Updates for V1
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The official Suunto stance is still the same, V1 will receive some updates, but hardware resources will limit the amount of new features it will get.
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Okay, everyone. I wanted to share a bit of perspective on the perceived “abandonment” of older watches, based on my experience developing SuuntoPlus apps over the past few months, since the platform was opened to external developers.
Building something that is both visually polished and computationally useful on an embedded device such as a sports watch is remarkably difficult.
The available RAM and processing power are very limited, largely because the device also needs to deliver long battery life. There is a reason why general-purpose smartwatches, particularly those running systems such as Wear OS, have very different battery characteristics from dedicated sports watches.
Working with the SuuntoPlus platform has given me a lot of respect for Suunto’s engineers. They are doing low-level optimisation to fit more features into hardware that is already operating within very tight limits.
It is also worth looking at how much the platform has evolved. The Suunto 9 Peak Pro launched with a new interface that, to be honest, was extremely slow at first. Since then, the same platform family has gained offline maps on the Vertical, support for two SuuntoPlus apps running at the same time, navigation, and a large number of data streams being collected and processed in the background: pace, GPS, accelerometer data, barometric data, heart-rate data, NGP, and many others.
Even values that appear simple on the screen are not always available in a ready-to-display form. Heart rate must be derived from sensor signals and filtered before it becomes a stable value. Other data may be represented internally in standardised units, such as speed in metres per second or temperature in Kelvin, and then converted for presentation.
On top of all this, we expect the interface to be clear, responsive and visually polished.
I have learned the hard way that even seemingly minor graphical choices can have a measurable cost. For example, drawing a straight line with rounded ends can be considerably simpler than drawing a curved arc with rounded ends that follows the shape of the display correctly.
This does not mean that owners of older watches should not feel disappointed when their devices stop receiving major features. That frustration is understandable, especially when the hardware still works well. I only think it is worth recognising that supporting older devices is not simply a matter of enabling an existing feature. Every new function competes for memory, processing time, battery life and engineering resources on hardware with fixed limits.
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@Łukasz-Szmigiel I don’t expect endless new features. What I do expect from a premium watch that launched at nearly €800 is that long-standing, well-known bugs are fixed.
For example, the recovery value still isn’t synchronized correctly—the watch and the app often show different values. That is not a new feature request; it’s a basic consistency issue that has been reported for a long time.
Yes, developing software for embedded devices is challenging, but that’s precisely what customers pay for when they buy a premium product. Price and product positioning create expectations, and regular maintenance and bug fixing are part of that commitment.
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folks, noone ever said, that firmware is not actively developed anymore.
V1 has just not got the 07/26 update that V2 and R2 have received.
Simple as this. -
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@smopi, I understand where you are coming from. I would also like to see the phantom vibrations and overly strong vibration alerts fixed on the S9PP.
My guess is that addressing issues on older devices is no longer commercially viable for Suunto, even when those issues remain frustrating for users. Perhaps one day the company will consider opening parts of the firmware for discontinued devices, although I realise that this is probably unlikely.
Personally, I treat the watch as a tool that supports my training. As long as it does not interfere with it, and the benefits still outweigh the limitations, I am comfortable continuing to use it.
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