Suunto have finally come out swinging. The Finnish manufacturer has just announced its latest watch style dive computer – the Ocean. This stylish computer is packed full of diving features and it finally includes all the non-diving capabilities you would expect to see in a modern smart watch.
Suunto has been relatively quiet in diving market recently with no notable releases in the last couple of years. All the while appearing to lose market share, particularly to Garmin, Scubapro and Shearwater. The latter now seems to be by far the most popular new models of computers I see on dive boats, at least here in the UK.
The Ocean moves away from Suunto’s longstanding naming convention (D4,D5, D9 etc) and this seems to highlight a shift in their approach. It’s always seemed odd that they’ve never committed to combine the general features of a sports focused smart watch into their dive focused offerings. Competitor Garmin have been doing it with their dive computers since 2017.
Dive Features
The computer comes in three finishes: black, silver and sand. It includes a full suite of diving features: multiple gases, wireless tank transmitter integration, and a freediving mode. All this is visible on the full-colour AMOLED display protected behind scratch resistant sapphire glass. You can expect this to be a very capable dive computer given Suunto’s long heritage in the market.
The standout diving feature is the ability to view your route on the Suunto app after your dive. This feature will initially be released in beta and no details of how it will work have been shared so far. It will be interesting to see how well this actually works in practice. GPS enabled watches have had the ability to record entry and exit points but this obviously doesn’t work underwater.
We have to assume it will attempt to track movement with just accelerometers while underwater. I’ll be impressed if they’ve managed to make this work in a complex 3D environment. It’s a proven technology used in inertial navigation units deployed in aircraft, ships and particularly submarines but they cost orders of magnitude more and certainly don’t fit on your wrist.
Sports
The most significant change from previous Suunto computers is they’ve finally leveraged all the knowledge and success from their sports focused smart watch lineup into a dive computer. The Ocean should have you covered for any activity in your surface interval with the ability to track over 95 different sports and activities. It also comes with all the usual biometric and health tracking features.
When you’re aggregating all this functionality into a single item its battery life becomes even more crucial. You don’t want to be constantly charging the device or worrying if you go for a walk before a day’s diving that it won’t have the charge to last the day. On paper the Suunto Ocean will have excellent battery life with up to 50 hours diving or 26 days in a low power mode.
Final Thoughts
The biggest indicator that Suunto have come to play is the price. Retailing at £725 it significantly undercuts the similarly specced diving and multi-sport Garmin Descent MK3i and Shearwaters more diving focused Teric by over £250.
I own a Suunto dive computer (EON Core) and have owned multiple Suunto wrist dive computers and a Suunto smart watches in the past. They’re always reliable and well made products. However, watch style dive computers don’t fit my diving needs – the smaller screen and straps don’t suit cold water diving as well as dedicated large format dive computers.
That being said if you’re a warm water diver and like to stay active the Ocean will likely be an excellent fit. It has already made a stir on social media but now all we have to do is wait for the reviews to land.
