Suunto Changes

This week has seen interesting developments at Suunto and now is probably the time to also report on some other changes earlier in the year.

Suunto’s Movesense Sold in Management Buyout

Many of you might not have heard about Movesense. The Movesense pod looks very similar to Suunto’s heart rate pod. The difference is that Movesense is programmable and offers third parties a ready-made sensor platform to capture physiology and movement parameters.

Read More: Further details on Movesense and the companies already using the platform

Initially, the main uses for a programmable sensor platform seemed to be related to sports and fitness however, more recently, further successes look set to come from the Movesense Medical sensor and other medical uses.

Reading between the lines, the new medical opportunity diverts Suunto from its core direction in the Outdoor/Adventure markets and this seemed to have sparked a management buyout (MBO) of the Movesense operation. The MBO is led by Jussi Kaasinen who formerly ran the Sports Tracker platform (Suunto acquired that in 2015).

This truly exciting change opens us new opportunities to operate and expand in the medical space with the Movesense Medical sensor, while at the same time allowing continuing driving the growth with our current and future Movesense sports products. We continue to provide our customers unprecedented Finnish-made cutting edge sensor technology, which enables new use cases varying from measuring physiological signals from individual athletes to team sports and all the way to health metrics and clinical grade ECG monitoring. Jussi Kaasinen.

Selected Movesense Customers

Here are some companies using the Movesense platform

• https://www.morphwear.co – track training load, power, stroke mechanics and more
• http://www.kaunila.fi/eng – dog collar tracker. Also, horses…but probably with a larger strap (or a very small horse)
• https://konectspeed.myshopify.com/ – athlete and team reaction, reaction and agility metrics
• https://www.reima.com/int/reimago – Kids activity app
• http://www.runteq.com/ – Running Kinematics from the people who brought us Zoi.
• https://www.supa.ai/ – Integrate HR, temperature and movement data into (women’s) fitness clothing.
• https://www.w2nd.info/ – Accurate HR, lactate threshold determination and more.

Take Out: If you are an existing Suunto watch owner this is unlikely to affect you at all.

New Suunto 3, 5, 9 and Suunto 9 peak firmware

Some new firmware was sneaked out earlier this week for most of the current Suunto models. It’s not the most massive update in the world but there are some nice goodies here that will please many.

Today, I’ve been using the BURNER app (part of SuuntoPlus) and this adds a new workout screen that shows your current fat/carb consumption rates and %fat burn

The information is great for ensuring that you are achieving your workout goals and can also help you time fuelling more accurately, though it’s important to note that the accuracy will depend on your HR zones and the accuracy of the HR that’s captured by the watch.

Fat and Carb burn is shown in grams/hour and the figure is updated every few seconds, consequently, it can appear to jump about a bit.

Suunto – New European Distribution

Back in the Summer, Suunto hooked up with Tech Data for the European distribution of their products. Tech Data are a large distributor and th benefits to Suunto seem to be to consolidate the levels of service to retailers in the main European markets and to gain easier access to the newer, more rapidly growing ones.

Suunto – 2022 For New Products?

It looks like Suunto are quietening things down for new products in the rest of 2021. Meaning we probably won’t see anything new until either the New Year or Spring launch slots.

From my perspective, this is a little disappointing as I was originally hoping for a revamped Suunto 7 powered by the new Wear OS 3. That’s clearly now unlikely to happen and made more unlikely as Google only seems to be allowing Samsung and themselves (Fitbit) to use Wear OS 3 until mid-2022 much to the chagrin of Fossil and others. Suunto 7 Gen 2…? Septemberish 2022 is my bet 🙁