How are so many basic features missing? Are these on the roadmap?

[pbanon]

@martintrail I’m the opposite, all of these are features I used on my previous watch and I miss having available.
This is my first AMOLED watch and I’m still missing my MIP display.

[VoiGAS]

@raven as I am a Suunto user and my wife uses Garmin I have a usecase: When we are hiking and go to a hut for a break she uses this feature while I hit Pause. The difference is that she has a normal watch during the break while I have a blinking Pause Screen. Also if I touch the buttons by accident the pause ends.
Not a big deal, but a nice comfort feature

[pbanon]

@aiv4r said:
Technically you are absolutely correct, but I think you take it too seriously not everybody uses a watch as only training tool, some people, hikers for example use it for adventure tracking and etc. So it is nice to have one hike in one “activity” even with stops for lunch dinner and etc. that is why we have pause button.

This is my use case. My primary activities are mountain based and often over multiple days. I like having the full trip in a single activity and especially one continuous GPX track. Also social bike rides as noted by @elbee above. The other nice thing about pause and resume later is GPS gets turned off while the activity is idle in the background, which extends battery life. For multiday trips, this is very nice.

[pbanon]

@VoiGAS said:

@raven as I am a Suunto user and my wife uses Garmin I have a usecase: When we are hiking and go to a hut for a break she uses this feature while I hit Pause. The difference is that she has a normal watch during the break while I have a blinking Pause Screen. Also if I touch the buttons by accident the pause ends.
Not a big deal, but a nice comfort feature

Yup, I started using resume later on my garmin when I kept accidentally restarting the activity.

[pbanon]

@raven said:
Wow, that’s not how I do sessions. If I completely stop and let my HR come to a rest from sitting down, then that clearly means I’ve stopped the activity. Your social bike ride is two sessions in my mind and not a single session.

I think this is the root of the difference for how we approach activities. For me an activity is not based on my HR, I track based on the trip I’m doing. A multiday traverse or overnight backpack is a single activity, a social bike ride with long stop in the middle is one activity, but a hike on two different days as in your example is two separate activities. It’s just a different approach based on what we want to get out of the watch and neither is wrong.

[aiv4r]

@raven i do not think we disagree on the point, we disagree on philosphy of using a sportswatch
But I also think that for example if I would do multi-day activity I would just start a new activity everyday, while if I have a pause for an hour to eat or enjoy the view with a beer/coffee I would leave it on pause.

[raven]

@VoiGAS said:

@raven as I am a Suunto user and my wife uses Garmin I have a usecase: When we are hiking and go to a hut for a break she uses this feature while I hit Pause. The difference is that she has a normal watch during the break while I have a blinking Pause Screen. Also if I touch the buttons by accident the pause ends.
Not a big deal, but a nice comfort feature

Right, but in a world where the proposal I offer, “view as one session,” existed, then you’d simply stop the first session, have the watch as normal, then start a second session. You’d then have the option to view as two sessions or combine to a view that would match what your wife has. Meanwhile, she wouldn’t be able to separate out her paused session if she wanted.

And my proposed feature would be in the Suunto app, so if this happened would benefit all Suunto users regardless of watch model, where a more complex pause/hold feature would require firmware updates for every Suunto model for the feature to exist. Which more likely means “on future watches, not the current ones.”

[raven]

@pbanon said:

@raven said:
Wow, that’s not how I do sessions. If I completely stop and let my HR come to a rest from sitting down, then that clearly means I’ve stopped the activity. Your social bike ride is two sessions in my mind and not a single session.

I think this is the root of the difference for how we approach activities. For me an activity is not based on my HR, I track based on the trip I’m doing. A multiday traverse or overnight backpack is a single activity, a social bike ride with long stop in the middle is one activity, but a hike on two different days as in your example is two separate activities. It’s just a different approach based on what we want to get out of the watch and neither is wrong.

Except that with my proposal, everyone has the option to do things “both ways,” so I can record sessions before and after lunch and see them as either two events or a single event. Your proposal means we only get one event unless there’s a reverse idea from what I propose, to “split” a session into multiple views, which seems more complex. And as I note earlier, I’d be concerned an extended paused event in abeyance would be prone to data loss, especially if doing other things on the watch. Asking for a week long “single event session” to be continually alternating between running then paused seems like asking for trouble.

[raven]

Here’s an example situation I’m curious how others would handle: you’re on a multiple day bike trip, and for the evening at a hotel to sleep. You want to use the pool to do some lap swimming, why not? But you already have the ongoing biking event.

Does the “extended pause/hold” system allow a different session to run in between the pause/hold, so that here you could run a separate swim session?

With my “view two as one” idea, we’d already have ended the day’s bike ride, so simple to start a swim session, then the next day start a new bike ride. Then later in the Suunto app, take both bike days and combine to one view. How would “extended pause/hold” deal with this idea?

[freeheeler]

I think you can all calm down. these ideas have been there for many years and obviously they did not make it to the watch since… chances aren’t zero, but when we observe releases we can imagine that they will not come too soon

[raven]

@freeheeler said:

I think you can all calm down. these ideas have been there for many years and obviously they did not make it to the watch since… chances aren’t zero, but when we observe releases we can imagine that they will not come too soon

It also seems the extended pause does exist on Garmin, so those who find that a mission critical feature can vote with their money. The proposal I offered as an alternative (although both ideas could exist simultaneously, which is why I was curious if my idea would be sufficient for others or if they would demand extended pause anyway, and if so, why) I think would be a novel feature no current sports watch does to the best of my knowledge.

I concur it’s likely neither feature request will happen, at least not any time soon.

[maszop]

@pbanon The previously mentioned option of displaying several activities as a single one in the SuuntoApp would be a much better solution than some dodgy workaround on the watch itself – even more bugs.

I already suggested that solution earlier in similar threads, instead of that idiotic ‘Resume Later’.

[brechtvb]

The best solution for this is for Suunto to start fixing things.

I have suggested this before but we should have an issue tracker for better tracking and denser conversations.

Including a list of sports Bluetooth sensors that work and don’t, it would prevent a lot of surprises.

[pbanon]

@raven said:
Except that with my proposal, everyone has the option to do things “both ways,” so I can record sessions before and after lunch and see them as either two events or a single event. Your proposal means we only get one event unless there’s a reverse idea from what I propose, to “split” a session into multiple views, which seems more complex. And as I note earlier, I’d be concerned an extended paused event in abeyance would be prone to data loss, especially if doing other things on the watch. Asking for a week long “single event session” to be continually alternating between running then paused seems like asking for trouble.

Adding resume later feature also let’s everyone do it both ways. If you don’t want to pause and resume later, then you can choose not to and start a new activity the way you do today.
My activities auto sync to Strava and Strava does not allowing combining activities. It is possible to combine tracks using 3rd party tools but they are tedious and don’t always work. Plus when you upload the combined activity to Strava, most other native watch data is lost.
If pausing an activity works, then it shouldn’t matter how long it’s paused. This has always worked flawlessly on my Garmin.

[Steven Hambleton]

Instead of pausing an activity, allow someone to go to their exercise log, then choose to extend an existing saved session.

Not sure how this would affect stats recording or mapping but it means you can use your watch as a watch and it also means you can choose to start a different sport between sessions.

[raven]

@pbanon said:

@raven said:
Except that with my proposal, everyone has the option to do things “both ways,” so I can record sessions before and after lunch and see them as either two events or a single event. Your proposal means we only get one event unless there’s a reverse idea from what I propose, to “split” a session into multiple views, which seems more complex. And as I note earlier, I’d be concerned an extended paused event in abeyance would be prone to data loss, especially if doing other things on the watch. Asking for a week long “single event session” to be continually alternating between running then paused seems like asking for trouble.

Adding resume later feature also let’s everyone do it both ways. If you don’t want to pause and resume later, then you can choose not to and start a new activity the way you do today.

But I want to see the Trail Running session I did one day and the Hiking session I did on another day both as separate sessions (for individual performance metrics) and as a combined session (to see the overall map of my vacation adventures). Resume later would force me to keep the session in abeyance for an entire day, and would force me to choose one of the two modalities but not the other although would give me the single map.

And again, my proposed “view two as one” idea would be an app update ability that gives the feature to all Suunto users, while changing how recording works on the watch requires a firmware update for each individual watch, and this presumes the feature was within the hardware and OS capabilities of the watch. Otherwise it is only for new watches designed with that feature in mind.

[elbee]

@raven said:

@elbee said:

@raven

Ah. You want to ridicule other people’s opinions ….

No, that was not my intent, and I don’t recall commenting on an “opinion.” I stated how I use devices and what I expect from them.

In the case of someone wanting to have a social ride with a lunch break, what I think would make sense is to record this as two sessions as I would do. However, then in the Sunnto app, have a feature to “view as one session” where one can combine multiple sessions.

People push their activities via suunto to other platforms, like strava, intervals.icu or komoot. Your solution would mean you have to combine multiple legs of 1 activity on several platforms.

But we’re not going to solve this. Everybody (me including) only want the features they have use for. And like I said, pause to resume later isn’t a must have feature. I had it on my previous watch and had use for it, so it’s more a nice to have.

[raven]

@elbee what’s the limit of “extended pause” on Garmin? As I asked earlier, can one do a separate activity “in between” the legs? Is it possible to extend an activity a week, a month, a year?

A problem I have with the proposal is from a testing point of view, what’s the limits it would be tested against? This is partly why I asked how people define a “session”. For me, if I run a 10km on Monday, then another 10km on Tuesday, a third 10km on Wednesday, a fourth 10km on Thursday, then a 5km on Friday, that’s always going to be five sessions. While it’s true that’s a cumulative 45km and one might consider it “equivalent” to a marathon, it’s also true I didn’t run a marathon in this example.

It’s like if someone asked me “how’s the battery life on your Suunto Race S” and I answered “great, I’ve been running it a year now.” Then they’d clarify “wait, no charging for a year?” And I’d go “oh no, I charge it every 4-5 days, but my idea of battery life is how long I can keep it going without it totally running out of power, so plugging it in is fine.” People would find this definition silly, I suspect.

Likewise, the most generous interpretation of “session” I’d consider would be “activity done between sleep events,” with sleeping being the effective “plug in to recharge” for a human. Saying you want a “pause and continue” that can go potentially infinite over hundreds of days and watch charge cycles seems both problematic and ultimately prevarication.

As for “view as one” and other systems, my thought was when in this “view as one session mode” one could simply export the FIT file and it would do it as if it were a single session. Then import that to your other places.

[maszop]

@raven You could also ask: would over six months on the Appalachian Trail count as a single activity? By that logic, yes. But to me, that doesn’t really make sense.

[elbee]

@raven

I described it earlier but happy to be as clear as I can.

On a garmin, you start an activity (by pressing the upper right button and selecting an activity). When you press pause, you get the option, save, continue, delete and resume later.

When you select resume later, the watch returns to normal (not sport) watch mode.

The moment you start an activity again (by pressing the top right button) the you are presented with the paused activity. You can choose continue, or discard the paused. You cannot start an other.

I haven’t tested if I can extend 1 activity for months, why should I? But if you want to do it it’s probably not a problem.

And if you want to brag about running a marathon that you actually run in intervals during several days… that says more about the person that about a watch function that has some good use being misused.

You focus to much what a session is. It’s basically what you think it is and that might be different for other people.

There might be use for your suggested “combine multiple activities to 1” in the app. Like the time I did a long trail run, my watch crashed, but did saved the activity so far. I started a new one and ended up with 2 separate activities on strava. Bit of a bummer.

But for normal things where there is a logical pause (like social rides) you just want the automatic flow, syncing you watch and seconds later it’s on strava. Easy as that, and no fuss with editing and combining 2 things.