Software Firmware Update Suunto Vertical?!

It’s just a watch made in Finland dude. Chill.

I’m chill as cucumber. Dude. A cucumber out of a fridge on a hot summer afternoon… the good, thick, long, succulent cucumber, you know, the one that goes into a proper Greek salad. How are you? Enjoying some quality forest fires up north?

but you do sound kind of sarcastic and unhappy.

Maybe because I am sarcastic by nature and at the moment, a tiny bit unhappy? After all, if Suunto can release what amounts to basically a rushed product, I should be able to faint some consumer frustration?

I’m not asking for $1000 worth of it, but just a morsel? Maybe like $100, no?

I had 3 hard resets and countless soft resets to work about two dozens issues that I had no reasons to expect in a finished product. That’s not counting the ones like maps not loading, widgets getting stuck, and so on that have already been reported in this forum.

Disconnect and go for a run without any electronics.

I would. But have you seen air quality in New York recently? It’s dark and raining on top of it. And don’t even get me started on the road quality here. I have a high deductible on my health insurance plan. I spent $800 on that made in Finland just-a-watch, so it’s either that or a broken leg treatment for me. A real bummer of a dilemma if you think about it.

It’s a choice to be here on the forums. Choice to buy a Suunto or not.

Then I proudly choose to be on the forum and complain about a Suunto I bought.

We are all pro-choice, right? (I suspect @Tieutieu might be pro-life though.)

It’s a free ~~country~~ forum, is it not? If somebody is allowed to post artistic arrangements of their watch collections, workout calendars, or unending odes to Suunto unparalleled genius, somebody should be allowed to vent their anger and remorse too?

A good story needs both. Remove the former, and you are left with a Garmin forum. But take away criticism and snakiness of the latter, and you will end up with far worse. A cult.

@mikekoski490 i agree that definitely Suunto is not out to deceive anyone. However, Nick has a point here. At very basic, the watch must works reliably with its basic function, for everyone. Yes, sure, if anyone is not happy with the watch, then can either go buy other brand, or go run without watch. But that is precisely what kills suunto here. Suunto used to be number 1 brand in region. Now? Very few people want to buy it, even if it is made in Finland. It is near unsaleable here. I’ve been to one shop here whose sales staff actually persuaded the customers to actually buy coros instead (the shop is one of last few to actually carry both suunto and coros), because the staff found so many complaints, and returns, from customers who bought suunto in the past 2 years (9 baro, 9 peak, 9 peak pro), that he also got fed up recommending suunto. This shop might ditch suunto after current stock is finished.

I really wish to see suunto succeed again, but at the rate of bugs list, and the rate competitors are advancing, suunto seriously need to buck up. “Hotfix” in my country here, means fix in hours or days, not months. Yes, i’m software developer. If i were to launch software with crash in basic function affecting a faction of customers, my boss would have asked me not to go home until i fix it in hours.

@Kk2n-Kk said in Software Firmware Update Suunto Vertical?!:

@mikekoski490 i agree that definitely Suunto is not out to deceive anyone. However, Nick has a point here. At very basic, the watch must works reliably with its basic function, for everyone. Yes, sure, if anyone is not happy with the watch, then can either go buy other brand, or go run without watch. But that is precisely what kills suunto here. Suunto used to be number 1 brand in region. Now? Very few people want to buy it, even if it is made in Finland. It is near unsaleable here. I’ve been to one shop here whose sales staff actually persuaded the customers to actually buy coros instead (the shop is one of last few to actually carry both suunto and coros), because the staff found so many complaints, and returns, from customers who bought suunto in the past 2 years (9 baro, 9 peak, 9 peak pro), that he also got fed up recommending suunto. This shop might ditch suunto after current stock is finished.

I really wish to see suunto succeed again, but at the rate of bugs list, and the rate competitors are advancing, suunto seriously need to buck up. “Hotfix” in my country here, means fix in hours or days, not months. Yes, i’m software developer. If i were to launch software with crash in basic function affecting a faction of customers, my boss would have asked me not to go home until i fix it in hours.

Maybe because it is made in Finland the boss can’t do that (I imagine).
And so everytime you get an issue you also need to remember of the quality of life that the people that work on Suunto hopefully have , and that you are contributing for it (I see it as good thing).

@Kk2n-Kk I second every word. Thank you for being a good cop to my bad snarky one.

In New York City, an outdoorsy Paragon Sports used to carry Suunto watches. Not anymore. A well known regional gadget powerhouse BH Photo&Video, who sell absolutely anything and everything electronic, no longer carries any of the newer Suunto devices and are slowly selling off their stock of Suunto 9 Baros. A dive shop that was huge on Suunto and had watches in addition to diving computers on a big ass glass display, smack in the middle of a show room is also out. REI is probably the last brick and mortar in the US of A that still carries Suunto, and even there it’s order-to-shop. This is the real life outside comfy confines of this echo chamber of a forum.

Just because some issues haven’t happened to you personally, or you chose to ignore other issues as insignificant, doesn’t mean posters here share your unending enthusiasm or have no reasons to be frustrated. Dismissively suggesting them to disconnect, ignore, return a watch and so on is condescending at the very least.

They say forums are mostly negative, because people only bring up issues and concerns while the happy users are just somewhere out there enjoying the product.

Well, if that were true, Suunto wouldn’t be in the position they find themselves in, right?

Maybe in reality, for every unhappy customer in the forum who voiced their concern, there are a dozen who just silently folded. I’ve been long enough around here. I remember all those people who asked about structured workouts and Training Peaks integration back in 2018, Movescount and web front end in 2019-2020, more support for Suunto 7 in 2021…

It’s great that @Tieutieu is enjoying his Vertical to the fullest. I liked @MiniForklift classy watch photo op. And kudos to @mikekoski490 for staying with the brand for so long.

I wish I could share your excitement. But after going through what amounts to a rough beta test, I can only hope the service pack of a “hot patch” would actually deliver the Vertical the way it was meant to be. It’s either that, or @Tieutieu will need a hell lot more of his friends to buy the watch in the near future.

gone troppo

I would just like to add that I think the suunto vertical is the best outdoor watch ever produced up to this point by any company.

jw cou

@gone-troppo fully agree. I don’t know why I don’t have the bugs reported by other but for me this watch is awesome so far - coming from S9PP, 7X, instinct, S9b before that.

@gone-troppo said in Software Firmware Update Suunto Vertical?!:

I would just like to add that I think the suunto vertical is the best outdoor watch ever produced up to this point by any company.

Curious about this statement. Can you elaborate?
What do you understand by “outdoor watch”?

gone troppo

@André-Faria

Outdoor watches such as top of line Garmin Fenix or epic range, top of line coros and polar etc the closest rival in my view is Garmin enduro 2 which has similar battery life however it is a few mm thicker watch so not as slim as the vertical. It also is extremely expensive vs the vertical you pay for all those 1000 features.

@NickK said in Software Firmware Update Suunto Vertical?!:

@isazi One way or the other you’re always doing it wrong for some group of people.

You mean poor suckers who counted on a watch not to crash and reboot in the middle of their long run? Or to see those much advertised offline maps once you spend half a day downloading them? Or perhaps have Suunto+ apps that don’t display placeholder labels and drain battery like there’s no tomorrow? Or maybe have a compass that doesn’t need calibration every single time? Hell, what about an EPOC recovery timer that counts down hours!

How dare these unwashed peasants demand basic heavily advertised and promoted features to work! Ungrateful bastards…

Customers these days! You charge them mere peanuts, $830 plus shipping and tax and they want a working product! You can’t get a mere appetizer at the three-star Michelin restaurant for this amount, and they want a working product!

In my opinion people are expecting a flawless product with a million features totally tailored to their needs.

I’ll settle for a quarter million and a few blemishes at this point, thank you very much. Can we negotiate?

Yes, bugs are inevitable. As long as they are taken seriously and repaired some day

Some day? Look, I used to be known in this forum as one of the biggest Suunto fanboys, but I can’t ignore the fact that with every passing iteration the amount of bugs far outstrips the number of features added. Suunto really did Garmin this time around and managed to break even seemingly unrelated stuff.

Like how do you break a recovery timer, for Pete’s sake?

We had one widget that was really slow to load on S9 and S9P — heart rate. Resources were also kind of meh. S9PP sped things up considerably. Not quite Garmin/COROS level of snappiness but acceptable. With Vertical, you swipe between widgets and can literally see the digital paint dry. That’s assuming the widget doesn’t get stuck half screen, end up as blank, or crash your watch.

And now we have a “hot fix” that by the time it rolls out is going to be anything but “hot”. Lukewarm, maybe? Room temperature? And yes, I understand… Suunto has process. It has those famous field testers. People for whom offline maps work flawlessly, widgets scroll blazingly fast, the S+ apps are on point, and the activity recording is rock stable.

I’m sorry. I received my replacement Vertical yesterday. And I had more problems with it in the past 24 hours than with all Garmin, Suunto, and COROS watches from the past several years combined.

The growing list of issues voiced up in this forum for a single watch mere days following a release aren’t some spoiled brats nagging about minor obscure edge case. It’s a testament to ever slipping standards and a product that could have benefited from an upward of half a year of additional development.

What were the problems?I believe that if it is something like restarts out of the blue either a hard reset would fix it, or it can be hardware.
When others told to get your money back, I think it is the safe bet…
As much interest or hope I may have um in Suunto, if two or three watches were not working ok, I would want my hard earned money back. Because in the end it’s your working hours and just a product to serve a purpose. And if it is not capable to do it, out with. Life is too short to have stuff that doesn’t please us.

Tieutieu

@NickK…
I’m far from beeinng a perfect person, but I have a few qualities.
I daily refuse the statement « I have no time ». I try to organize my life around and for the things and the people I love (including my wife and my 2 kids)…
I have a lot of self-mockery.
I believe that if everyone was kindest to the others the world would work better.
Concerning my activity volume : one race of almost 14hours is a good way to add hours of training into the calendar. I wish I had more commute. For the rest, the « one dot per day stupid challenge » is no very easy to achieve…vertical has probably a function dedicated to that but it’s not working on my watch.
I sincerely hope that the updates to come will solve the most of the issues you have.

Jamie BG

@Kk2n-Kk
Agree with a lot of what you say, however the reality is that its really no better with Garmin, Coros, Polar, Apple, Samsung, Fitbit etc - if its not hardware issues its software issues.
Sometimes we get lucky and are blessedly free from issues, othertimes I read in horror as people are on their 3rd unit and still having hardware issues - and or whatever they do a unit will just not work for them…
Bugs - unless the tech is basic or very formatted to one function there are bugs in it - just a reality of life due to how complex tech is today - and the reality is that Garmin isn’t really any better than Suunto - see the latest 13.22 updated for Fenix/Epix - I got updated on early rollout - within 48hrs the watch updated again - can’t remember what the issue was - but was a hotfix - I just lucky that in that 48hrs I didn’t hit that particular bug they had to create a hotfix for and retrigger the update. But look at the list of the bug fixes that was included in the update - pretty scary - especially knowning that there are loads others still out there.

Personally I say go with something that works for you. Really not worth bashing any of them as they all have their issues.

Likarnik

@Jamie-BG yeah, but with Garmin you got hotfix in 48h, not in month and a half as it’s expected now.

Sadly I agree with @NickK and @Kk2n-Kk. We were mocking Garmin because it’s buggy and praising Suunto because it’s solid, has less functions, but at least they are working unlike Garmin. Now Suunto is like Garmin, but less functions (although it has almost everything I need). Build quality is excellent and made in EU is still a big plus for me. I get it that new functionalities are not 100% yet (like maps, solar graph), but soft reset every time I have to set zones? Rebooting in middle of activity? Recovery time? Those are some of basic functionalities that I expect to work from start. And even if they don’t and Suunto acknowledge a bug I expect hotfix in couple of days, not months. I’m software developer myself and create a lot of bugs, but solving them and deploying to our customers is first priority. At least those simple fixes, show customers that you care, not everyone is on this forum and they don’t know that fix is ready for next release (normally it needs 4months or more to se the light).

isazi

@Likarnik said in Software Firmware Update Suunto Vertical?!:

At least those simple fixes, show customers that you care, not everyone is on this forum and they don’t know that fix is ready for next release (normally it needs 4months or more to se the light).

A bug that affects some people and not others, I would not call it simple, especially in the embedded word. The bug seems to be at the intersection of hardware and software and related to the power up and down of some components, so not easy. It looks like developers found the cause of some reboots, and we are testing the hotfix that should hit production next week (I believe). This does not mean there are not other possible bugs, but that the one rebooting watches during activities is some particular conditions (and in a month and using it every day it still did not happen to me) has probably been patched.

Likarnik

@isazi I agree with that, in my case sometimes customer have to show me his use case to get the bug as I can not reproduce it. But as far as I remember in other topic some of fixes are already ready for more than a week? And users here are quite helpful with sending logs to get fix asap.

isazi

@Likarnik users here are very helpful, and some bugs have been fixed and identified thanks to the people in this forum. Some issues are already fixed yes, but minor ones, and the goal of the hotfix is fixing the crash of the Vertical during activity. And at the same time, development is also going on for all the other watches that should get a software update in June.

@Jamie-BG please don’t get me wrong. I don’t intend to purposely just bash any brand, but i just give the real situation here, at least in my country of what is happening to suunto and the people experiences. @NickK is right in this one. Many stores refuse to carry suunto. Yes, garmin has bugs, coros has bugs, polar has bugs. But it seems, these bugs are not as killing to them as what happen to suunto. So for most, they voted with their wallets, and moved on from suunto, just like you said, go with something that works for them. I personally still have my 9 peak, but for majority out there in my country, suunto is , well, a past story and no or few retailer want to carry them anymore.

Again, yes, garmin has a lot of bugs, but the bugs , to the mass, here, are more tolerable, because , like @Likarnik mentioned, the features at least outweight the bug, while unfortunately for suunto , since 9 baro, the bugs and features no longer tally, and thus, many people here moved on to something that works, and that spells the (near) end for Suunto in my country.

zhang965

@Kk2n-Kk said in Software Firmware Update Suunto Vertical?!:

Jamie-BG please don’t get me wrong. I don’t intend to purposely just bash any brand, but i just give the real situation here, at least in my country of what is happening to suunto and the people experiences. @NickK is right in this one. Many stores refuse to carry suunto. Yes, garmin has bugs, coros has bugs, polar has bugs. But it seems, these bugs are not as killing to them as what happen to suunto. So for most, they voted with their wallets, and moved on from suunto, just like you said, go with something that works for them. I personally still have my 9 peak, but for majority out there in my country, suunto is , well, a past story and no or few retailer want to carry them anymore.

Again, yes, garmin has a lot of bugs, but the bugs , to the mass, here, are more tolerable, because , like Likarnik mentioned, the features at least outweight the bug, while unfortunately for suunto , since 9 baro, the bugs and features no longer tally, and thus, many people here moved on to something that works, and that spells the (near) end for Suunto in my country.

Welcome to Suunto community.

@zhang965 haha, thanks. I’ve been with suunto for long time, since ambit 3, and now holding on to 9 peak, but i have been told, by existing retailer, don’t hold my breathe for vertical. No one want them anymore here, and current distributor has already given up on suunto and suunto now looking for new distributor. Things are looking pretty grim here. If suunto vertical is launched late here, it will coincide with new fenix 7 pro series (which usually carry a lot of discounts here). At the nearly same price, guess what people will choose here?

zhang965

@Kk2n-Kk said in Software Firmware Update Suunto Vertical?!:

@zhang965 haha, thanks. I’ve been with suunto for long time, since ambit 3, and now holding on to 9 peak, but i have been told, by existing retailer, don’t hold my breathe for vertical. No one want them anymore here, and current distributor has already given up on suunto and suunto now looking for new distributor. Things are looking pretty grim here. If suunto vertical is launched late here, it will coincide with new fenix 7 pro series (which usually carry a lot of discounts here). At the nearly same price, guess what people will choose here?

Yes, agree with, but you can never wake a person who pretends to be asleep, hope you are having fun in Suunto community.

Egika

I am struggling with these kind of statements.
Not because they are not true etc.
I just don’t know where the information could be used.

With a statement like “this is not acceptable” - what would anyone here expect to happen?
Guessing here:

Looking for affirmation? -> Yes, but this is obvious. Reboots are not acceptible. Still they are there. So what now?
Make Suunto people work harder? -> I guess they are, plus a forum rant will not change it
Make Suunto change their processes, because you think you know how it works better? -> really?

@NickK @Kk2n-Kk (so many K’s, but you are different individuals I guess): maybe you can tell me about what you expect to happen when you state that certain things for you are not acceptible.

Thx