Suunto X3HR Wrist-top Computer

According to the description this has a graphing heart monitor, stop watch, altimeter, thermometer and barometer and it also tells time.

Does anyone have any experience with this item?

I have a Suunto without the heart rate monitor.
I'm a big fan. The altimeter is great for hiking: it tells you you're almost there or have a long way to go. This is when I use it the most. The thermometer is great for telling you it's too cold to get out of your sleeping bag. For an everyday watch, it's totally overkill, but a nice tool out on the trail.

I use a Garmin Forerunner 301. Its a GPS with heart rate monitor display, and the ability to upload everything to a PC if you like track your progress.

Its very nice for multiple sports such as running, hiking, biking. You can even tell it the weight of your pack. I like to use it to keep myself in Heart Rate Zone 4 while hiking and interval training on the boring flats while biking.

But the GPS altimeter is quite useless, drifting up to +/- 150 feet while stationary. It will fail to lock to GPS more frequently than a good handheld unit in the same conditions. And the unchangeable battery only lasts 14 hrs before it needs a charge.

The price may rapidly fall soon as they have just introduced the *new*improved* 305.

Remix said:

I use a Garmin Forerunner 301. Its a GPS with heart rate monitor display, and the ability to upload everything to a PC if you like track your progress.

But the GPS altimeter is quite useless, drifting up to +/- 150 feet while stationary. It will fail to lock to GPS more frequently than a good handheld unit in the same conditions. And the unchangeable battery only lasts 14 hrs before it needs a charge.

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If you carry it on your wrist, that may be part of the problem. Some of the signals are likely to be blocked by your body and swinging the unit back-and-forth degrades the signals.

Garmin doesn't seem to publish any vertical accuracy specs (horiz: <15meters RMS), but I'd estimate about 20-25 meters RMS or within about 40-50 meters 95% of the time. So +/- 150 ft is to be expected. For better accuracy, a GPS auto-calibrated barometric altimeter has a spec of about +/- 10 ft. (Generally consistent with my experience.)

Doug