Suunto Sports Watches – A Look Back In Time At The History Of Suunto
| Suunto watches make unique, high tech sports watches in a cutting edge package that delivers the ultimate level of performance in it’s designated feature set.
Suunto watches are amongst the most sophisticated on the market, providing you with highly functional, accurate and reliable sporting equipment for your sporting lifestyle. |
The Suunto company was founded in 1936 by Tuomas Vohlonen and was originally in the compass business and is a relative newcomer to the sports watch arena.
Suunto’s entry in the running and fitness watch arena did not come until the year 2004 when the company released products for fitness oriented users, however today Suunto is a market leader in high-tech sporting instruments in diving, fitness and outdoor arenas. |
About Suunto – A Look Back In Time …
| Suunto were originally known for their production of compass technology and we have only recently seen the emergence of Suunto sports watches, however Suunto’s committment and dedication to technology have quickly resulted in them becoming one of the premier manufacturers of high-tech sporting equipment, amongst runners, divers and outdoor enthusiasts. Here is a brief look at the Suunto story over time.
The Suunto company was started back in 1936 by Tuomas Vohlonen, a keen orienteerer and outdoors man who sought to solve the problem of inaccuracies in traditional “dry compasses” with a unique method resulting in a much steadier needle, leading to better readings and improved accuracy. This new technology would become patented and made standard of the Suunto company and by 1950 they were producing field compasses as well as a compass for marine activities, both being exported to over fifty countries around the world.  In 1952, when Helsinki hosted the Olympic games, Suunto created the torches that were used to carry the light of the Olympic flame. In the following year, the first marine compass, the Suunto K-12 was released and in 1957, Suunto began to manufacture hypsometers which have the ability to measure the height of trees. In the decade of the 60′s Suunto’s compass range grew even more significantly when it introduced its first diving compass. This came about from divers themselves when a British sports diver attached a Suunto compass to his wrist and discovered that it worked under water. While other companies may have disregarded this information, the engineers at Suunto saw it as an opportunity to launch a new business category. In the years that followed Suunto’s business and exports grew significantly. Suunto was committed to focusing on combining its strength in new skills in electronics with its traditional precision mechanics. Accuracy, ruggedness and reliability where always the company’s core value and so from Suunto’s point of view, they were simply continuing to operate within their original core value systems with their new Suunto sport watches.  Not until 1987 would the seed that much of the company’s future growth would be based on come into being with the mass production of the SME dive computer Suunto sport watch. Up until this time, divers had to pre-plan the decompression time using diving tables and their overall safety duration of a dive. With the release of watches Suunto created for divers, all of these calculations could be handled by algorithms on the Suunto wrist watch itself, which was a great boon to divers who risked making mistakes with manual calculations. Naturally Suunto also combined their compass sports watch techniques to their highly innovative computer diving watches which was present in their Suunto Spyder watch and could not be more evident in Suunto’s next big market creation, the Suunto Vector which was released in 1998. The Suunto Vector wristop computer was designed for outdoor leisure use with the ability to measure air pressure and thus altitude, with abilities to predict changes in wealth as well as time and direction. This watch Suunto created for divers would pave the way for the next generation of Suunto wathces in the new millennium and in 2004 Suunto released the D9 which was the first combination of diving computer and digital compass. |
That same year Suunto entered the field of fitness watches with a brand new, highly sophisticated running and training watch, the Suunto t6. This was a heart rate monitor combined with sports laboratory abilities that provide it with precise, high-quality measurements on training effect which is an indicator of the user’s fitness gain in a particular training session. The t6 watch proved such a success, that it was followed up with an entire series of watches for athletes of all levels and abilities. It marked the beginning of an era of advanced Suunto computer watches catering to the needs of advanced athletes and fitness enthusiasts of all levels and abilities.
 The next major advancement from Suunto was the launch of a new series of outdoor sports instruments, the Suunto Core and Suunto Lumi. The Core watch combines Suunto’s traditional compass abilities with contemporary design direction and advanced “ABC” – altimeter, barometer and compass features. The Suunto Lumi sports watch is in fact the first female outdoor sports watch that is specifically designed with the needs of women in mind. It is a watch made for women and designed by women, both of these products have been highly successful and have fared incredibly well in design competitions. The Suunto Lumi won both the if design awards in 2008 and the reddot design award, while the Suunto core won the reddot “Best of the Best” nomination, also in 2008. In the following year, the Suunto HelO2 dive computer was introduced into the market, it was the first diving computer from the Suunto company that has full mixed gas capabilities. The watch is targeted at technical divers who need multiple gasses such as nitrox, trimix and oxygen when diving to deeper depths and longer dives. Later in the year Suunto made its entry with its first premium sports watch collection, the Suunto Elementum, which is targeted at active city dwellers who are intrigued by a multitude of activities such as diving, outdoor activities or sailing. This watch combines both style and function in one discrete package. The Suunto sports watch is today, one of the market leaders for divers, runners and fitness enthusiasts and outdoors and adventurers world-wide. It is also a sports watch that is prized by skiers, sailors and golfers due to its dependability, accuracy and well thought out design that pays a lot of attention to detail. The Suunto sports instruments provide a high level of functionality that is melded with great aesthetics and care for detail. The Suunto sport watch instruments provide a great range of sport-specific features that help athletes of all levels abilities to both improve and analyse their performances. Located in Vantaa Finland, Suunto is the employer of 500 people throughout the globe and a distributor to over 100 countries. |
