First questions about the Race 2
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Maybe I am not educated enough but please enlighten me how you use these small screens for navigation where labels are useful and important?
I use only the loaded track and follow it. If there is a complicated junction the map helps me to decide which way to go. Zoom level is 25-100m. I use it this way. No more no less. This simple.
Do you check the street or track labels while walking/running/cycling? If I zoom out to get a broader view the labels are disappear on my Garmin. They are not useful any more. I always have a phone on me where I can check the map with every feature’s name. I used twice on device route planning but it was pain in the but. It was a Garmin Edge 830 and a Fenix 7X. Phone is more useful. Usually I plan my tracks at home. If on site route planning is needed I always used my phone to do that not my Garmin.
Now I have Race 2. My only pain is it is not possible to send new track to the watch without internet connection on iOS. I asked support about it. They sent me a long answer. On iOS there is some file handling limitation. Android is ok in this regard. If it will be solved it would become a more outdoor watch.
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@szleslie this is valid point, i see it only like last case scenario. I can imagine that you are in mountains, not sure how to continue with hike. No internet connection and you have offline maps in watch. So you can look around for some known point, maybe some peak, lake, or something that will help you to get better orientation. And than another scenario, you have created path in phone and on the route there may be some interest point like waterfalls, lakes etc but you didn’t create POIs for each. So it can just help you estimate how far it is to this points. Currently i don’t have watch with offline maps but i can imagine this scenarios to be usefull. Phone is best in backpack, watch is on wrist available all the time to check.
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@szleslie POIs are not labels, POIs are icons. Then, there are the labels of the streets.
I.e. a water fountains is just a raindrop
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@Tomas5 You are right. I was thinking where can I use it this way. I came up with same. There are conditions where paper maps and phones are not easily usable if at all. Last chance back up solution can be a watch with full maps with labels and everything and on device routing. It is better than nothing.
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@dreamer_ I agree. It is useful for some. I think it is not important for me at the moment. Maybe in the future. Who knows. I am a cyclist first than a hiker (more of a short walk than a hike). A simple map is enough for me. Repeat, for me:). I tried local tourist map with colour coded tracks and it was useful on my Garmin. Unfortunately it was painfully slow, the map rendering. Suunto is much better in this regard. Every watch needs some compromises.
If Suunto will add more map features in the future, please make them optional. Switchable labels, POIs etc.
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@szleslie I agree. My Epix Pro gen2 is not good for hiking because the mapping is incredibly slow.
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You guys make great points. I don’t think anyone is really using a watch to make high-level navigation decisions (at least I hope not). Suunto’s barebones maps are really great for giving just a bit of context when you are following a pre-planned route.
But having just a few simple POIs baked-in would be really great for the examples you gave above. Things like shelters, water, trailheads, parking lots, cliffs, peaks, and the like (“mountain” focused POIs) would be awesome for quick diversions or emergency situations. And making them an optional layer (good point @szleslie!) would be great so you can still enjoy a simple, uncluttered map experience when you don’t need them.
Having a POI icon layer (no labels, just icons) would be a great way for Suunto to differentiate themselves from the competition while keeping things clean and simple.
Vertical Ti / S9PP Ti / S9P Ti
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@Joaquin in my experience auto-reverse function often activates when it really shouldn’t. It should, as you say, activate only if you already go in the opposite direction for 200 meters, but in my experience just momentarily losing the route if enough to flip it even if the watch never tells you that you are off route.
Here is a fresh example from yesterday. I was doing a trail run that consisted of two different 10 miler loops with a resupply at my parked car in the middle. I never was further than 15 meters from the route and never changed my direction, but after the resupply stop it decided to reverse the entire route. And then it took a very long time to actually convince the watch to use the original route the way I planned. The problem is that I didn’t remember how I planned it. On the watch map screen there were 4 paths leading to the car or leaving the car, and I had no idea which one to take to stick to my plan. I ended up opening the route on my phone to figure out where I was supposed to go next. This shouldn’t happen.
There are may more examples like that. Once because I parked slightly off the route and was off route for the first couple of thunder meters, once I reached the route, the watch flipped it. That was extremely annoying because for the remaining part of the day the elevation profile was moving right to left. Basically the watch decided to do the entire route in reverse, even though there was absolutely no reason for that.
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@Steven-Hambleton Thanks. I support this too. I have the Race S (and just ordered the Race 2). I love ti but I really miss the possibility to set a specific alarm clock on a specific day
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@duffman19 said in First questions about the Race 2:
You guys make great points. I don’t think anyone is really using a watch to make high-level navigation decisions (at least I hope not). Suunto’s barebones maps are really great for giving just a bit of context when you are following a pre-planned route.
But having just a few simple POIs baked-in would be really great for the examples you gave above. Things like shelters, water, trailheads, parking lots, cliffs, peaks, and the like (“mountain” focused POIs) would be awesome for quick diversions or emergency situations. And making them an optional layer (good point @szleslie!) would be great so you can still enjoy a simple, uncluttered map experience when you don’t need them.
Having a POI icon layer (no labels, just icons) would be a great way for Suunto to differentiate themselves from the competition while keeping things clean and simple.
This is a fantastic idea, but perhaps something mixed or more avanced is better.
In Garmin the saturation is specially on big cities, and when you are walking in a big city you are very likely using your mobile phone (and running I’m not sure at all if they do have sense in big cities). So perhaps POIs do not have much sense in that scenario and to see an oversaturated (and slow) map. Perhaps some street names can be useful though.
Garmin has a lot of room to improve here because walking with the watch in that scenario can be really frustrating.But it does have a lot of sense to have POI icons by default in the mountains because you are going to see very few and it makes the navigation look much better done. That’s the case of the waterdrop when refering to water fountains.
Or even on small villages by default for the waterdrop but also things like bus/train stations (i.e, on a trail running race when you arrive to multiple small towns).
No need to say but POI icons are the same on all brands, all are standard so everybody understands the navigation regardless of the device. A waterdrop is a water fountain in Garmin but also in Amazfit.
But anyway, I think POIs should be there (everybody seems to have them), but it is more important to have a perfect navigation in all the explained scenarios.
And the navigation is probably the most important thing to be finally fixed now, and thinking in this Race 2 but also the future Vertical 2 (if it wants to be a Fenix competitor when navigating).
This is the generation that the navigation should arrive to a perfect point now the watches are so good (and remembering what Amazfit has accomplished with the so nice navigation for the T-Rex 3, not even for the turn-by-turns in all the scenarios, but for TBT in GPX imported tracks and even POIs) .
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@Tomas5 There are offline maps on your phone that work without internet. Why display such things on a tiny watch screen?
The POI icons themselves make more sense.
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@dreamer_ said in First questions about the Race 2:
In Garmin the saturation is specially on big cities, and when you are walking in a big city you are very likely using your mobile phone (and running I’m not sure at all if they do have sense in big cities). So perhaps POIs do not have much sense in that scenario and to see an oversaturated (and slow) map. Perhaps some street names can be useful though.
Garmin has a lot of room to improve here because walking with the watch in that scenario can be really frustrating.Not many people go deep into configuration options on Garmin, but Garmin maps do have level of details as a configuration option - Low, Medium, High. Depending on this option, the map turns on or off certain map elements - POIs, trails, etc.
I wonder if the same could be done by Suunto. I understand that Garmin uses vector maps and Suunto uses bitmap (raster) maps. But perhaps map elements could be made transparent through color mapping or opacity channel - modern graphics accelerators should do that efficiently. I suppose Suunto already does something like that because different map elements (trails, forest roads, residential roads) disappear at different map zoom levels.
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@sky-runner a little correction of my posts. It seems I only see now the waterdrops on my Epix Pro even on towns by default. Something has changed, I remember a very saturated map. But that was a while ago. I suppose I can look further at settings (by default is just fine now for me)
