Equipment Store

Suunto X9i GPS Watch

Suunto X9i GPS Watch description

The Suunto X9i GPS Watch tracks waypoints along your route, interfaces with digital mapping software, and even tracks speed, distance, altitude, and weather as you hike, climb, or ski. Pre-plan your routes by uploading data from digital maps or Google Earth, so you never lose your trail. Suunto made the GPS with an incredibly accurate 3-foot resolution and gave it the ability to show your current speed, distance traveled, distance to you next waypoint. It also has enough memory to store a ridiculous amount of information for future reference. Find your way through a whiteout, battle through brush to a remote peak, and know exactly how many vertical feet you ski in a season with this amazing GPS watch.

Bottom Line: You would have to try hard to get lost with all the technology features of the Suunto X9i Watch at your disposal.

I've bought this watch and am VERY HAPPY with it. It has worked flawlessly and has been exceptionally accurate. I have used it while operating my car and it was perfect in distance over 103 miles. It can gauge speed and was dead on with the speedometer of my auto. I tracked back from 140 miles out and it was within .01 dead on accurate. You MUST read the manual from the CD. The watch is complicated and you must understand the functions to succeed with it. If you don't, you'll end up unhappy. Spend time reading and you'll find a new best friend.

After two weeks of side-by-side usage, Ive concluded that these watches are targeted at very different markets. Furthermore, in many respects, it seems like neither watch is totally ready for prime-time. Both have nice feature sets, but they each seem to be lacking some very important features to make them truly useful across several sports. The Suunto X9i seems to be targeted and more useful to the climbing crowd, whereas the Garmin Forerunner 405 seems targeted at the fitness/jogging crowd. Neither has the complete feature set that the above-average hiker/trail runner/mountain biker needs. Thus, if you purchase either, you have to accept the compromises inherit in one or the other. If I was pressed to recommend one over the other, I very hesitantly lean towards the Garmin Forerunner 405 due to smaller size, better battery life, faster GPS synch, slightly better navigation screen and of course, lower price. Im hesitant because of several important cons which I elaborate on below.STATS:Battery Life (w/ GPS): 4.5hr (X9i) vs. 8hr (405)Battery Life (w/o GPS): 16d. (X9i) vs. 12d. (405)Size: X9i is larger in every dimension than 405Weight: 74g (X9i) vs. 60g (405)Water Resistence: 100m (X9i) vs. 3m (405)Heart Rate Monitor: No (X9i) vs. Yes (405)Outside Temperature: Yes(X9i) vs. No (405)CONS: Garmin Forerunner 4051) Does not display raw latitude/longitude position on standard screen. You can save a waypoint, which they call location, and then edit that point to see the latitude/longitude (displayed in non-decimal format).2) Does not have On/Off button to save battery-life.3) Comes with very basic software with limited maps. Cannot export tracks into GPX format.4) Difficult to upload waypoints for future route.5) Limited to WGS84 map datum (limits international usage of tracks)PROS: Garmin Forerunner 4051) Easy to use menu system.2) Fast GPS satellite synching.3) Can connect to heart rate monitor.4) If you can get waypoints loaded, there is a nice screen that shows the direction/distance to the selected waypoint.5) Great fitness monitoring screens and many are customizable.CONS: Sunnto X9i1) Large physical size.2) Poor battery life with GPS on.3) Slow GPS satellite synching.4) Difficult to use and complex menu system with 5 buttons.5) Does not have On/Off button to save battery-life.6) GPS tracks, which they call logs, tend to have jumps/errors when GPS drops out, which is often.7) Comes with very basic software with no maps. 8) No screen to show direction to a selected waypoint.9) Limited to WGS84 map datum (limits international usage of tracks)10) Suggested Retail Price is 25% more than the Garmin 405.PROS: Suunto X9i1) Does display raw latitude/longitude position on Position screen, but in non-decimal format.2) Does have temperature feature.