched solar charging which would have required spending a significant amount of time outside to reap the benefits of the battery.

Adding AMOLED displays to outdoor watches has been controversial. Older MIP displays are more energy efficient. The Vertical 2 is down about 10 days over the older Vertical for what Suunto calls daily use.

However, even if you use the tracking and mapping features, you won’t be able to access the charger every few days. After two hours of tracking in optimal GPS mode, the battery was only down 2 to 3 percent. The battery drop outside of tracking is also small and the standby performance is also excellent.

Software updates

Photography: Michael Sawa

A more streamlined set of smartwatch features helps conserve battery when it really matters. Unfortunately, you may have gotten better battery life because you don’t get notifications or responses to the phone if it’s paired with an iPhone instead of Android. There’s also no built-in music player, but you do get a nice set of music playback controls accessible while tracking.