User Review: Suunto X6HR

Suunto X6HR
Above: The current X6HR, which may differ slightly from the version reviewed.

Reviewed June 19, 2008 by Jeff_traveller

Rating:
Price Paid: $250

This watch has great features, and a terrible user interface. If ease-of-use, and good design, are important to you, avoid this watch.

First of all, the buttons are too hard to press, which forces you to look at the watch and mash the buttons hard to change functions. When you are climbing or biking, this is the last thing you want to be distracted by.

Secondly, the compass function is poorly implemented. Instead of displaying a compass face with four bearings, the watch gives you a hard-to-understand reading like "NNW", which is a really non-intuitive way to visually display a direction. Whenever I am looking for, say East and get something like NWW, then I have to stop and think: "now, that's north west west. so this *other* direction is north west. So this *third* direction is north. So this *fourth* direction is east."

Maybe other people are more used to this style of compass operation, but having been trained with magnetic compasses, I always want to know first where north and the other 3 points are before figuring out the bearing I want to take.

My last gripes are minor- the use of a serial cable is silly and incompatible with modern laptops. The software looks like it hasn't been updated since the '90s.