Race 3S & Race 3 rumours

[elbee]

@Tami999 said:

I hope Race 3 will have minreal glass. Sapphire is MUST HAVE for me. This would stop me from change Race 2 to Race 3 (tech geek here :D)

You post is slightly confusing. Do you want sapphire or are your hopes on mineral glass?

(And why you want a race 3 when you now have a race 2 also puzzles me. You’re probably more interested in the watch part than in the sport part?)

[Stavrogin]

@GratefulDeadpan Maybe I read it wrong but he also quoted the current model as not having multi band GNSS.

5krunner seems to be more AI using writer looking to launch an online presence fast vs a real person who puts out well thought out content. The site and his content are a bit like a tech tabloid written by AI.

[Goatee]

Subscription would kill it for me & would class it as a slippery slope towards the end for me

[Tami999]

@elbee said:

@Tami999 said:

I hope Race 3 will have minreal glass. Sapphire is MUST HAVE for me. This would stop me from change Race 2 to Race 3 (tech geek here :D)

You post is slightly confusing. Do you want sapphire or are your hopes on mineral glass?

(And why you want a race 3 when you now have a race 2 also puzzles me. You’re probably more interested in the watch part than in the sport part?)

Nope. Iam a lot into sport, but also my second hobby is technology. If something cool bring to Race 3, I gonna sell my Race 2 and buy Race 3, but also Sapphire glass is must-have for me, both for sport and daily wearing, which for me its easy to get scratches on bezel, and I dont trust mineral glass. Yes, its cheaper, but I never scratched sapphire in my life. I can have scratched bezel, its ok, but not a screen after 1 week.

5krunner seems to be more AI using writer looking to launch an online presence fast vs a real person who puts out well thought out content. The site and his content are a bit like a tech tabloid written by AI.

The whole rumors seems for me a lot what “AI” threw away via google after typing ,Race 3" by people.
From what I’ve read this AI said Race 3 and Race 3S comming this year and compared to Race 2 with "single-band GPS" Race 3 gonna have dual-band. So we can see how we can trust these rumors… Race 2 got dual-band, like every Race/Vertical released if im not wrong.

[André Faria]

kinda interesting to see the comments here. People don’t want yearly releases but also don’t want paywall, well money needs to come from somewhere…
On my side I would prefer to pay a fee and have the same watch with updates than having to ditch a watch and buy another, but that is me, not the mass, and not the business model that companies operate today.

If the features are nice, and useful for the client even if AI based, why not?
We don’t know how it is implemented.
If the features are bad, well guess they will not sell and quickly either they improve or they will see people go where the grass is greener.

I think suunto earned some costumers when garmin decided to not release new features to “previous gen” watches such as the 965, fenix 7 etc and also paid features that were not as good as the client using claude or chatgpt.

Guess they can learn from that, and still profit.
Let’s see what the future support for Race, Race S, Vertical 1 gives and this new race 3 brings.

[Steven Hambleton]

I don’t mind a yearly hardware cycle as long as there is a trade off of faster processing or more storage.

But as this is a sports watch and not a smart watch, I don’t think it’s necessary to improve specs year on year.

The Apple Watch benefits from faster internals and more storage because the operating system demands it. Not so with Suunto watches.

What I would like to see is a more features for things like MP3 storage, uploads, guide creation, backups etc off the watch. So basically a back-end to manage everything on the watch in a web app as well as the mobile app.

[withManish]

jw-cou It’s not about waiting for official news; it’s general feedback as an end user. I look at a 3- to 4-year lifecycle of the watch (These watches aren’t cheap; there is a $300–$400 price tag).

As a long-time Suunto user, I have noticed that every software update brings a new set of bugs instead of resolving old ones. A simple example: they are announcing and claiming 15 days of battery life as just a watch; I have noticed you hardly get 7 days of juice even after putting the watch in power-save mode.

Heart rate does not function accurately, and the same goes for oxygen measurement. They are adding more and more functionalities without even knowing the use case. Their customisation is really odd, and it won’t let the user decide what they want; it pushes what they think is correct.

These watches are for athletic purposes, not lifestyle watches like Apple and Samsung. I don’t see the suitability of a touchscreen when you have a very tiny screen, and that’s the main reason for battery drain.

It can go very long, actually. I said this before: “We are paid beta testers for all tech companies”

[withManish]

@André-Faria I agree with you; there is no need for a hardware update every year. Focus on technology that can last a long time, is stable and adds paid features if needed. Just like a mobile app. You announce a new watch and deliver the same issues in a different way, rather than giving solutions.

[thanasis]

@withManish at the moment Suunto does seem to offer any paid subscription services for their watches. hence, I assume, they sell watches and they (need to) make money out of them so their offering needs to be somehow competitive and drive demand.
Now we are probably talking about strategy here, but the reality is that we need some fixes to our watches .

I don’t really care about every single feature out there but I need the device to be rock solid in terms of performance .
For instance, I have recently started wearing a g-shock as a daily driver and only train with the suunto vertical … I trust the g-shock won’t fail in its daily thing (e.g. an alarm to ring on time… and not having a concern of the watch entering deep sleep)… those are issues that when left unfixed cause toxic behavior

[matram]

@Steven-Hambleton
I would guess that the typical HW development time is 2 years. Then you would have different teams working on different products. I think this is what we see with Garmin and Suunto. If Apple releases new HW every year, they are likely still taking 2+ years for each watch, just running multiple model years in parallel.

Suunto seems to follow the normal Agile development approach for software with 2-week sprints and quarterly releases. In my personal view that approach will emphasise regular releases of customer-visible features and give low priority to quality improvements and architectural changes. It does not have to be like that, but it is a common pattern.