Step counter on Vertical

[RGomes]

@Bradleyd It was a test I did and I was intrigued by the big discrepancy in the values obtained. Of course I still prefer my Vertical!

[A Former User]

@RGomes if it is lile on old devices you can Check here https://forum.suunto.com/topic/7090/s9p-accelerometer-problems

[TonyG]

@Egika said in Step counter on Vertical:

Who needs to know their foot steps anyway?

I imagine there a millions of people whom getting into fitness use step counting as a platform to start their journey. Their are countless health based websites that reference a 10,000 daily steps goal as a standard some should strive to achieve, e.g.
diabetes websites
WebMd
Government health department websites
etc

its not about Needing to Know, rather its nice to know for millions of folk that their walk today reached a goal, who knows; it may inspire some to hit the trails etc…

[Łukasz Szmigiel]

@TonyG I assume that it’s for motivation and for tracking everyday movement, of which lack of is a problem nowadays. There are people who hit record on every activity (like ordinary walks), and those that don’t. Accurate steps tracking together with HR can be a good estimate of daily activity, which makes sense to track as it doesn’t require any user input at all (just have your watch on).

[Egika]

@TonyG anyway - to get “real” steps counted you need to put a sensor on your foot or leg.
Wrist based guessing of steps depends on some assumptions and will never reflect real steps.

[Egika]

@Bradleyd said in Step counter on Vertical:

For running, whenever I’m doing cadence training or run with a different group, my gait length changes and the step count difference accumulates over longer distances. It’s interesting to note whether I had ten thousand steps in a 10k run or just under nine thousand, a repeatable and comparable step counter can be a noteworthy comparable measure.

Though the ultra athletes on this forum say they don’t use the step counter metric for their training or events, I think there is an important use case for other athletes and this shouldn’t just be dismissed as a ‘basic daily activity indicator’.

For running the steps counted by any watch will be very precise, as arm movement is in sync with leg movement.

[MiniForklift]

@Egika said in Step counter on Vertical:

For running the steps counted by any watch will be very precise, as arm movement is in sync with leg movement.

Unless there’s a lot of uphill where your hands are on your thighs

[dreamer_]

I’m finding this bug in my new Suunto Vertical. The counted steps in the SV are very very high. A lot more than on Garmin, Coros or even Amazfit.

There’s an issue with the algorythm. The software is not as pulished as in other watches.

It is not something critical of course, but if you offer a feature in a premium watch, It should at least work better than the very cheap watches

[lilaceo]

@Egika then I recommend take the his feature out

[Tami999]

@dreamer_ Could You compare normal day SV vs. competition watch? I wonder about difference. I always knew that Suunto watches does too much steps, but i wonder if its 10, 20 or 30%

[A Former User]

@Tami999 I wore a Fenix 7 Pro on my right wrist and a Suunto Vertical Ti on my left wrist for a couple of weeks. In general the Suunto Vertical was about 30% higher in steps than the Garmin. The Garmin could also easily be fooled by certain hand movements, but to a far lesser degree. Waking up in the morning and walking from the bed to the coffee machine and making coffee would often result in 400-500 steps in the Suunto Vertical, while it was maybe around 30-40 steps in the Garmin Fenix 7 Pro (which is pretty accurate I would say based on the distance between my bed and my coffee machine). This huge error was probably due to a lot of hand movements while making coffee, filling water, taking out cups, milk, and all of that stuff, which the Suunto counted as steps and the Garmin was good at not detecting as steps.

It seems like any and all hand movement will fool the Suunto Vertical. Some hand movement can also fool the Garmin, but it is significantly less. The same happens when driving a car or motorcycle, the Suunto counted A LOT more steps than the Garmin during these activities.

I have disabled the steps widget and have removed the “7 day steps” card in the Suunto app as the data is completely inaccurate. It doesn’t feel good to do so on such an expensive watch. And unless this feature (and other features) are fixed in firmware in the next 6 months I’m pretty sure I’ll jump ship back to Garmin once they release the Fenix 8 series, and forget about Suunto, and also get my girlfriend to drop her S9PP and jump over to Garmin as she also complains about inaccurate heart rate sensor and all the inaccuracies of the Suunto watches. She was very partial to Suunto since she is Finnish, but after seeing how bad the data from the Suunto is she also now seems to want a Garmin as her next watch.

[dreamer_]

@neonix @Tami999 this is exactly the issue the watch has. I have been a long time Garmin user and have also used other watches from other brands.

Suunto counts a lot more steps, a lot. A very simple movement of the arm seems to count as an step. Today, after waking Up, I had like 20 steps and I’m getting thousands at the end of the day.
It does not distinguish the kind of movement or how fast is that movement… everything seems an step for the watch.

The algorythm of the accelerometer is not as pulished as in other watches and there are other sensors that could help for not counting so many false steps. Coros works better and even the Amazfit watches are a lot more accurate in this.

For me this issue, the imposibility to pair multiple sensors of the same type, the imposibility to set wake Up alarms for week days and the bad OHR are the bugs and serious issues of this watch.

Everything but the OHR thing can (and should) be fixed. This is an expensive and the best Suunto watch. Those issues shouldn’t be there. We are on 2024, are basic things in other brands and should work as expected.

The OHR seems hardware related. But at least que can use an arm / chest band as a workaround.

I like this watch a lot. It has a lot of potential and with those little software issues fixes, It can be the best watch of the market without any doubt.

[Tami999]

@dreamer_ Yep but question is, technology changes so fast, especially in watches. Before they do something with that, we will have Vertical v2 or something.

[dreamer_]

@Tami999 this watch is very new yet to think in a newer one. Suunto has really done a good job with this watch, investing probably a lot of money. Software things are extremely cheap compared to investing in a new watch and those fixes can increase a lot the value of the new watch if bugs and issues get solved.

At the end, every software fix makes the product increase its value to the user. Happy users also means more sales. In the other hand, noise is not usually any good and nobody wants that in a new product.

[dreamer_]

And the fixes do also mean that you’ll have a better base software, with less issues and bugs for investing in new products. At the end, it’s the moment to solve the issues if you want to do the things right.

[dreamer_]

I have found a very interesting thread here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Suunto/comments/rvjgcn/a_really_expensive_step_counter/

It seems that the step counter of the S3 and S5 is much better than the step counter of the S9P and someone is guessing that the reason can be to save battery.

I think the step counter is only useful when not tracking an activity with GPS enabled so you have an estimated walked distance to add (that can be a lot or something just anecdotal depending of the user or the day you are walking).

Perhaps a good idea is to have the counter disabled while running, and estimate the final steps of the workout with the GPS distance (so we can save battery on workouts) and have it enabled with an accurate tracking (if possible) while not GPS distance is tracked and you don’t care about battery at all.

[pilleus]

@dreamer_

https://forum.suunto.com/post/144035

I compared my Suunto watches and in the linked topic you can see the results.

[dreamer_]

@pilleus very good thread. Thanks a lot for your tests and your feeedback with this. Those numbers are similar at what is said in the thread I was talking about with people speaking about the (S3 and S5) vs S9PP

So Suunto has already developed the code that has the best step counter (or at least something that is pretty interesting), but in cheaper models. It would be very interesting if someone could send that feedback to Suunto, so they can have a look at the code and see what’s happening after the S9P. If there’s something that was already developed and now is missing or why this bug now.

They have already something solid to have a look at for a possible fix for the issue.

My SV counts always more than 10k steps at the end of the day, even if I’m not doing anything special. At least that more than 3 times of what it should be.

[EzioAuditore]

@dreamer_ Not sure how is it connected but I own both the Vertical and the Race. The SV overcounts (bare movements of the hand) and the Race undercounts (but I much prefer this given the fact that moving around your room or just stretching your back is not really ‘moving’)

[dreamer_]

@EzioAuditore Perhaps the Race has the right algorythm? It would be very interesting is someone could check the step count of the Race vs S3/5 or SV/S9PP so we can see where’s the issue.

Just guessing that the SV has the algorythm of the S9PP (which seems very bad) and the Race a similar algorythm as the one of the S3/5.