I’ve been wearing a Suunto Core Black Military watch just about daily for nine months now. Being particularly hard on watches, I was curious to see how it held up to daily abuse – especially the watch face. I tend to wipe those out pretty quickly with various gouges and scratches.

Suunto Core All Black Military watch

The Suunto Core has a handy set of features:

• It actually tells time and offers all the standard watch stuff: two time zone support, alarm, date, stopwatch, and countdown timer.
• Sunrise / sunset time data for 400 different locations worldwide is built in.
• Altitude tracking – While you have to calibrate altitude based on where you are, the operation is quick and easy.
• Digital thermometer – To get accurate outside readings, you do have to remove the watch and let it adjust to ambient temperature. The sensor is located too close to your skin to provide accurate readings.
• Barometer and storm warning. This actually turned out to be a really useful feature. The main display has a small barometric trend line indicator that tells you if pressure is increasing or decreasing. You can also set an audible alarm when storm activity is indicated.
• It’s water resistant to 100 feet and the buttons are operable under water.

Some don’t care for the moderate level of contrast on the watch face, claiming that it is more difficult to read in dusk or low to moderate light conditions. At the other extremes, visibility is great. In broad daylight the screen is easy to read. In darkness, the back light feature works great. While visibility is not as good during “in between” light conditions, it was not an issue for me.

Oh, and the durability? Not a scratch on the mineral crystal face.

I like it.