Um. My name is michael howe, uh, i’m, the owner and creator of borrow time films. I spent a lot of time in the mountains and training for the free ride world tour qualifier to do a lot of trail running in the mountains in and around sweden and the rest of the world. So this watch i’ve definitely given a run for its money. So i’ve taken it from arbisco all the way to cabinet kaiser, which is about uh, 100 kilometers or so, and during that time i was running up and down different mountains, trail running um and hiking, and then i’ve also done some swimming with the watch and i’ve Done some basic trail and road running around my hometown of malmo uh, so that’s kind of broadly speaking, a little bit of a summary of my use of the sum27 uh. My first impressions of the watch were pretty good um. It was a little bit kind of annoying to set up at times. I had a couple things i needed to google here and there in order for it to to sync uh with my phone. It just stopped syncing, so i had to like clear the cache and force it to sync at one point, but once those little niggles were passed, the watch itself was pretty good, but the thing that always seems to let me down is is the battery and i Mean the battery itself is good like if you literally hover between uh two modes, so there’s there’s, one mode, you can basically just hold down the the power button and then it’ll say: do you want to power off? You can say yes, it’ll, say power off.
Shutting down and then you’ve also got the option to just go into a battery saving mode which, which apparently can stay in for about 40 days. So that was how i was initially using the watching kung’s leader. I was going into that mode when i wasn’t using it and then coming back to the the other kind of gps activated mode when i wanted to use the watch. But the problem is the second it’s in a gps mode, it’s going to be absolutely rinsing. Your battery it’s got a maximum 12 hours. I mean i’ve, probably not seen that sort of life span from it, yet i’ve i’ve only really been able to get a day maximum two days use out of it, particularly if i’m doing some cycling or some running or some swimming uh. I can usually get about three three to four good activities out of it, of of maybe an hour to two hours, each and with general wear of the watch along the way um so yeah i mean that just isn’t really good enough for me, like i, like A watch that i can put on my wrist and not have to think about and then uh you know when i want to charge it um i i will, but i mean i’ll, try and do this again because i stuffed it up the first time, but you’ve Got this mode here the battery saving turn on battery saver. You can say yes and then the watch is going to slip away now into the battery saving mode and it goes into a heavily reduced uh.
All it does at that point is, is just uh tell the time, basically, it’s um it’s no longer effective at much at all um and it doesn’t look as nice as well. You want to watch so at least. Look nice uh when you’re using it in in the modes that that you want to use it for um and if it’s, in a battery saving mode. If you get the sun29 barrow it’s not going to completely change the look of the watch, it will still look like a 729 barrow. It will just do smart things with the watch. So if you hold that down again it’s going to ask you to hold it down for a bit longer and then eventually the watch will probably vibrate there. It goes and then it’ll switch back into the fully fledged uh gps tracking and all the rest of the bells and whistles modes um. So yeah i wasn’t able to easily get music onto it. Um it doesn’t work like that with spotify. I don’t use google play for my music, so i found that kind of a wasted feature as well did a bunch of googling to find out how to actually put music on the phone. Basically, you need to have synced music into your google play playlist and then try to sync them to the watch. So again, that’s not really useful for me because thank you could play music. I don’t know who does they’re about to turn off the service and replace it with youtube music.
Maybe then it’ll get an update uh, but until then it’s pretty useless um. The one thing i love about it and it’s. Probably the reason why i’m still going to get a sunfu watch is the sun27s diary features and creating trail routes and all this sort of stuff which you would actually get anyway with the um uh. You can see a bunch of the recent activities i’ve done there. Um you get all that anyway. This is nine! Sorry lost, you guys youtube amateur! You get all that with the sun 29 or the 79 barrow anyway. So i’m really struggling to see. Why i’m using this watch for smart features, which i barely get the use of. I mean i might use it to occasionally get a notification about um bitcoin falling or something like that, but that hardly seems, like you know, the best use of uh smartwatch features. So all in all, i think it’s going to be a note from me and i will be taking the watch back. Uh i’ll, probably swap it for the sun 229 barrow and see how i get along with that. I would have liked, i think, maybe the second like the next iteration of this watch is going to be a cracker um, because they’ll find out some of the teething issues with with this one uh, because it is a genuinely nice watch like um and i’m sure, Like if you can manage to get your google pay up and running and you’ve got like good music synced to it, and you you’re kind of just a local runner who doesn’t mind putting his watch on his bedside table each night to charge.
Then this is probably a great watch for you. I think it kicks the out of you know something like an apple watch. It looks fantastic. It looks way better. I mean even the actual watch faces themselves like really easy to access. If you just hold that down, you can access a bunch of the other watch faces here. Some of them are quite actual fancy. Looking as well um, so i mean it’s it’s a nice looking watch, it’s it’s got absolutely. You know ripper battery life if you’re able to just dunk it on your bedside table each night and you don’t mind uh, you know doing one exercise, one short exercise a day or something like that or maybe two and i don’t know, but it just feels like It’S it’s it’s quite limited right now. For me, the features i want are within suntu and the diary, and all these sorts of things i mean the the heat maps which are which are also sort of accompanying this it’s in trail mode at the moment, are really cool like i can see all the Different heat maps around me to to maybe inspire me to do some running in a certain area: uh, oh that’s, where all the trail running is going on. Okay, i’ll go and see what what’s there um, but i don’t know that that’s a defining feature to the point where i need to get this version of the watch to to have it.
I mean it. Hasn’T really blown me out of the water yet is, is all i’m saying so yeah it’s gon na be a no for me, i’m. Taking it back, let’s see how the sun 2 9 barrow goes uh in the end. But if you’re after a good, looking um suntoo watch with google play where you can put music onto it and you can listen to bluetooth headphones, while you’re running and you’ll probably likely have to charge it every second night at the very least on your bedside table, Then this is a pretty decent watch for you, but if you’re someone who does really long exercises – maybe you know 60 70 kilometer cycles and swimming and two hour plus trail, runs and runs up mountains and needs a watch that they can maybe take into an isolated Place and have it last then. I don’t think this is the the right watch for that. I think you definitely need to go with the sun, 29 barrow or the sun 29 uh, or something like that, so you’ll get more battery life out of it anyway. I hope that’s a helpful review. Uh give me a thumbs up if you liked it uh give me a thumbs up if you’re happy that the phone fell over and i’m recording this in such a professional manner and uh give me a thumbs up if you’d like to see some more gear reviews.GG9_WEJ_yoc
