I thought a lot about whether to write this or not. I have loved my Race S and it has done a great job 85% of the time. I am noticing little quirks that my COROS either does not have or cannot have due to the Ciimb Guidance.
Since updating to the new software version my H10 HRM has been broken so I have had to use my Garmin HRM Pro +. It has been really bad at keeping connected.
a. if a Garmin watch or my phone are present the HRM will connect and disconnect on runs. This has made Zone Sense intermittent. Yesterday during my 75 min run the the HRM connected and showed connected, but after running for 35 minutes the watch beeped like it just connected. The ZS never showed up after 10 minutes so I thought it was weird, but to make things worse when I downloaded the workout it showed a constant 128 BPM for the first 28 minutes. That is so incorrect. Today I went for a 10 mile hike and put my phone in airplane mode and left the antique fenix at home and ZS worked. (but other things went wrong see below)
I know the HRM is a Garmin product, but it should still work. My watch was beeping every so ofter driving home with the HRM in the backseat. It was connecting every so often for some reason. There was no activity going, but it just does that. It also did that when I had my COROS HRM as an option. I had to disconnect it because it was switching over during runs when I had the COROS HRM on.
b. This set of issues below made me say “What???”
Today I did my hiking route in the Suunto app so I could use turn by turn. It was a peak to peak to peak hike. Here are the weird things that happened in the 4 hours.
the climb guidance would not show were I was in the picture (it shades blue to show progress). The only way it would work is if I scrolled down to the second climb guidance screen and back. This happened over and over. Also it announced the first climb, but it never showed up in the guidance. It was red in the graph, but…
As I approached the second peak I stopped short of the summit of the planned route by about 20-30 feet. There were a ton of people and I did not want to deal with it all so I started to head to the third peak. This cancelled any turn by turn and climb guidance from there on out. It all disappeared. The watch could not accept me staying on route, but not finishing a small portion before turning around.
Because of #2 I was able to stop and luckily I had a bit of cell reception so I redid a route on app and downloaded it to the watch, This made things work better again. Also this time the shading and climb guidance screens worked correctly. That is until something happened and I don’t know what. I was on the map screen for a few minutes and no matter what I did it would not let me go to another screen using the middle button like normal. I did all the things zooms in an outs. hit all the buttons short hits and long hits. The only thing that would happen is if I hit the middle button long enough it would go to the first screen, but all the other screens were not accessible. WTF?? So I reloaded the route in navigation and it worked for the. remaining 2 miles of the hike.
That is a lot of little silly things that should just work. I have been wearing an old Fenix 5 plus or a COROS Pace Pro because of all the issues lately as well as the Race S because I don’t want to lose activities. The COROS worked flawlessly for the hike. Sure it did not have climb guidance, but the turn by turn was on point (and I downloaded the route from Suunto. I did not have to build it in Coros to make it work Total win).
I should mention that sleep tracking isn’t super important to me, but it has become something I judge Suunto on because well it did not work for the first 6 months I had it. Then I figured out if I wore it on my right wrist on the inside it would track fairly flawlessly. (That took a lot of experimenting. way more than I should have had to) but now with all the “Improvements to sleep tracking” it is a useless function. I am a side sleeper and have been my whole life. I thought, hmmm maybe Suunto just is better for back sleepers. I even tried that to no avail. I got a 2 hour nap that night. The only reason I am mildly interested is a. I rarely get an HRV reading and would like that and b. I would like to see if the new recovery metrics are accurate.
Are other people seeing little bugs like these? I defend Suunto on Reddit, DC Rainmaker, the 5k Runner and Facebook, but man on man I do need it to work. Garmin has so much bloatware and is so so expensive, but they do just work usually. I have had a few bugs, but overall they work. I really want my Suunto to just work. Oh and I have tried to work with support… What a disaster.
Thoughts?