Ambit2 - spell it out for me...
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I’m also surprised by this silence in the sports media…
This decision has been rarely pointed out.
There was only few articles when they announced it.
Now, it’s been just a long silence…But this is a crazy planned obsolescence!
As it has been mentioned above, suunto seems over confident that people will simply buy their new toy released annually… -
To be honest here, I do hope Suunto will be supporting MC only for the A1-A3 watches and prev devices. Perhaps that should work.
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@Dimitrios-Kanellopoulos said in Ambit2 - spell it out for me...:
To be honest here, I do hope Suunto will be supporting MC only for the A1-A3 watches and prev devices. Perhaps that should work.
@Dimitrios-Kanellopoulos
To me, that seems like the most insular/abstracted solution, for Suunto devices that were (clearly) never designed to operate (fully or otherwise) in the SA implementation.
This allows current Ambit (and some others) to continue to sync, on a known-good platform, until the watches “actually age out”, make changes to custom sports modes, etc. Freezing the app store, sometime soon, would also make this more-or-less a known/predictable quantity, too (without the need to totally nuke all the existing apps).This allows for a path forward, beyond AmbitX (and a few others), given that you can sync your data into the sports-tracker service, say if you decide you want to stay in the Suunto ecosystem, after the demise of an older watch, or otherwise.
It would seem like the simplest way to not alienate current customers, and to preserve the chance that they remain Suunto customers, for the most part.The main downside, for Suunto, is the ongoing deployed server-side components; it’s hard to say what the overhead is here (but I’m quite certain Suunto knows, even amortized out for several years).
There are probably also some (likely lesser) support costs and such, as the “aging out” process continues.
Both of these should decline steadily, as the last Ambit devices are sold, and devices start to “fall off”, for various reasons.Unless the overhead is significant (this could be true, depending on the actual design here), I fail to see why Suunto wouldn’t take this option, soon, and squelch all the “bad press” they’re getting, and will likely continue to get, as the 2020 date approaches.
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@pgrey
that’s true. What I’m missing most is a clear communication from Suunto about their plans for Movescount desktop, Movescount app and hence the Ambit apps and support.
Normally you expect a 10 years product support by the day the last item has been sold (at least in Europe…). I only bought a used new condition Ambit3 Peak Sapphire recently and noticed that this watch is still being sold in stores… why would Suunto kill the service of their products that are still in shops?
I’ve had the new Suunto App installed and would have left it installed, but noticed that this is a different platform and has nothing to do with Movescount.
So I switched back to the Movescount Android app, hoping that eventually both Movescount desktop and app will be continued as we know and love it.
I don’t mind adapting to something else in the future… but the watch settings amd service must not take steps backwards…
I came from Garmin because of (and only) for the good analytics in Movescount and the option for ambit apps where I can read the ascent rate in meters per hour and some other useful customization.
If Suunto really does not care about their customers I will find another product.
But of course, I’d like to stick to the fantastic Ambit3 Peak and Movescount with all it’s good readings and settings.Suunto, please listen and don’t risk loosing Ambit lovers to other competitors.
Cheers
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Sunnto strategy needs to be clarified.
They are keeping customers in a total doubt since 4 months and it seems that they treat their dealers the same way as we can still find Ambit 2 and 3 for sale in some shops at the moment !!!
Really bad signals from sunnto but fortunately they are not the only one in this businness and custommers will be happy to experience new brands.
Please add me to the list of disappointed and angry customers who are using Ambit2. -
Two points:
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All Suunto needs to do if it doesn’t intend to brick these watches is say, “We will make sure they continue to work.” The fact that they have not said that speaks volumes.
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Someone noted that this is “possibly illegal”. All we need to do is find one jurisdiction where it is illegal (and for sure this sort of thing should be illegal) and then bring action against Suunto there. Does anyone know which countries might make it illegal to do this? I would gladly contribute to a law suit. I’m sick of hardware manufacturers thinking they can behave like software manufacturers. I spent a lot of money on this watch. Watches are supposed to be inter-generational devices. Things that you hand down to your kids. Clearly no one who bought an Ambit 2 expected it to have such a short life.
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It’s a shambles. So someone in Sunnto decides to abandon support for watches sold recently, and abandon a perfectly good usb upload solution (Movescount) for a mobile app, that doesn’t connect to recently sold products, because these recently sold products don’t support Bluetooth. Madness!
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@Brad_Olwin I disagree with disgarding Ambit 1 or Ambit 2: these watches were built to last.
My dad was an early adopter of the Ambit (1), he still uses it for running, hiking, climbing, cycling today, happily uploading to Movescount.
I bought my Ambit 2 a few years back and it still works like a charm. I’ve taken it to -20°C, -30°C, no issues.
No idea how the touch screen/ bluetooth watches put up with this environment. (Would love to hear reviews)
I really don’t see a point in having fancy displays personally, but maybe I am just old fashioned for a 31 year old.I do strongly agree with your statement to wait and see (even do the black on white statement is a bit frightening to me).
People jumping to conclusions, giving up, going to Garmin…
Come Christmas time 2019, I guess I can make a proper decision, maybe I will be forced to buy a new watch.
If that is the case I will do the same as when I bought the Ambit 2: look at all my options and all manufacturers.
By then both Garmin and hopefully also Suunto will come with new innovations.Let’s sit out the storm, give Suunto our polite feedback and wait and see.
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@Annoyed This is not official communication since I do not have anything else to say that is stated in our web page but I’ve understood it in a way that we have legal obligations to support watches sold from a store for two years or so. I’ve also heard this rumor that we do not know when the last watch is actually sold from a store somewhere in this globe. So That may lead to a conclusion that we may have some time for Movescount to exist in a form or another. Of course there are options like making Movelink2 to connect other platform or Suuntolink to support Ambit/Traverse/etc.
From the Suunto application point of view the new application is not yet good for a real heavy Ambit3 users. It lacks a lot of mandatory features for many of those users. Best way to influence is to add requests and vote for them in this forum. I’m sharing the stats about the the votes (top 10) weekly internally.
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@Jouko-from-Suunto
Thank you for this post! I now have a better feeling about what Suunto is planning and I start to believe that Suunto actually hears their customers.
Nevertheless I think the communication is on the unlucky side at the moment.But I must say that Suunto has done a perfect job with the Ambit family. People that were looking for a simple, reliable watch that delivers important values for various sports, decided for an Ambit. Most Ambit users in my opinion are not the typical customers who would change to a smartwatch as soon as it is released on the market.
The Suunto Spartan was a big step in that direction, also to keep up with Garmin. And with the good battery life of the Suunto 9 plus maybe some more fancy features I think Suunto can catch more customers that need to decide between a Fenix 5 or a S9…
At the moment I think the web service and App are the biggest differences for these watches. And I don’t think that people buy a watch with having a third party web service supplier in mind from start.Let’s wait and see what Suunto offers us in the May News.
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@Jouko-from-Suunto How about the dead-simple stuff, like being able to install/change sport-modes, or a users’ physical and exercise characteristics?
While I get that (maybe) custom-sport-modes could fall off, it seems like being able to change the above is “core functionality”?
It also GREATLY affects the resale, if you can only sell to someone who wants your exact watch configuration (same EXACT athlete characteristics, same EXACT set of sports, etc).The “maybe we’ll sort of address this, sometime before we shut down MC” is a poor message. If I will never be able to adjust anything, ever again on my A3S’s (I have 2, 1 is 2.5YO, 2nd is 1YO), I want to resell them, now, and figure out what I’m moving to (something with a full-web platform, that part is certain, I already hate trying to compare route segments, on my phone, and I have a really high-DPI screen).
By keeping this part “secret”, Suunto is basically forcing customers to play “resale chicken”, with the EOY (app no longer available for mobile), and next summer…I’ve been a steady Suunto customer, since the early 2000’s, with the Vector, but I’m not moving to the SA-app platform, it’s just too hard to compare segments and data per-segment, etc, on a phone (I’ve spent a lot of time hunt-pecking my way around SA, an operation that takes maybe 5-10 seconds, on the MC web presence).
That’s a pretty terrible degradation in the overall customer-experience, IMHO. -
@pgrey The watch settings are also missing for the later patch of devices and I agree we should have them. They are requested a lot also from our internal testers and our choice of implementing something else first has been questioned a lot. My bet is that the business has reasons for their priority decisions, some may be related to a new watch some to other things I do not understand or know either. We have had some bad luck with especially Trainer quality and it has cost us dearly and we are quite tight on the finance, so the mobile teams are really a bit too small for all what we would need to do, so we have tough decisions still to make on the priority order and what comes first etc. I think the world is changing fast on this area and we need to be sharp and do our best to stay in the game. Garmin is the Goliath and we are smaller that the stone thrown at him. To my eye Polar has the exact same issues with their new platform that we did when Spartan came. Let’s see, I hope our customers will help us to do the right choices.
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@Jouko-from-Suunto
This sounds like Suunto has made some wrong decisions in the past.
Without knowing the market in depth I would have guessed that Suunto is one of the biggest players in the segment of GPS multisport watches.
I’m not sure if Suunto can rely on their customers and potential customers charity. For some users a watch is a nice toy, but some are really relying on their watch and need to trust in their equipment and service.Suunto customers do have very good ideas how the App and web service should look like. But what Suunto does in my eyes is: they put up a forum and say: please let us know what you want and need.
What forum users including me frequently do is dumping fragments of ideas, some people do upvote it and Suunto looks into this “letter cemetery” and picks up the few top most voted contributions.
What I personally think would be better is to start a poll on the movescount web page about key functions. Of course there should be an additional box to drop side comments. But for Suunto to analyze what’s needed or not it is much better to have an organized poll with tick boxes and simple questions. -
@TELE-HO about 1,5 week ago a poll popped up, when I logged in to MC. I thought this happened for every MC user, wasn’t it?
Questions were, what I use MC the most, sports,… and place for some free text… -
@radlwadl
when I installed SA for the second time to give it another try after the update I also received a popup on the phone to give feedback… but… giving feedback thru the phone is like looking at your activities on your phone… it’s simply not convenient!
And as far as I remember the popup did not ask for anything specific, just: how do you like it?
There is no simple answer other than: “I don’t like it” … but of course if I don’t like something I want to explain why. Swearing is easy without any constructive criticism or solution suggestions.It’s not the point that I don’t like SA in general. I’m just missing a LOT.
I’m not even against new technologies. Otherwize we would be still riding horses… -
@TELE-HO we were in a short discussion two(?) weeks ago regarding some german speaking 2nd hand market groups on facebook. You might remember.
I guess we share the same opinion.
I just wanted to inform about the poll I was invited to. It wasn’t only a “do you like it? - OK” question.
It was a rather extensive form to check the most important usecases, the preferred interface (web or app). In my eyes it was the poll you asked for this morning. And I wonder that not every MC user was invited to reply to the questions -
@radlwadl
yes I remember that discussion… only 2 days later I saw an Ambit3 Peak Sapphire sold for 72,- CHF (mint condition!)… while the 2nd hand prices last summer were around 250,- CHF… this just as a side comment.no, regrettably I did not receive this poll… maybe they don’t roll it out all at once?
Let’s see. -
@Jouko-from-Suunto said in Ambit2 - spell it out for me...:
@pgrey The watch settings are also missing for the later patch of devices and I agree we should have them. They are requested a lot also from our internal testers and our choice of implementing something else first has been questioned a lot. My bet is that the business has reasons for their priority decisions, some may be related to a new watch some to other things I do not understand or know either. We have had some bad luck with especially Trainer quality and it has cost us dearly and we are quite tight on the finance, so the mobile teams are really a bit too small for all what we would need to do, so we have tough decisions still to make on the priority order and what comes first etc. I think the world is changing fast on this area and we need to be sharp and do our best to stay in the game. Garmin is the Goliath and we are smaller that the stone thrown at him. To my eye Polar has the exact same issues with their new platform that we did when Spartan came. Let’s see, I hope our customers will help us to do the right choices.
Jouko, despite the world is changing fast I think Suunto has it’s own customers who do not care about silly stuff like colour touch screens, watch payments, music player e.t.c. Leave that to Garmin and go back to your roots. Simple, reliable, sturdy watch that one can rely on and you will always and your market share is secured and will be growing - slowly but growing. There are lot’s of trail runners, mountaineers, hikers, paragliders I know that love their Ambit watches. Very few want to upgrade to Spartan e.t.c. If I were you I would keep improving these reliable watches and keep selling them for next decade or so. IMHO Spartan was a very bad step.
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@petmic
I would wish an Ambit4 Peak Sapphire for my next birthday
Totally agree and support your comment!
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We do have a separate insight team having NPS surveys and what not to collect user needs and feedback. This forum is just one source and planned originally to be used for the application beta phase. We decided to not kill this when the closed beta ended and I think this forum is still on it’s way to be nice tool for us and our users.
In my eyes one issue we see here is that we are quite slow on showing any changes that comes from the feedback we get. having the feedback to show in the end product is not as easy as one may think. I come from technical background like coding and Test Automation CI etc and it has been quite big eye opener to work with the marketing and other stakeholders to see how little I understand about those areas and reasoning behind product decisions…
What comes to market shares, my understanding is that Suunto has never been big, even it has been in top3 with Garmin and Polar. Ambit was our hit product and one could say it was first of a kind. I still adore my Ambit3 in races and my runs but S9 has replaced it as daily watch and casual activity tracker. But atm is lacks some Outdoor features I’d like to have in my hikes, mainly POI related stuff. And I come from Finland where the Suunto brand knowledge is the best in the world.
I share the worry about Ambit/Traverse users destiny and can assure they are not forgotten and I am personally fighting to get full support in Suunto app since Movescount is not improved anymore. This is not only because I’ve started my Suunto career with Ambit2 testing about 7 years ago. It’s because I believe it deserves and needs the supports as the devices are still great for years to come,
