How are so many basic features missing? Are these on the roadmap?

[raven]

@elbee I appreciate the reasoned discussion. Another question, if you know, about Garmin — you mention you cannot run another activity while one is in pause/abeyance mode, but what about sleep? Is that tracking denied too?

Test case: Someone has a three day weekend and doing a cycling “tour” (and I’ll use “tour” for now to represented what I think of as multiple activities combined into one), and leaves Friday afternoon say 13:00 and rides four hours to a cabin, sleeps, then Saturday rides most of the say with meal breaks, then leaves Sunday mid-morning to return home say 18:00. This three day tour has a total of oh, 16 hours of activity time, with overall real world time being 77 hours.

Does this test case person lose the ability to track sleep Friday and Saturday night? What if they have the Garmin Sleep Index device and switch to that, is that possible, or does switching the “active device” now end the activity in abeyance?

This is partially “actual curiosity” on my part, but we can also treat it as hypothetical questions if you don’t happen to know the answers to these. Let’s assume for now sleep is not possible when an activity remains paused.

That may be fine for requirements, but then does this need to be disclosed to the user? For example, in recent updates Suunto gave the ability to transmit HR broadcast to another device. However, whenever one does so, there’s a warning that this will increase battery drain. It’s not a one time warning but happens each time you invoke the feature.

It’s little things like this that I ponder about, which it sounds like you’d appreciate having a similar background. It was partially a quick thinking of this wide range of areas to consider, alongside my personal related idea of “wouldn’t a view multiple things as one” (i.e. “tour mode view”) that got me to engage more with this thread. My very first response here was “we have pause,” not even understanding what the OP was asking for as it didn’t immediately strike a use that I myself would do. With a slightly better understanding now, I still like my ideas better.

Anyway, with luck people from Suunto are reading this and are inspired to improve “touring” features somehow. I’d suggest not to limit to whatever Garmin does, even if “pause” is the way they go. I think being able to do a separate session in between “tour stages” is good, I’d want ambient background HR recording still on during the pause time, etc.

[elbee]

@raven

I don’t know. I don’t track sleep. (And an actual benefit for me is that that disables morning report.)

And what would be the worst that can happen when you loose some sleep tracking? It’s not that it’s very accurate. Or useful.

[Joaquin]

Thank you for this great feedback. As a user myself, I would also love to have this feature one day.

I’ve been working on a solution through a new SuuntoPlus Sports App, where users can create and manage two different adventures, each with a custom name. The app keeps the accumulated data for each adventure independently, allowing you to continue your progress across multiple activities.

It’s not a complete replacement for a true multi-day activity, and I’ll continue improving it, but it already allows us to keep track of the most important information from an adventure or expedition directly on the watch and in the Suunto App.

Stay tuned!

[raven]

@elbee said:

@raven

I don’t know. I don’t track sleep. (And an actual benefit for me is that that disables morning report.)

And what would be the worst that can happen when you loose some sleep tracking? It’s not that it’s very accurate. Or useful.

I’m sure others would disagree on the usefulness of sleep tracking. I do value knowing my overall sleep time, how low my HR got overnight, and the HRV results from sleep tracking, but “sleep stages” I put little weight on. In general, I think sleep tracking is a popular feature people look for in a device, and I imagine that’s one reason Garmin decided to make a dedicated Sleep Index Monitor for those who want that without wearing a bulky watch.

As for sleep tracking accuracy, one could argue that improving that would be a better use of Suunto developer resources than improving pause. Even dismissing sleep though, my earlier example of wanting to track a night swim session separate from an ongoing multi day bike tour seems like a reasonable thing, so Garmin’s inability to run a separate session while a current session is paused does seem to be a flaw in their design.

[elbee]

@raven

I know sleeptracking is super popular. Certainly on garmins, there are quite a few data collectors who collect data just for the purpose of collecting data. Or overquantify their lives.

For sleeptracking you are better off asking yourself in the morning, do I feel refreshed or still tired. That is a so much better indicator.

And like I said somewhere before, I don’t think the pause to resume later is much used on garmins (it has some bugs but I was the only one complaining about them) and you want to make it in an even smaller niche

[sky-runner]

@Steven-Hambleton said:

Instead of pausing an activity, allow someone to go to their exercise log, then choose to extend an existing saved session.

As soon as activity is saved it gets pushed to the cloud and other platforms such as Strava or Training Peaks. So this approach won’t work or it would become very complicated to manage.

Personally, when I owned Garmin have have never used “Stop and Resume Later” feature. Heck, I don’t even pause my watch except in rare cases. On Suunto I prefer to have raw data and on Strava I let Strava automatically remove stopped time (unless it is a race). And if a stop is extended, for example for lunch, I simply end activity and then start another. In a multi-day case, I definitely use separate activities for each day. I see an activity as a single effort as opposed to a single GPX track.

[raven]

@elbee Let’s approach this another way; we can define two types of devices. A “sports watch” should simply record an activity/session and that’s it. A “smart watch” does additional things outside of activities.

As an example of the former device, my first GPS wrist device was a Garmin Forerunner 910XT and I’d call it a “sports watch” as defined above. I used it when I did my sessions, and turned it off completely and took it off my wrist when not in a session. It was simply too big and bulky to be used as a timepiece.

It seems that’s more in spirit with what you want, if you see features sleep tracking as a distraction, and feel Garmin has gone too far on extraneous non-activity features. If so, I’d submit Suunto’s current design, where when an activity is paused the device is effectively frozen, is more in the “sports watch” mindset. You’re either currently tracking an activity or you’re not. If you are paused and having lunch on a bike tour, then you likely have a smartphone with you, which can do all the minor non-sports things your Suunto device can do like checking the weather.

For my “sports watch” vs “smart watch” distinction, I do think asking to do anything other than activity tracking leads to a slippery slope of non-sports features, some of which we’d likely all agree are expected in 2026, and some of which we’d say are superfluous. I keep using “watch” and “device” here sort of interchangeably, because I do think simply telling the user the time is now considered a basic sports watch feature. Likewise, I think showing weather is non-controversial for most people, and we can see how it’s “sports related” and useful.

After that, things like music control, showing messages, showing calendar events, etc. can easily push into “smart watch” territory. I like to have music when I run, but can agree it’s not a basic sports watch features, and back in my 910XT days I had an iPod to accomplish this.

However, the area of “wellness” like tracking resting HR, sleep, and other non-activity but body-related aspects of our lives I think has slowly creeped into the “we expect this by default” area, pushing those feature more into “sports watch” rather than “smart watch” despite the fact the 910XT never did such things.

I’d suggest if Suunto’s current pause behavior were to change, so that you could do something else when paused, then the natural thing people would expect is “I should be able to do everything I could do before I started the activity,” so open any other widget/app on the device.

I’d say this should also include starting another session as that’s normal device behavior with the only stipulation being cannot have two activities paused so the secondary session would need to be properly ended before doing anything else. Effectively, the second session would gave the current “device is frozen on pause” behavior we have now.

So for a “purist, I want only a sports watch, not a smart watch,” I think the current pause ability is generally fine. It’s certainly not great for a smart watch though.

[pbanon]

@raven said:

@elbee I appreciate the reasoned discussion. Another question, if you know, about Garmin — you mention you cannot run another activity while one is in pause/abeyance mode, but what about sleep? Is that tracking denied too?

The state of paused activity is frozen and stored in memory, GPS turned off, and the watch returns to normal operation. Sleep tracking resumes as normal.

[pbanon]

@raven
I agree the lines of smart and sports watch are blurring together (in fact Suunto lists battery life for “Daily use: Smartwatch mode” in the battery specs on it’s site). I also agree Garmin has significant feature bloat so they can fill up the spec list on their website. I only used a subset of the features on my old garmin and appreciate Suunto’s cleaner approach. The set of features I describe in my original post here are part of the subset of features I frequently used on my garmin and miss on my Suunto.

All these watches are designed for a broad audience and not everyone will use the watch in the same exact way or use every feature available. I did a lot of research before choosing the Vertical 2 but never even thought to check for these features (my fault) because they seemed basic enough to be universal. Going back and searching, I’ve found I wasn’t entirely wrong in thinking so as all the other big names (garmin, coros, amazfit) offer these features.

I posted here hoping Suunto would see it and consider adding these features to their roadmap to meet base feature parity with their competitors. Again these are basic features for me I used all the time, but maybe not used by others.

[raven]

@pbanon said:

All these watches are designed for a broad audience and not everyone will use the watch in the same exact way or use every feature available. I did a lot of research before choosing the Vertical 2 but never even thought to check for these features (my fault) because they seemed basic enough to be universal. Going back and searching, I’ve found I wasn’t entirely wrong in thinking so as all the other big names (garmin, coros, amazfit) offer these features.

And Polar? It seems most closely aligned with Suunto than the others.

[maszop]

I still think it would be much easier – and therefore faster – to implement this in the SuuntoApp rather than in the watch software. You could achieve not only the same results but even more. Plus, you wouldn’t have all the limitations – sleep analysis, recovery, TSS, CTL, ATL, HRV, etc. You could also, for example, use different activities during a multi‑day trek – like swimming, climbing, or via ferrata – without having to deal with complicated activity session management or multisport mode.
Additionally, full freedom of sensor management between different parts of a multi‑day activity.
Reboot, update etc. between days etc.

On top of that, it would be available to every user (like ZoneSense), not just those with the latest watches. And you wouldn’t have to pray that a crash doesn’t happen during such long and complex recorded activities.

You could also relatively easily group and combine selected activities into one final one, and then – like with any regular activity – export it automatically to other services, just as it currently happens at the end of every activity.
Especially since, in such a case, it’s really only about the total distance, elevation gain, duration, and a few less important stats like steps or calories. All the other statistics are far more useful on a daily (per session) basis for ongoing analysis.