Future of the Spartan Line
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Hi to all Spartans,
I would like to ask about feature of the Suunto spartan line, many of us on the community both watch at the early stage after when ambient series has been discontinued and new spartan appears on the horizon. The watch was no cheep and cost a lot Suunto ensured that the new line will be developed as a replacement for Core/Ambient. Now after 3 years I see that Suunto starts developing X series, but totally forgets about Spartans. Spartans get only some minor fixes, no feature (as he claimed that he will deliver) and no major updates. As I can see X series is developed with SuuntoApp faster than Spartan even been before. @Dimitrios-Kanellopoulos till you are moving to NL and working for Suunto according to your LinkdeIn account and maybe you are able to answer on some questions on the forum. Because I/we can’t get any answer from support neither regarding new features and major updates till sunto promised to deliver updates for spartan every each 3/4 months. Is it a suunto policy killing product during 3 years ?? or what ??
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Despite what Suunto has stated, I think the Spartan line is pretty much dead in terms of meaningful updates from here on out. It was a good watch at a great pricepoint when it dropped, but as I’ve seen, the release cycles of tech demand that new products are pumped out quicker and quicker, leaving legacy devices to languish.
My Spartan is still a good watch but with awful wrist HR and an even worse battery meter. the optical HR could be because of my skin tone or how it hits my wrist or any other number of factors, but it is still pretty bad for anything but 24/7 monitoring. The battery meter issue is simply inexcusable.
Again, it still is a good watch, but I’ll likely be moving on to another brand when this one is cooked. I’ve used garmins, TomToms, Polars; and Suunto is still good; but this watch, while not a lemon, just didn’t cut it overall.
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if there will be an update for Spartan Ultra,
I’d hope for Vo2max
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@Matthew-Curtiss The wrist OHR is highly user dependent and temperature dependent. My S9baro is no better than the WHR Spartans and may even be worse because the watch is heavier. I think Suunto did a very good job developing the Spartans, I bought one when it was released (the Ultra) and the updates compared to where we are now was substantial, much more than what the S series has seen. I think you can put these into perspective, similar issues were raised with Ambit 1 to Ambit 2 and to Ambit 3.
Vector/T6c/Ambit 3 Peak/S5 Copper/S3/S7 Ti/S9 baro Ti/S9P Ti/S9PP Ti/Vertical Ti/Race Ti/RaceS/Ocean/Wing
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@Brad_Olwin said in Future of the Spartan Line:
@Matthew-Curtiss The wrist OHR is highly user dependent and temperature dependent. My S9baro is no better than the WHR Spartans and may even be worse because the watch is heavier. I think Suunto did a very good job developing the Spartans, I bought one when it was released (the Ultra) and the updates compared to where we are now was substantial, much more than what the S series has seen. I think you can put these into perspective, similar issues were raised with Ambit 1 to Ambit 2 and to Ambit 3.
I get the wrist HR issue, and in the future, I certainly won’t buy a product based off that feature alone. I do stand by the battery meter issue and other problems (hardware failures, etc) that at least my model (though not me personally) has faced. Again, I’m not totally slagging the watch as it is good; I’ll even say very good. But some of the issues that have been present since at least the November 2018 update are pretty inexcusable in my book.
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Who said that the Ambit series is discontinued?
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@mraka ambit are not in production now. Finish. What is sell is what are in warehouses.
SR
Site (gr7vel spin): https://youtube.com/channel/UCfHM0mXWS8S61h70Rzj9mfA -
@Brad_Olwin said in Future of the Spartan Line:
@Matthew-Curtiss The wrist OHR is highly user dependent and temperature dependent. My S9baro is no better than the WHR Spartans and may even be worse because the watch is heavier. I think Suunto did a very good job developing the Spartans, I bought one when it was released (the Ultra) and the updates compared to where we are now was substantial, much more than what the S series has seen. I think you can put these into perspective, similar issues were raised with Ambit 1 to Ambit 2 and to Ambit 3.
IMHO the development of the Spartans has been very long and with big steps because the starting point was very low too. I mean, I have a SSU and previously I owned an Ambit3 Vertical and I prefer the SSU,but I have to recognize that the Ambit3 has all that the SSU has and even shows more info. I can remember lots of people complaining that the Spartans had less (some still lack) features than the Ambits.
The S9 started with the base of the Spartan, as an evolution, so as a mature or nearly mature product.
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@Luís-Pinto said in Future of the Spartan Line:
@mraka ambit are not in production now. Finish. What is sell is what are in warehouses.
Are you sure about this? If I’m not mistaken @mraka bought A3P with serial number of this year. You have some info from inside Suunto or you’re just guessing?
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@Luís-Pinto said in Future of the Spartan Line:
@mraka ambit are not in production now. Finish. What is sell is what are in warehouses.
It seems that Sapphire model is out of production: link text
But the Black version is still alive: link text
And as @Prenj said, i did buy a watch with 1935XXXXXX serial.
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I own a Spartan Baro HR. At this point I’m already looking for a new brand. My valoration: Good hardware with very basic firmware (any 100-150€ smartwatch has better soft with more frecuent updates). Suunto is the first brand I bought that has less options today that when it was purchassed in 2017. In that time Suunto was leader on sport watches. Today what I see is a good marketing campaings for very basic products.
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@gerardtp I have the same watch. Well they (Suunto) should come with something on if they want to keep current customers. This watch is only 2 years old and at the time of purchase it was a premium watch. For premium watch you got to have premium support otherwise what is the message which you send to customers?
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@gerardtp I have that watch too and I ditched it 3 weeks ago. Changed brand and now I can finally use structured intervals…
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@gerardtp Sent you a private message with the details.
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I’ll change my spartan soon. I ever thought that i’ll be a suunto user because this brand was so cool. I realy enjoyed movescount !!
I’ve got ambit, ambit 2, ambit 3 peak ans spartan ultra.
I was looking for a 9 baro but… maybe in 12 month it will be not supported and there will be a new suunto 10 or 12 ??? and no update for the 9…
Now i’ll start to interested myself in other brand to choose my new watch, maybe fenix or coros -
@bbx100 said in Future of the Spartan Line:
@gerardtp I have the same watch. Well they (Suunto) should come with something on if they want to keep current customers. This watch is only 2 years old and at the time of purchase it was a premium watch. For premium watch you got to have premium support otherwise what is the message which you send to customers?
My experience is that you do get premium support!
My Spartan Trainer had a battery issue and was repaired and express mailed to Finland and back in almost no time and for free.
Can’t complain at all.
What is your experience with the support? -
@Michał-Rudzki What features are you missing from SSU? I ran for over 17 years without a watch and then I bought SSU in 2016 when it launched. The firmware releases first two years fixed the biggest issues. Personally I understand Suunto can’t support a product forever with new software. It’s like smartphones and laptops - there is a lifecycle. SSU wasn’t cheap when it launched, but I feel I’ve gotten my moneys worth.
Right now with Stryd pod (purchased 2018) I’m improving my running and SSU still displays/collects the data. People seem to complain about missing structured intervals, but personally I have so many other possibilities with SSU and Stryd to improve my running that I don’t need more features. I guess people use these tools in different ways.
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@Hannu-Liljemark said in Future of the Spartan Line:
@Michał-Rudzki What features are you missing from SSU? I ran for over 17 years without a watch and then I bought SSU in 2016 when it launched. The firmware releases first two years fixed the biggest issues. Personally I understand Suunto can’t support a product forever with new software. It’s like smartphones and laptops - there is a lifecycle. SSU wasn’t cheap when it launched, but I feel I’ve gotten my moneys worth.
Right now with Stryd pod (purchased 2018) I’m improving my running and SSU still displays/collects the data. People seem to complain about missing structured intervals, but personally I have so many other possibilities with SSU and Stryd to improve my running that I don’t need more features. I guess people use these tools in different ways.
Certainly different ways … I don’t run for example, but I do use my watch for road cycling, hiking, climbing, skiing and other occasional sports like kayaking, etc.
I am certainly not easy to please when it comes to wearables, but c’mon, they really screwed it up with the Spartan line compared to Ambit when it comes to features. Hardware wise I really like the Spartan line. -
@Hannu-Liljemark just because you don’t use some features it doesn’t mean that others don’t. Compare that watch to previous Ambit/Core line there is a huge difference in favor of Ambit line and another thing is that at that time other competitors already had better functionalities (don’t know why I choose Suunto, worst choice of 2016) Suunto promised a lot but never keep promises. There was an interview witch one guy from Suunto and a lot of things that were maintained are not in the Spartan line. Would you like some examples:
- in the RUN training, you can’t set time of the training to the seconds, there are steps every 5 sec ?!?! (in the watch there are already counters where you can set every second)
- Alarm (I know you don’t need that one… ) but I am using the watch as daily and would like to see the possibility of setting the different alarms for different days of the week or even couple alarms for one day. !!!
- sleeping feature, luck of the phases !?!?!?! (all Chainise watch for 10$ has that feature) and watch for 650 euro !?!?!?!
- it’s not possible to track your progress via APP on android (really) movescount was really great, don’t know why ?!?!?!?!
- create your track via mobile on 6", really !?!?!?!?
- the biggest mistake is putting all that to 3rd party application, you are paying for watch 650 euro + subscription, for example, Strava/Runalyze/TP to get more you have in SuuntoApp you need have a subscription with you need pay 10 euro/month really !!! there is no discount while you are using suuntoApp. So, if you would like to do some analysis of your data you need to pay and pay a lot…
- in the swimming training, you can’t change pool meters, not all pools have 25m ?!?!?!?!
- luck of missing battery indicator of the strap or stryd or other Bluetooth dev. ?!?!?!?!
- notifications on the watch they don’t work as they should, from the beginning there is a bug related to notifications. You can’t clean notifications that already have been read they didn’t disappear in the watch… IMHO person who was involved in implementing that feature should be fired…
- I don’t think if Suunto has Q&A process, there are a lot of issues and errors after releasing a new feature or fixing bugs, I thing people/users are the testers and Suunto should pay us for that testing too or even try to give us more features.
- it’s not possible to change hand for the watch, you can’t rotate watch face
- missing really good web frontend (when I bought they have at least that one…)
- counting steps to km or miles it’s really easy (just set measure your step save that in the watch and count using that variable)
- Why Spartan can’t get VO2 0 I use that a lot ??? (don’t say it licensed, they are international company… so the should have some many for that otherwise they can put some effort and many into Azure ML for that and after 2 years the can implement their own solution instead of paying for license)
The watch has 2 years, I don’t agree with you regarding the life cycle, look on the Garmin/Polar or even to some of Chainise like Xiaomi, Samsung their life cycle is around 5 years and the software is much more reliable then Suunto’s. They should admit the Spartan series was a joke, they learned a lot on that platform nothing more and now they are trying to forget about that and putting much more effort into S series.
I bought the watch for Movescount platform before order I did some research and at that time I agree with the fact it’s totally new platform and logically is a fact if you are designing a new platform you thinking about implementing something new, refreshing old and implement also old features. Besides as suunto would behave honorably, I would buy a new their product instead goes to another competitor (definitely not Suunto)
