Buy suunto 9 or wait

[RiphRaph]

@dennisdemennis How important are regular firmware updates for you, and/or how long do you expect to be using a new watch? AFAIK the Spartan is less than two years older than the S9 and it hasn’t had a firmware update since some time last year (that little bugfix in early January hardly counts). If that’s anything to go by, the S9 too may stop receiving updates a year or so down the line. If this would be an issue for you, you might want to factor it into your decision.

[sartoric]

How important are regular firmware updates for you

The right question should be
“How important is to you to receive new functionalities”

Because, even if there are some minor bugs, Spartan is a good and mature watch too, and ATM it has more stuff then it has at the beginning (those the buyer was looking for when he bought it)

[Saketo Nemo]

Ask yourself if it does everything you ask of a watch. If the answer is yes, buy it and enjoy it, it’s a awesome watch, especially after the latest update.

Looking at how Suunto did for Spartan, it won’t even be the latest update.

When there is an heir to Suunto 9, if he has something that seems necessary to you, you can always sell it.

Or wait for software updates to improve it further as the price drops.

It will be at that point that you will wonder if it will not be worth waiting for the new generation.

And so on…

[Brad_Olwin]

@RiphRaph said in Buy suunto 9 or wait:

AFAIK the Spartan is less than two years older than the S9 and it hasn’t had a firmware update since some time last year (that little bugfix in early January hardly counts).

I have said this before, I bought the Spartan when it was released on 15/07/16, so the watch is four years and yes at least two years older than the S series. However, the S9 development was built around a completely different GPS chip, Suunto was the first to use the Sony chip. Second, the Spartans was far, far less developed than the S series when released! The improvements to the Spartan to get to where it is now changed the entire UI! The S9 has matured with releases and I would argue the Spartan developed with releases.

So to our OP I disagree with you @RiphRaph, Suunto will support their products until the development has reached a point where the hardware will not permit improvements but the watches will function for many, many years. The Ambit is a good example where there remain many users of these excellent devices that still function well (I have one).

[Dimitrios Kanellopoulos]

My first watch was the moto 360 sport. I didn’t expect updates.

My second watch was the polar 400 , i didn’t expect updates.

Somewhere when the Spartans went out people treated watches as computes or something. Probably due to the lack of features.

Now-a-days companies stop providing updates , trying to make more solid first launches. For that see polar. Polar has a lot of models that didn’t get more than 1 update after launch.

Are they bad watches ? By far no …

[Łukasz Szmigiel]

@Dimitrios-Kanellopoulos on the flip side it would be interesting to see a generic watch with “ok” hardware but an open source os like android. I can envision thousands of distros, xda-like web forums with googol of app versions and maybe one or two noteworthy additions.

But hey, watch freezes during races would be legendary.

[Dimitrios Kanellopoulos]

@Łukasz-Szmigiel even for android the complexity has raised so much. See lineage. It takes Soo long to get a stable version out. Unfortunately even on Android there is a lot of “not open” parts. But yeah I’d love that.

Btw did you know that there is an opensource watch out there that does exactly what you say

[Fenr1r]

@Brad_Olwin said in Buy suunto 9 or wait:

Suunto will support their products until the development has reached a point where the hardware will not permit improvements

Interesting: how do you know that the Spartan Ultra hardware will not permit named waypoints and/or bearing navigation? Was there an official statement?

If not, shouldn’t “will support” be “might develop”?

[Łukasz Szmigiel]

@Dimitrios-Kanellopoulos lineage is pretty awesome. I remember it from times when I had owned Nexus 5, it had a different name back then.

Didn’t know about the open source watch though.

[Dimitrios Kanellopoulos]

@Łukasz-Szmigiel there are plenty actually.

I’d go for this one

https://banglejs.com/

[Dimitrios Kanellopoulos]

@Fenr1r the same way iphone 4 don’t support siri and 4s did. More memory.

I was back then able to put siri at my iphone 4. It worked but not that well in terms of performance that the compromise eventually led me to uninstall it.

Sure all can fit everywhere will a LOT of effort.

[Fenr1r]

@Dimitrios-Kanellopoulos Bearing navigation, I’ll buy it as possibly too much. There’s a lot of new stuff going on there.

But waypoint names as equivalent to Siri, really? What is the on-watch limit of those 40-ish different default names* for waypoints that have to be incrementally augmented by adding numbers (e.g., “Building 06”)? Isn’t the storage and differentiation at display level already there?

And as for the work to be done, programming-wise … is waypoint handling & display really so different now on the S9 that its code wouldn’t still slot back into a reopened SU FW with very little more effort?

Other** Spartaneers kept the Suunto faith and endured a LOT of teething problems doing the '16-'18 UI/feature-stabilisation that worked well enough that the initial, common Spartan/S9 FW gave the newer watch a much less rocky start. Call this a gesture of developmental payback.

*And those are slots/words that could be user-optional sacrifices. E.g., create a “Devil’s Pass”, lose “Animal Scrape”. OK - that’s potentially extra work … but customer-friendly and outdoor adventure-y.
**Not me, per se, I’m just trying to slipstream.

[Dimitrios Kanellopoulos]

@Fenr1r no it’s not equivalent. I didn’t mean to compare waypoint names. But in general