Live location, offline maps, heatmaps, custom styles and more
By: Chris Rieth
Today the Suunto team introduced the Suunto 7 — their first true premium smartwatch.
Suunto 7 runs on Google’s WearOS, and uses our Android SDK to offer truly innovative features to bring highly functional and stunning maps to outdoor adventures, especially outside of connectivity.
It’s been exciting to collaborate over the last seven months with Suunto’s talented team of designers, cartographers, and developers. Working alongside and supporting their team as they built a new kind of smartwatch experience for fitness, one that elevates the location experiences for every type of user, was especially fulfilling. Here are just a few of my favorite features in this release:
Heatmap: The first thing you notice when you put the Suunto 7 on your wrist is the watch face — a stunning heatmap that’s customized to your location and over 70 different sport modes, to visualize the most popular routes where others are enjoying your favorite activity. This is a genuinely useful feature for discovering the best path for a run, hike, or ride.
Seamless offline maps: Suunto 7 automatically downloads local offline maps to seamlessly maintain the beauty, speed and rich detail of your route maps even if you go outside of connectivity. Data includes terrain contours, pathways, and activity-specific details. And having this download automatically means there’s one less thing to prep (or forget) before your next activity.
Map styles based on activity: The watch has more than 70 exercise modes and draws from four core map styles that switch based on activity. If you go snowboarding or cross-country skiing, Suunto 7 will automatically display a winter map style that shows trails and will help you stay oriented in context, even if you are offline in the backcountry. If you’re on a bike tour, Suunto 7 will show a custom outdoor style that highlights nearby bike trails and outdoor points of interest.
If you need an extra push to stay on track for your 2020 fitness goals, you can plan, track, and share your activities with friends and family with Suunto’s companion mobile app, or sync your activity directly with Strava.
Ready to build your own wearable mobile device? Check out our Mobile SDKs that make the Suunto 7 such a useful, powerful package.
Chris Rieth - Technical Account Manager - Mapbox | LinkedIn
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