SO THESE SUUNTO Heart Rate Monitors are on sale. I used to use a Polar until I lost the sensor and it was pretty good. I’ve got a Suunto dive computer and I like it. But the reader reviews on these are kinda lukewarm. Any recommendations from folks who’ve used ’em, or used others?

UPDATE: Reader Mike Dini emails:

I’m a slow runner and I’ve had several heart rate monitors. I’ve had one top-of-the-line model from each of the major vendors — Polar, Garmin, Suunto. To coin a technical phase related to engineering EDA software: ‘use what sucks the least’.

Given my experience with the T6, Suunto is dead last in this market. The device was nearly unusable. The SW sucked and regularly crashed. The heart rate monitoring function would occasionally go wild. This wildness was impossible to edit out of the database (My heart will not go 220 BPM). It would take a weird form of chanting to get the watch to recognize the foot pod and chest strap. The display is ODD and hard to read. The UI is not intuitive — merely starting and stopping the watch takes effort. If you take a vacation for 7 days, you will need to reread the manual. I had trouble giving the thing away. You claim: ‘I like the diving stuff’. The T6 made me extremely suspicious (read: terrified) of the diving products.

Polar (S625X) is pretty good, but it is only recently that they added GPS capability in the newer RS800G3. Note that the reviews of the RS800G3 are poor on Amazon. UI to the watch is fairly good (S625X). It is obvious, for example, how to start/stop the watch and save a lap time. All the functions needed are here, but it can take a rocket scientist to get some desperately needed things to work. The most important is to alarm when the aerobic threshold is exceeded (in my 167 BPM). This task taxed all of my 25 years of computer engineering skill to figure it out. The manual is terrible. Technical support is non-existent and hostile. I always had trouble with the IR link. This appears to be a sick company.

At present I’m using a Garmin 305. It is a little large and bulky, but has GPS capability. GPS is *VERY* slow to lock and I question its accuracy. The UI is wretched. It seems as if the engineers designed this product as a wrist-based GPS unit that happens to have a heart rate monitor. This should be reversed: a HR monitor that has GPS capability. The buttons are in the wrong place — during a training run, I regularly shut off the watch during the most critical time of a run by hitting the ‘off’ button rather than the ‘lap’ button. The display is hard to read, and doesn’t have nearly as much information as it first appears. The alarm is too faint. The SW is OK, but nothing spectacular. The connections on the back corrode. The watch behaves incorrectly at some of the boundary conditions. The battery life is too short (10 hours or so).

At the moment, I’m using the 305 — it sucks the least. But, it wouldn’t kill me to downgrade to the S625X. I will never use a Suunto HRM product again. OK to use my name and verify. Fix spelling and grammar please.

Ugh. None of this sounds especially appealing . . . .