Q: S9 and indoor pool swimming distance

[BrunoH]

Hi folks,

I’ve had my S9B for a week now, but because of the COVID restrictions I haven’t been able to try one of my favourite fat burning sports yet: indoor pool swimming. I am a simple man with simple needs; all I want is accurate distance measurement and time. MobVoi TicWatch sucked big time, but Suunto 7 was spot on; didn’t even have to define the pool length!!! S7 recognized all my turns and the measured distance was always reliable. Too bad it had other stability problems.

I still have a couple of weeks to return this S9B if I am not satisfied. Can you nice people confirm if S9 records the indoor swimming distance reliably? I do not aim for speed in my exercise, I usually do breaststrokes as long as I can in order to get into shape and burn fat.

Thanks,
Bruno

[surfboomerang]

I have very good results with indoor swimming distance and my S9B. Almost flawless.
The only time distance can be a bit off is when you are disturbed in your lane and have to change your stroke.

[Lozen]

@BrunoH it is quite good to recognise the swim styles (but you have to do the “correct” movemenst) sometimes you can loose a length but for my point of view it is valid for all the watches. The big disadvantage also compared with AP3 is that you can not manage the drills that means that from a pool swimmming point of view it is almost 50% useless.

[Jamie BG]

@BrunoH
Suunto doesn’t seem to recognize breastroke at the moment so will record as freestyle.

What stability issues did you have with suunto 7, as this doesn’t seem to have been a major issue, and the one major bug that I know of that causes instability will be fixed in the next update, and in the meantime there is an easy and quick work around fix that resolves the issue.

[BrunoH]

@Jamie-BG My Suunto7 crashed a few times in the middle of an exercise. Very frustrating because activity recording is THE point of having a device like this.

Also the route altitude profile was way off, but still the profile appeared ok in Google Fit. One time I had been walking 200 meters below sea level according to Suunto log while the Fit profile was completely believable. How can the same GPS and/or pressure data be interpreted differently? And often my round trip (start and stop in the same location) was recorded as uphill all the way.

The third problem was the touch UI getting less responsive over time; I had to keep booting the watch.

At least the crash problem and the altitude profile seem to be known issues here in the forum. I ended up negotiating my money back and I replaced my S7 with S9B. I wanted less smartwatch stuff and more reliable sports features.

Can you Jamie reveal what has been fixed in the next release?

[Jamie BG]

@BrunoH - they have determined the issue with the activity crashing - due to wear os phone silence option. If you have that switched on it can crash the suunto app.

Elevation one might have been due to where the barometer is suited - not the most practical place in my opinion as it is very easy to cover and therefore get false readings. Would have made more sense to have had on the right side of the watch or top/bottome of the watch than the left hand side at the bottom where it is very easy to cover.

Yours is the first one I have heard of in regards to unresponsive screen over time. Wonder that wasn’t more related to the suunto app crashing.

Pity as when its working it really is a great watch,and the only true smartwatch with a decent fitness app.

[A Former User]

I am using Suunto 9 baro for swimming in pool. My turn are recognize very well. It mean swimming length is correct. I have only problem with any specific training when is not recognize swimming (for example only kicking). For this have Ambit models swimming drill mode. This missing me on S9. My swimming style is with S9 not recognize. Always is logged free style. For this had Ambit teach mode. This I one times used and than was all my style 100% recognized. So my opinion old Ambit models are much better for pool swimming than new top models.

[A Former User]

I swam 1400 m today. Wanna guess the recorded distance?

900 m

I did 3 strokes all > 50 m. Wanna guess the number of strokes detected?

1 stroke

Hope this helps.