Hoosier,
I don't do much diving at altitude. The Uwatec SmartPro automatically adjusts to the altitude you are diving in. The feature that I was talking about was a post-dive alert built into the computer. There is a small picture of a mountain and after a dive it will color in a bar at the top of the mountain. If you have one bar at the top of the mountain picture, that means you can't go above 10,000 ft or something like that. If you have two bars at the top of the mountain picture, then you shouldn't go above 8,000ft or something like that. The idea is it tells you when it is safe to drive or fly up to a certain altitude. Being as I work at 10,000 ft., this is quite useful, I will know after a dive if I have indeed spent enough time at sea level to properly de-saturate the Nitrogen.
The extra log time on the Suunto sounds like a great advantage if you don't use a PC to download your dive data. I know many people really love the Suunto, and I have found more dive shops that carry Suunto products than Uwatec computers. It was probably one of the tougher decisions I've had to make as far as Dive gear goes. I made the decision to go with the Uwatec for a couple of reasons. First was price, the second was the large LCD screen that goes with this wrist computer. I found the readout very intuitive. As we have talked about, the IR PC-Download built in is easily the nicest feature on this computer. The post-dive altitude warning is a nice feature because of the altitude I work at.
As far as complaints go, I do have a couple that people might want to consider. I have found it very difficult to turn on the backlight. The switch is hidden beneath the case and you have to push it at a certain spot that is not marked on the computer in order to turn it on. The controls themselves are not buttons either, they are simply electrodes that you touch. By touching them you create some kind of electronic connection between them. They are not as intuitive as I thought they should be, they are quite advanced though, perhaps I'm just not used to them yet. The battery is not user replaceable but it lasts long enough that it's probably not an issue. Apparently it will simply lock itself out if you violate too many warnings. It will take 24 hours before you can use it as a dive computer again. I would hope that would never happen to me, I will be sure to post an updated review if it ever does. I have heard of it happening to people, but who knows how they were diving. Perhaps they needed to take a break for 24 hours if they were ignoring their dive computer. So I can't really speak to that.
Have fun,
James
