Suunto Vertical: Bug Collection

[jakubdr]

@Frederick-Rochette No soft reset necessary when the Watch doesn’t connect to SA, I found this easier workaround:

• turn on the airplane mode on watch
• turn it off

It then connects to SA right away. A bit annoying bug, but this workaround works for me.

[Frederick Rochette]

@jakubdr thanks I’ll try

[wmichi]

Not sure if this is a bug… When I have the new solar watch face selected, the watch doesn’t turn off the screen while charging. Instead it looks like this:

If I select one of the other (older) watch faces, the display gets completely turned off while charging.

[freeheeler]

@wmichi
it happens also to older watches with different screens. I saw this several times and seems to be a minor bug, nothing to worry about IMO

[wmichi]

@freeheeler Right, it’s minor. I think I never saw this before, because the S9PP charges so fast.

[freeheeler]

@wmichi
I saw it first on S9PP. I think it happens more often than we think, but we don’t watch the watch charging, right?
it was coincidence in my case

[Simon]

The good, the bad and the ugly

The good:

I’ve received my Vertical yesterday, configured it and did my first multisport activity today. First off, the battery life is crazy!!! Started this morning with 96%, did a 1 h 40 min hours activity with performance GPS - which was also perfect - and now, the watch shows 97%. It’s a very sunny day Using the map is quite useful.

The bad (no bugs):

1. With former Suunto watches (e.g. S9P), when leaving the track during navigation, the map would zoom out and show me where the track was. That’s no longer the case. I need to manually zoom out. If the track is further away than 500 m, I need to move the map around and search for the track, because there is no indication where the nearest direction is back on track. Not a bug, but not so nice.

2. When panning the map, it snaps back to the current location quite fast. And just after each panning, the map shifts around a little bit. Both makes planning an off-track route a bit difficult. In an emergency situation (blizzard, cold, etc), this could be quite bad.

3. The onboard HR and particularly the spO2 sensors are still just toys. A waste of space, weight and battery. The acquired data is sometimes quite good, in the case of HR even accurate, but they are just as often absolutely incorrect. Hence, unreliable toys. Yeah, many people want to have that still. I don’t :'-D

The ugly (bugs):

1. Using the display “Intensity zones”, one can configure 2 fields. Only 1 is actually shown on S9P/P and on the Vertical. To my knowledge, the second field is only used on S9. Okay, so I filled the field marked as #1 and set the second field to “Empty”. This didn’t work. During the activity, the display did show the current heart rate, but all other data was garbled up. Now I set both fields to the same value and it seems to work now.

2. When I wanted to start the second activity via the multisport option (long press upper button during activity), there there were no names given for the options to choose from - only blank fields. My configuration: I deleted all default sport modes and created 4 custom sport modes. I can select each of them to start an activity, but their names didn’t appear as multisport choices. A rather ugly bug!

I noticed a lot of other minor bugs, which are not critical. I’m a software engineer myself and - oh boy - I wouldn’t dare to publish a software that has so many issues. IMHO, Suunto did a quite sloppy job here. But okay, lots of different users with lots of different configurations … and everything should be there and working from the first day on. It’s a tough task. On the other hand, e.g. the above mentioned “Intensity zones” display issue with 2 fields when only 1 is available on the watch, has been known for years. That’s embarrassing

Not sure if I keep the watch. It seems to be very unreliable all in all.

[A Former User]

@Simon I was also impressed about the battery, but don’t forget to calibrate the battery (discharge from 100% to 0%) I went out with 30% battery remaining on my first charge and boom the watch discharged in 30 minutes… Just a FYI to avoid unpleasant surprises

[Simon]

@tomasbartko Oh wow, that’s kind of nasty!

[Tieutieu]

@tomasbartko said in Suunto Vertical: Bug Collection:

@Simon I was also impressed about the battery, but don’t forget to calibrate the battery (discharge from 100% to 0%) I went out with 30% battery remaining on my first charge and boom the watch discharged in 30 minutes… Just a FYI to avoid unpleasant surprises

Did you had the backlight on ? That is THE major bug that over-consume the battery

[A Former User]

@Tieutieu no, not really. I however had 2 Suunto apps on. I guess this combination with no calibration was the issue.

[A Former User]

@tomasbartko

S+ apps eat through your battery faster than it takes a Golden Retriever to finish a bowl of spaghetti.

[mikekoski490]

Finally got hit by the reset bug - 60k gravel ride, at about the 30k mark just turned off and restarted. It was going into activity pause mode as I was taking a photo. Profile was just basic. 2 apps running - big numbers and CO2e. Not a big deal but would be nice to stitch the 2 workouts together in SA. Just missed a section of HR, which is seperate from 15 minutes earlier when a fairly large black bear ran across the logging road about 100 meters infront of me - that shows an HR spike lol.

[runomatic]

After all that negative feedback, i’ve got a positive one: Went out for a 25k run with just 7% battery left. Coming home with 4% after 2:40h. Call me Mr. Brave!

[freeheeler]

@runomatic
going out on 7% is living on the edge

[seanvk]

@Simon On the subject of the widgets. One item I would add to your mentioning of HR and spO2 is that I think they should entirely avoid putting the widgets in a pipeline so to speak. Not just because of the lag, but there is no quick way to get to the one you want. Instead, they should have the following flow:

middle button or side swipe -> list of widgets with some partial information.
top or bottom buttons, scroll up or down
middle button select for more detail

I just really dislike the side scroll for the widgets and coupled with the lag, it’s not a very good experience just to get to one widget you wanted to look at in more detail

[A Former User]

@seanvk Like Garmin you mean? Would make more sense imho.

[BrunoH]

@seanvk my solution was first to hide the ones I never use. Then I arranged the remaining ones so that the most used widgets are next to the watchface, left and right.

I don’t think Suunto will abandon their chosen UX and replace it with something copied from the rivals.

Having said that, I’d really like to see Suunto solve the lag…

[A Former User]

Btw. that 9pm thing about the Week Report was true. lol

[Frederick Rochette]

@runomatic On Saturday, I also had 7% left and after going out for a 2-hour run, I also had 4% left.
After completely discharging the watch on Saturday, I recharged it to 100% at around 11.30pm. When I woke up at around 8am on Sunday morning, the watch was at 98%. I went out for a 2-hour run and only 92% remained (6% for 2 hours…).
So battery consumption seems to be random… because one 2-hour run = 3% and another 2 hours = 6%.