- Suunto has unveiled a new running watch, fittingly called the Suunto Run
- It’s lightweight at just 35g, and costs just $249 / £199 / around AU$400
- Smart features include real-time predicted marathon pacing and a new ‘Ghost Runner’ mode
Finnish adventure gear maker Suunto has unveiled the Suunto Run, a lightweight, high-performance and – crucially, for these expensive times – cheap running watch, priced at $249 / £199 (around AU$400). Suunto seems to be gunning for top billing in 2025’s best cheap running watches list, with AI-powered features and up to 12 days of battery life.
At just 35g with textile straps, it’s got a “brightest in class” (according to Suunto) 1.32-inch Gorilla Glass AMOLED display and is packing some innovative-sounding features, including a real-time marathon race prediction tool.
Most sports watches now have virtual pacers that you can set in advance to keep you on track for your ideal race time, but you usually have to calculate the right pace yourself before you set it on the watch. The Suunto Run’s marathon mode will reportedly do those calculations for you, clocking how fast you’re running and producing a predictive time that changes during the course of your race. Clever stuff.
A Ghost Runner mode allows you to virtually race your friends along the same route or segment, and the Suunto Run also sports a track mode optimized for speedwork.
The 32 pre-loaded sports modes are customizable, and the Suunto app contains additional training and recovery insights that’ll be familiar to you if you’ve used Coros, Polar or the best Garmin watches.
Hardware-wise, the Suunto Run is primarily plastic with a slim stainless steel bezel offering an iota of additional protection for the display. It sports two buttons and a central rotating crown. Unlike most chunky running watches, its light nature and inclusion of two strap sizes in the box makes it ideal for runners with smaller wrists. Having unboxed and tried it on, it’s comfortable to wear.
It packs a dual-frequency GNSS satellite connection for activity tracking and navigation, is swim-friendly (but not dive-friendly) with 5ATM waterproofing, and offers 12 days of battery life in smartwatch mode. In GPS mode, that shortens to around 20 hours of use with multi-band GNSS enabled, or 16 hours with its always-on display enabled as well.
It’s very much a sports- and health-specific tool first and foremost. While it does offer simple notification features, don’t expect NFC payments, email management, third-party apps or any of the usual ‘true’ smartwatch features.
At this price (cheaper than a GPS and cellular-enabled Apple Watch SE 2), that’s totally fine; the Suunto Run isn’t trying to replace an Apple Watch day-to-day. It does, however, seem to be a comprehensive budget running tool, and with gadgets getting ever more expensive (not to mention constantly trying to flog additional subscription fees for premium features) the Suunto Run will likely prove popular. Stay tuned for our full review.
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matt.evans@futurenet.com (Matt Evans)
