Finnish exploration and sports specialist Suunto has just announced its first Wear OS smartwatch, and it comes with one especially neat trick up its sleeve. The Suunto 7 features full-color offline outdoor maps so you can follow your live location no matter where you are. This rugged watch and sports tracker isn't cheap at just under $500, but its feature-set might just make it worth the money.

Powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 3100 and 1GB of RAM, the Suunto 7 offers the best of Google's Wear OS platform (no laughing at the back) with some advanced proprietary features such as more than 70 sport modes and insights via the Suunto app. Continuous GPS tracking will cut the battery life down to just 12 hours, but it's rated for 48 hours during normal use. It's constructed from stainless steel, reinforced polyamide, and Gorilla Glass, and it's dust, shock, and waterproof (up to 50m).

The 454p AMOLED display goes up to 1000 nits of brightness, and there's naturally a built-in heart rate monitor to go with a host of activity tracking sensors. You will have to rely on Google Fit for a lot of the health-related functionality, local offline maps and Suunto Heatmaps should make up for that. You'll also get limited access and free trials for apps from the likes of Strava, TrainingPeaks, and SportTracks to sweeten the deal somewhat.

Pre-orders are open now, although the Suunto site only lists variants that start at $499 despite the apparent MSRP being £20 less than that, and you can expect to see the new timepiece in stores from January 31.

Source: Suunto