Suunto X6HR

I had the watch for about five years. I like it because it is comfortable and not too heavy. After replacing the band for the third time, the display went south and now shows all features displayed at once. If I take the battery out the display shows normal for about 1 second then goes out for lack of power. I done fooling around with this turkey.

Older watch so you don't have to worry about buying one. They were advanced when they first came out. They had lots of problems. Customer  support is  lacking. They use a call center overseas. They basically just have you send it in if it is still on warranty. A real hassle.

The bands break due to poor design and materials. Stick with a cheaper watch so you don't get sucked into trying to save an expensive watch that's off warranty that you never should have bought to begin with.

Never could get the heart rate feature to work.

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.