Suunto Spartan Ultra & Sport- Company Sales Presentation

With the sparse detail initially released about the Suunto Spartan Ultra, it’s great that with the announcement of the SPORT model/variant along comes a LOT more detail.

Let’s have a look.

This is the presentation being used by some of the Suunto sales teams (Source: Officially from Sunnto PR). <Here> it is in its pdf-fullness and HUGE amount of detail. And below are a few pages I’ve put in an image slideshow – they were 10 of the ones that I found personally interesting. The pdf has MANY more slides:

There’s some detail about the battery life mode.

• A worry with the market-leading screen resolution is that it will eat into the battery life. It seems to me that, from the slides, the Ultra model probably just has a bigger physical battery – speculating this could be to make space for the optical HR that will follow later this year.
• Even in maximum accuracy mode a creditable 10 hours of training time is delivered. Up to 40/65 hours (sport/ultra) of battery life can be eeked out of the device if needed for the Ultra sports people.
• This all seems plausibly useful. Let’s wait for the watch itself.

Sports Expertise

• Again, this looks market-leading
• 80 sports, 100 Sports Modes. (That might just about cover it all for me) eg bike race, bike group ride, bike with power, bike without HR. The sport modes LOOK like they will be useful to me.
• *NB* Apps to be compatible later!!!! I was told this was not the case before. Let’s see what pans out. I never looked closely at the Suunto apps previously most of Garmin/Sunnto’s apps never seemed overly useful to me. Just a personal thing.

Movescount has some Peer Group Insights

• Again, this looks market-leading and novel.
• Quickly looking at this you can see what level people in your Age Group have been training at in order to achieve certain race times. That will have some use but other factors will be at play that might make it easier or harder for you to emulate their performances than just the training.
• But there are 20 metrics you can look at here and various combinations of the triathlon sport (eg including trail running)
• Summary: Can’t hurt! Good analysis fodder to while away the evenings.

Heatmap Insights

• Again, this looks market-leading and novel.
• The heatmaps look super cool. But I have a feeling they might be gimmicky.
• Then again I’m a bit boring and tend to do similar routes. If YOU are travelling to a new City or a new forest then being able to create MOVES from heatmaps could be a good way to get to meet fellow athletes or choose safe routes or just simply to chose routes that will actually get you to your destination in unknown and difficult terrain.

Future Plans

• A lot is planned for inclusion in Aug 2016 including cached HR, routes, breadcrumb navigation, cycling and running power, LOTS of screen variants including 7 metrics per screen, footpod support. (There you go Garmin, footpod support right from the start…someone has been listening..ie not one year later like for the 920/Fenix3).
• Then some more stuff for autumn/fall eg activity history and stroke recognition (that should be there earlier though I have to say).
• PB trends
• Massive PR/PB details in Movescount by Age Group
• Tracking Day Types – This looks interesting where the balance of RACE, TRAINING, Active-RECOVERY, REST, etc to look at the holistic balance of your training. I know many of us will have the watch showing 7 days training and 0 days of anything else. Secretly we all know that’s wrong 🙂

PS I think I once got a free heart rate strap from Suunto that I’ve used about 10 times. That’s all. They haven’t bought me off, honest. Either that or I am very, very cheap. You decide 🙂