1 week with Suunto. The struggles.
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Firstly I want to caveat this post by saying that I don’t regret moving from my Forerunner 955 at all, I’m really enjoying the Suunto Race S and there are lots of positives, however there are a few small gaps that if addressed would really set the Race S apart.
In my view there are 2 key areas of functionality on a sports watch - firstly how effective it is to record activities and display in-activity data. The second is to display your aggregated fitness statistics for progress tracking. It’s the latter where there are currently a few gaps as a multi-sport athlete.
- The watch displays your metrics in a fixed Mon-Sun week, not a rolling 7 days. It means on a Monday you basically lose your data and start again. The body doesn’t care which day of the week it is, a rolling week would make much more sense and is likely a pretty simple change.
Performance as a data aggregation / fitness service…
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Have the capability to upload a fit file in the app. This makes adding activities done elsewhere easy if there is not yet a direct integration.
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Better handling of 3rd party data files. For example, activities from my Hammerhead Karoo are directly integrated and contain most of the data you would expect, but for some reason there are no calories shown, despite all of the data being there. However, if you download the fit file from the Suunto app and open it on fitfileviewer, it does contain calorie data so I don’t understand why it isn’t processed.
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The logbook only includes watch activities, so I need to use the app to check up on any activities done elsewhere
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A lot of data is run only - e.g. vo2 max
I appreciate you could record all of your activities on your watch as well as another device, but this is annoying when you are already recording on a capable device or platform and they record all the data needed already. Also it’s pretty difficult to do anyway if you can only have 1 of each sensor type remembered.
I ditched Garmin because they locked down the platform to force you to buy multiple Garmin devices, and as I didn’t want to do that, the aggregated metrics were junk.
This could be a great space for Suunto to excel in, especially as it already licences the TrainingPeaks metrics.
Bonus I would love a ZoneSense extension for my Karoo.
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@James-Eastwood said in 1 week with Suunto. The struggles.:
cking. It’s the latter where there are currently a few gaps as a multi-sport athlete.- The watch displays your metrics in a fixed Mon-Sun week, not a rolling 7 days. It means on a Monday you basically lose your data and start again. The body doesn’t care which day of the week it is, a rolling week would make much more sense and is likely a pretty simple change.
101% agree
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- The watch displays your metrics in a fixed Mon-Sun week, not a rolling 7 days. It means on a Monday you basically lose your data and start again. The body doesn’t care which day of the week it is, a rolling week would make much more sense and is likely a pretty simple change.
101% agree
me too, rolling 7 days would be great
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Up vote!
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@James-Eastwood, regarding your second use case, I never understood why some people prefer to track their aggregated stats on the watch. The way I see it is that the watch is a recorder - it collects the data and syncs the data to the app, and that’s about it. A phone or a tablet with a much larger screen are much better suited to analyze the data afterwards and see the aggregated stats, analysis, and trends. Opening an app isn’t really a big deal. Furthermore, the Progress tab in the app is so much more useful than anything you can see on the watch or in fact any analysis that I ever used on Garmin platform, and it provides a continuous view, not just the current week.
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@sky-runner it’s not that I want to use the watch to do the analysis over an app, it’s that the basic high level values are not very useful if they do not contain all data.
The watch is already a data aggregator, not just an activity recorder. It shows you:
- Your TSS
- Your CTL/TSB/ATL
- Your fitness (vo2 max)
- AI coaching tip
- Logbook
Do you disable all of those things?
My request above was for improved functionality for the app, but the summary information shown on the watch should, of course, match.
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@James-Eastwood said in 1 week with Suunto. The struggles.:
Do you disable all of those things?
I don’t disable all those things, but I regularly look at them in the phone app and for the most part ignore them on the watch. I mean exactly the same metrics - they get synced to the app too.
Another reason the app is preferred is that now I started to use two Suunto watches - Race S for daily wear and shorter runs and Race for longer stuff. So hopefully the app will be properly combining metrics from the two watches.
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@sky-runner They aren’t exactly the same, they miss any activity not recorded on the watch. That includes activities recorded on other Suunto devices as well as non-Suunto devices, such as a Bike Computer.
The point @James-Eastwood is making is valid, whether or not you prefer to use a phone or a watch.
IF Suunto did this, they would blow all other watch manufacturers apps out the water, and certainly create question marks over things like Strava Premium.
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I note in DC rainmaker’s Run review he once again laments the Monday reset logic.
This is a big one for Suunto to resolve.
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I isazi moved this topic from Feature Suggestions
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@James-Eastwood One thing that has changed the way I use Suunto is RunGap. For moving activities from other platforms into my Suunto app it is flawless. It is a paid app, but for a couple bucks it does not stop being an amazing tool to put together my Zwift rides, TrainerRoad rides and all other misc activities into the Suunto app.
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@Stavrogin RunGap is great, but I’m an Android user. I used it on an old work iphone for a while, but that is no longer an option.
I manage to get my data in via the hammerhead integration and runalyze. Unfortunately not all data is there, but there’s enough (importantly, TSS).
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@James-Eastwood I have the same problem.
SyncMyTrack works on Android (it costs pennies).
You can import any workout between Garmin->Suunto, Suunto->Garmin - whatever you want.
I use intervals.icu to analyze data on a large monitor because it’s more convenient than a smartphone app.
