Suunto 7 Successor

AndreaTraverseAS

@olymay io sono un po’ indeciso se prendere un s7 o un fenix 6pro…

olymay

@andreatraverseas said in Suunto 7 Successor:

@olymay io sono un po’ indeciso se prendere un s7 o un fenix 6pro…

I would be hesitant to buy the S7 today, as it will likely be replaced next year (purely my opinion, there has been no word from Suunto).

But if you are torn between the S7 and Fenix6, they are completely different devices.

If you want more of a smartwatch, then the S7 is brilliant. There are also other options from Casio and Fossil, and of course the new Samsung.

If you want more of an endurance watch, the S7 will not have the battery life for you and you should look at either the Fenix6 or the Suunto 9 Peak. But this is not an area I have any experience, sorry.

Jamie BG

@olymay @AndreaTraverseAS
Also don’t forget that for S7 you have to preload map section and or route onto the watch.
Unless you change region i.e. have Europe maps and go to America, you do not have that issue on F6 Pro.

@olymay I don’t think it will be replaced next year. The earliest we can hope for is H1 2023, once Wear OS 3 is widely available outside Samsung death grip and perhaps Qualcomm 5100 gets rolling. Doing anything else would make little sense to Suunto: 4100 will be old news next year, and without Wear OS 3, the sales aren’t going to be good. Who wants to buy last year’s model?

Perhaps, there might be another minor hardware refresh to the existing S7 line, just like Suunto already have done this year with new bezel design and bands, and the current sale price will become a permanent price point.

My biggest fear though is more and more apps would emulate Strava and stop supporting Wear OS 2 going forward. Since most of them are tied to cloud services, even no updates means things breaking eventually. Hence, what is still a fairly capable S7 hardware will meet its untimely end.

Also, if Wear OS 3 cuts off its support for iOS and even older Android versions (like new Samsung watches do), I see quite a lot of lost sales for Suunto that, unlike Samsung, doesn’t sell an accessory to its phone owners. It sells a fitness lifestyle to anybody with a smartphone.

I said it before: Google and Samsung “windows phoned” the Android wearable industry, just like Microsoft and Nokia did with their partnership and WP8 transition during smartphone wars. We all know how it ended for the two. Microsoft exited the mobile OS segment, and Nokia is gone (for all practical purposes). Google and Samsung will survive this reboot – Samsung has Tizen in its pocket after all, but it’s not clear to me the likes of Fossil and Suunto will find themselves a place in the post-Wear OS 3 world.

olymay

@jamie-bg said in Suunto 7 Successor:

@olymay @AndreaTraverseAS
Also don’t forget that for S7 you have to preload map section and or route onto the watch.
Unless you change region i.e. have Europe maps and go to America, you do not have that issue on F6 Pro.

The S7 downloads the local map area automatically when it is put on charge, so it’s not a massive hardship to do.
The default map area it downloads is a 54km square centred on your location, so pretty wide. BUT you can adjust this and zoom out to a whopping 10,909km square, which is frankly enormous!

Also, routes are synced from the phone to the watch instantly, as long as you toggle the use on watch option. As long as you already have the map downloaded (as per previous point) then the map data will already be there.

If you know you will be travelling a distance for an activity, you have time to download the route map (it really is rather fast!).

@aleksander-h said in Suunto 7 Successor:

Hopefully, we’ll have chips capable of doing BLE sensor communication on a low power chip by then.

Technically, absolutely nothing prevents them from having a sport mode run off the main processor. Just show a big warning that doing so will eat a tad more battery. I’m sure the ability to use external sensors, from heart rate to footpods to maybe running power, will make this watch far more desirable among more hardcore fitness crowd. Especially now that Spotify playback is available.

The limiting factor here isn’t the chip. It’s the lack of developer resources to support both normal and low power scenarios and additional connectivity. Suunto can’t throw people at the problem same way Garmin can, or even Wahoo or COROS.

Also, routes are synced from the phone to the watch instantly, as long as you toggle the use on watch option. As long as you already have the map downloaded (as per previous point) then the map data will already be there.

I think what @Jamie-BG wanted to say: not only the entire region is preloaded on Fenix devices without any intervention from you, not even putting anything on a charger (you won’t need a charger with 6X by the way, the thing lasts for weeks on end even with training) – the maps are routable on the watch.

You can select a POI and the watch would build a turn-by-turn route there. Or you can get yourself the shortest route back to start as opposed trekking back via a breadcrumb trail.

olymay

@nickk said in Suunto 7 Successor:

@olymay I don’t think it will be replaced next year. The earliest we can hope for is H1 2023, once Wear OS 3 is widely available outside Samsung death grip and perhaps Qualcomm 5100 gets rolling. Doing anything else would make little sense to Suunto: 4100 will be old news next year, and without Wear OS 3, the sales aren’t going to be good. Who wants to buy last year’s model?

I really hope you are wrong with that (and I mean that in the nicest way!). I think waiting until 2023 would be too late, as the smartwatch market moves so quickly, much more so than regular fitness watches, and Suunto could be left behind.
It sounds like the 5100 will be released this year, so devices launched early next year should be running it. And WearOS 3 will be well established and Samsung users will have done the debugging for us.

Perhaps, there might be another minor hardware refresh to the existing S7 line, just like Suunto already have done this year with new bezel design and bands, and the current sale price will become a permanent price point.

Anything cosmetic will be a waste of time now, as practically nobody is going to buy an S7 now knowing that it will not get WearOS 3 and many apps could soon stop supporting it.

My biggest fear though is more and more apps would emulate Strava and stop supporting Wear OS 2 going forward. Since most of them are tied to cloud services, even no updates means things breaking eventually. Hence, what is still a fairly capable S7 hardware will meet its untimely end.

I think it is inevitable that more apps will drop support for WearOS 2, as WearOS 3 is so different they would essentially be supporting two apps, which doesn’t make sense for many developers.
And this is why Sunnto cannot wait until 2023 to launch a successor.

Also, if Wear OS 3 cuts off its support for iOS and even older Android versions (like new Samsung watches do), I see quite a lot of lost sales for Suunto that, unlike Samsung, doesn’t sell an accessory to its phone owners. It sells a fitness lifestyle to anybody with a smartphone.

I don’t see WearOS3 cutting off iPhone. This is just a Samsung thing at present, and as more WearOS 3 devices are launched we will see that it is just as open as ever (Samsung have always tried to lock in their own devices)

I said it before: Google and Samsung “windows phoned” the Android wearable industry, just like Microsoft and Nokia did with their partnership and WP8 transition during smartphone wars. We all know how it ended for the two. Microsoft exited the mobile OS segment, and Nokia is gone (for all practical purposes). Google and Samsung will survive this reboot – Samsung has Tizen in its pocket after all, but it’s not clear to me the likes of Fossil and Suunto will find themselves a place in the post-Wear OS 3 world.

I’m not sure it’s a fair comparison, as that was a developer of a dying OS buying a dying manufacturer of hardware. Google and Samsung are just working together, as they have done before. As much as I hate Samsung’s approach to things, it has helped Android in the past. It could do the same for WearOS.
I do think this move signals the death knell for Tizen, as now the only devices running it (going forward) will be TVs. And I bet they won’t do that for much longer either.

Fossil will continue to churn out cheap fashion watches for as long as they sell. Don’t forget Mobvoi also make some decent WearOS devices. And Tag Heur. And many others.
And hopefully Suunto will keep developing by far the best WearOS device for activity tracking.

olymay

@nickk you can force the sport mode to run off the main processor, by keeping it on the map screen. Or by playing music via bluetooth headphones.
After having experimented with the music playback side of things, I can confirm it is more than a tad more battery used, the battery hit is significant.

I can understand Suunto’s logic in not allowing external sensors to be connected, but I definitely agree that it should come with a big warning (using this sensor will double battery use, or something) in order to manage expectations.

This is why I want external sensor support to be part of the successor, as I see it a vital part of any fitness watch.
But with the S7, the limiting factor IS the chip, as (to my knowledge) it does not support BTLE.

Ref your second post, thanks for the added info
I still don’t see how putting the watch on charger to get the maps is a hardship. Even an F6 needs charging now and then
Routing on the watch is nice though, that would be a cool feature to have.
But we are comparing oranges to refrigerators as they are completely different devices.

@olymay said in Suunto 7 Successor:

@nickk you can force the sport mode to run off the main processor, by keeping it on the map screen. Or by playing music via bluetooth headphones.

That’s not the same thing though: both mapping and music playback will be eating a lot of battery simply due to them being CPU intensive mapping and music decoding. The same isn’t true for a single BLE connection to a heart rate sensor though. Have you tried SportyGo with an external BLE sensor on S7? I did. The battery hit from an hour of exercise was fairly insignificant. I think about or under 10%.

Also, Polar M600 managed external sensors just fine without any low power mode.

You have to charge S7 every day anyways, especially if you’ve got AOD and sleep with the watch, so an extra chunk of battery due to the Suunto app running on main core and connecting to a sensor isn’t gonna break anyone’s routine. But it means I can have a single smartwatch that’s also my main sports watch, and I would rarely have to switch to S9P if at all.

But with the S7, the limiting factor IS the chip, as (to my knowledge) it does not support BTLE.

3100 low power core doesn’t support sensor pass-through BLE signal like it does for HR or GPS data streams. The main core obviously supports it. That’s why you have your phone connectivity and music playback

olymay

@nickk mapping isn’t CPU intensive, because the GPS positioning (the power intensive part) is already done. All it has to do is plot that on the screen. Yes the screen will use extra power, but nothing compared to the main processor running.
Same with music playback. Even my 15 year old mp3 player can manage days of music playback on a single AA battery, so it can’t be that intensive.
It is down to the inefficient main processor in the 3100 chip. It seems to be all, or nothing. Hence why it relies on the low power coprocessor.

The Polar M600 is over 5 years old, so not really a comparable product (it was also terrible).

It’s not about running the main processor breaking a routing, it’s about the watch not having the battery life to get the end of an activity. Using the main processor is such a drain that longer activities are almost impossible.
For example, using the watch in low power mode with GPS set to best I get roughly 8% battery use per hour.
With music streaming (not CPU intensive but running the main processor) I was getting 30% battery use per hour.
So without music 12hrs of GPS activity is possible. Should be more than enough for most activities unless you are on a long ultra.
With music streaming it won’t even last a marathon at just over 3hrs.
There is a significant difference here.

Essentially, I am hoping that the hardware (5100 or Exynos) will allow external sensor support (or headphones, or whatever) without killing the battery.
The S7 is already the almost perfect watch for me. with this it would be even closer

@olymay So, how do you think CPU stacks against screen in terms of power since both are directly related to mapping?

We can start here and here. Basically, regardless of how inefficient you think 3100 main core is, it eats roughly the same amount of battery as that beautiful AMOLED screen, especially in its lit fully color glory. Hence, even if you double power efficiency of your core, the overall energy expenditure won’t move by more than a quarter.

The problem with mapping is that it hits two power hungry components equally. There’s non-trivial amount of work that has to be done to scale map imaging data, transform it for screen geometry, zoom level, and orientation, and then project your current path and other information from the GPS stream. Then, once this work is done, the screen has to be refreshed. Rinse, repeat.

Coming back to that MP3 player of yours. It can last on a single AA battery because it uses a low power DSP core for playback, with MP3 decoding bit implemented in hardware. Any dedicated solution will run circles around general compute cores in terms of speed and power consumption. Nobody argues that.

My point is different: implementing a sports mode on a main CPU may be inefficient, but it’s still efficient enough to deliver acceptable trade-off between additional capabilities and battery life.

I used a SportyGo app with an external heart rate sensor. I didn’t experience any dramatic battery drain. If a third party hobbyist developer, without any access to system internals and Google/Qualcomm expertise, can do it, I’d imagine Suunto can do that even better.

Will you be able to use the watch for 12 hours of running outside with external sensors? Probably not. But I’m willing to bet you’d be able to use it for 4-5 hours for sure, and that ought to be enough for most people buying S7. And if we are talking a gym scenario, that doesn’t require maps or GPS, I’m sure we can get to 8-10 hours of usage easily.

And yes, Polar M600 may be an older and unsexy device, with a smaller screen, but it proves beyond any doubt that’s you can implement a comprehensive sports solution (including structured workouts by the way) with external sensors, running off the main CPU, and still have enough power left for the rest of the day.

Aleksander H

@nickk said in Suunto 7 Successor:

It can last on a single AA battery because it uses a low power DSP core for playback, with MP3 decoding bit implemented in hardware.

Not to mention a AA battery has more power than the S7. I believe the S7 has 450 mah, while a AA can be between 1500 and 2500 (I think) depending on brand.

olymay

@nickk wow this has gone a very different way than I was expecting and is a super interesting chat! (I’m very serious about that, I am am loving this conversation!).

It seems we could chat about this for hours (which I would love as you seem to know your stuff!) we have gone somewhat off topic.

It seems we both want the same thing for the S7 successor, which is external sensor support that does not ravage the battery as currently happens on the S7.

If we could get this, then I would by myself a Stryd in a heartbeat (although there would need to be a way to display the power data during a run, like other devices do!). And I know there are workarounds with the S7, but honestly I cannot be bothered with the faff of it

Jamie BG

@olymay
That must be new that it now allows a larger area, as whenever I tried in the past it refused to allow me to download larger areas, always just stuck with 54km as the largest it would alow me to download.
But yes that certainly takes care of that, especially if the next day you will be outside the initial 54km zone. Glad to see that is now working properly.

then I would by myself a Stryd in a heartbeat (although there would need to be a way to display the power data during a run, like other devices do!). And I know there are workarounds with the S7, but honestly I cannot be bothered with the faff of it

Give SportyGo a try! As long as you don’t need actual training by running power it will handle both heart rate and Stryd data capture just fine. The data screens aren’t exactly up to Suunto standard, but the thing works. Both for gym, treadmill, or even outdoors intervals where you might want accurate heart rate.

A while back I asked the dev to look into uploading the workout directly to Suunto as opposed to just Training Peaks or Strava. Back then it wasn’t possible at all. Now I’m seeing Suunto expanded its services API to include uploads. Maybe if enough people bother the guy, this can happen. You’d still miss the workout in your S7 summaries and all, but that wouldn’t be any different from using a different device to capture it in the first place.

@jamie-bg I think it always allowed, but manually changing the zone can be a bit… shall we say, temperamental? Sometimes things get stuck, reset to default size, etc. If at first you don’t succeed, try and try again.

Jamie BG

@nickk that could be it. I know it was supposed to be able to do it, just couldn’t ever get it to work, and was generally fine with a smaller area, except on the odd occasion when went on vacation etc. Would then when I get there just put on charger to download current area.

Another feature on the F6 I would love to see the S7 get is save location. Great to be able to do that like save location of holiday home so easy to navigate back when out walking and seeing sights and or having gone for a run/cycle - makes it super easy to get back, without getting the phone out.

@olymay A certain @the5krunner put out a review of Samsung Watch 4 and what can I say?

With enemies like this, who needs friends? Seems Samsung looked at Suunto 7 and decided they’d do the exact opposite. Cheap build, cheaper straps, inaccurate sensors, and no serious sporting chops to speak of. Let’s throw all this at the wall and see what sticks. They can’t quite give you an accurate GPS route, but hey… You get body fat from the wrist!

So, if Suunto can get onto 5100 chip later this year, bake it in H1 2022, then… When Wear OS 3 becomes available later that year, they may have a true sporting smartwatch on their hands.

Of course, by then Samsung would be going for a second attempt and Google/Fitbit would be spinning something of their own. Though given Fitbit failed to build anything legit beyond activity tracking all these years, I have my doubts.

olymay

@nickk I’ve seen mixed reviews for the GW4. If it is looked at as a generic smartwatch for the masses, with no real focus on fitness (which is exactly what it is) then it’s a pretty decent device. It will more than cater for an average person, who does a small amount of fitness and it mainly interested in basic wellness data.

It does seem to be built pretty well from what I can tell (although, a 20mm watch band?? are they serious???) and should hold up well. Samsung devices are normally made pretty well and the hardware is usually decent (I simply LOVE the rotating bezel!!!). However I cannot stand their software and the OneUI (formerly Touchwiz ) is horrible. And their insistence in people using their own versions of pretty much everything (Bixby!!) is annoying.

Yes, a Suunto with 5100 and WearOS 3 in Q1 or Q2 2022 could be the ultimate sporting smartwatch. Especially if priced competitively (the S7 was simply too high to start with and put MANY people off sadly).

No doubt by that point Samsung will have lunched another three watches and Fossil will be in double figures. But quantity does not mean quality (Fossil have how many watches now and STILL have charging ring problems!).

A new FitBit running WearOS could be a very interesting option for many though. Their generic fitness is really good, and their sleep tracking is the best by far. It is also a very well known brand so will sell like hot cakes.

Sporty Go
I have looked at this and almost gave it a go. The only thing stopping me was losing the data in the Suunto App (summaries etc). I use Suunto because I love how they handle and display my data.