Suunto Made a Route Planner That's Just… Free

Suunto released a route planning website this week, and I need you to sit down for the feature list: it's free. Completely. It doesn't even ask you to create an account. You open it, you plan a route, that's the whole story.

If you don't spend your days building software, that might sound unremarkable. As someone who does, I can tell you it's practically an act of rebellion. The standard playbook for outdoor apps in 2026 is a gauntlet: create an account, confirm your email, dismiss the premium trial, dismiss it again, and discover that the feature you came for lives behind a subscription. Somewhere along the way, planning a walk in the hills acquired a monthly fee. So when a company ships a tool with no email capture and no upsell — just a map and your intentions — I notice, the way you notice silence when a fridge stops humming. Software that respects your time is a design choice, and I'd love for this one to catch on.

It fits a nice little theme this week of navigation getting friendlier. Strava finally brought route following to the Apple Watch — you can load a route and follow it from your wrist mid-activity, which Garmin owners have enjoyed (and mentioned, frequently) for years. For anyone whose sense of direction is more "vibes" than "compass," having the line on your wrist instead of a phone you have to dig out at every fork is a real quality-of-day improvement. Fewer stops, fewer screens, more looking at the actual scenery, which was allegedly the point.

The rest of the week's outdoor news ran the full range from calm to unhinged. Calm: Vietnam's Cham Islands are getting attention as a quieter alternative for snorkeling and beach days near Hoi An, and a survey of 147 touring cyclists produced a genuinely useful list of the world's best cycling destinations — real routes ridden by real people rather than a listicle assembled from stock photos. Unhinged: Alex Honnold free-soloed Taipei 101. The skyscraper. 500 metres, no rope, Netflix cameras rolling. The climbing world spent the week debating what it means when that level of risk becomes streaming content, and I'll leave the debate to people braver than me — my palms went damp just reading the article.

But my story of the week stays the little free route planner. In a season of sixty-billion-dollar tech deals and death-defying broadcasts, someone shipped a simple tool that asks nothing and helps you get outside. More of that, please. 🌿