I've been wanting to jump ship from Garmin for a while now, but Suunto and other Garmin competitors aren't producing anything that is as good as what Garmin is producing. I read a few reviews on the Spartan and they were mixed. It's strange because Suunto have been making fantastic technical/sports watches for decades now, I have an excellent Suunto dive computer, but their multisports watches aren't particularly great, missing a lot of basic features e.g the capability of changing the number of data fields.

Ditto on the above. Been diving with Suunto stuff for years and think it’s the best for that, but they can’t compete with Garman products IMO

Interesting; I'm in on this thread. I was looking at the Suunto Spartan Sport as a 'reward' in case I hit all my goals and get serious about the sport at the end of the year. Read about the Garmin Fenix 5X last night, though...

I’m a Suunto user and have the Ambit3 Peak. I am very happy with it and would love to get a Spartan. My only complaint with the ambit is executing transitions between S-T1-B-T2-R. You have to hold down the lap button for what seems a really long time. I do mostly Xterra so trying to do this coming out of T1 onto the bike is near impossible, so I am actually always activating the next activity in the run up or while pushing out of transition. I asked a Suunto rep at one of the races this year how this has been changed and the action is simplified (however, forgot what it was...oops).

I was using a suunto spartan trainer after a fenix 3hr. I felt like the UI on the watch was more intuitive, especially using the navigation features. That said, pretty much everything else on the Garmin was a lot better. I was surprised that I missed the garmin connect app a lot. the suunto movescount phone app is not too great, although the website is better. I went back to Garmin recently.

I've got the Fenix 5 and love it. I thought my 910 was pretty average, 920 better, but the F5 ticks most of the boxes, plus it looks like an ordinary watch. The battery life is awesome too. It doesn't have wifi which was a nice feature on the 920, so you have to manually sync it, but apart from that it's great. Note they are bulky watches and the 5X is quite chunky, I have the mid sized one, perhaps try it on first. I found the 5x too big, but then I have slender ladies wrists!

I dumped Garmin a bit more than a year back and have been happy enough with Suunto to upgrade from a Ambit 3 Peak to a Spartan Ultra. The Suunto app is not as good as Garmin, but the website is far better as is the user interface on the watch itself. I have had better luck with the Suunto in the pool and have found that, at least for me, the GPS and elevation accuracy are better than on the couple of Garmin units I've owned. That said, I am primarily a trail runner and your mileage may vary.

I had been using an ambit3 for years for marathon and tri, but had used the forerunners for years prior. It was perfectly serviceable and a good watch and I never had any issues with the watch itself, but their lack of innovation really started to show in compared to Garmin when I started looking at things like integration to other platforms. I just switched to a fenix 5 and got a edge 520 for Christmas for my bike only needs. Honestly I like my new Garmins much more than the ambit3,maybe it's because I upgraded from an older platform to a current gen platform...

I will say, I really like Suunto's approach of setting up screens and data fields on the app or website and pushing to the watch rather than the Garmin approach of doing it by scrolling thru tons of menus on the device itself. That is really the only thing I miss, but I probably only care right now because I am setting up new devices...once they are set the way I like them, I never touch that part ever again.

So what I guess I am saying..if you are looking for a used Ambit3...hit me up...I'll give you an excellent price since it'll just sit in my drawer of gear for the foreseeable future. :)

I trained and raced with an Ambit 1 for years and loved it. It was bulky and lacked the features of some other watches available at the time but I loved how solid, consistent, and reliable the Suunto was. The thing worked day in and day out and it could take a beating.

Eventually I decided it was time to upgrade to a "smart" watch and went with a Fenix3. It had way more features than my old Ambit but I didn't end up using most of them. I also found the GPS to be less consistent (though still reasonably good) and the watch was generally buggier. It was a perfectly good watch but I kind of liked my old "dumb" Ambit better. When the Suunto Spartan Trainer came out I sold the Fenix3 and got the Spartan Trainer. I ended up returning the Spartan Trainer because I've found that I just can't get wrist-based heart rate monitors to work for me; Garmin, Suunto, Apple watch, etc. though the Scosche works on my arm. Instead I got a Spartan Sport for the same price as the Trainer when Suunto was having their black Friday sale.

I absolutely love the Spartan Sport. Great GPS signal that it finds very fast, the layout and options for data fields are much better (and they are customizable) than the Fenix3 or Ambit1, I find the interface more intuitive, I think it's a much better looking watch than the Fenix or Ambit series and the Spartan Sport without optical heart rate has a big face but is not bulky at all. That said, there are some downsides that I don't really care about but others might. In particular, I would not buy the Spartan if you're looking for a lot of the smart watch functionality. Garmin is, in my opinion, way way ahead of Suunto when it comes to smart watch features and functionality. I frankly don't care, my priorities are accurate GPS, good battery life, and reliability. So if I'm buying the watch because I want to train and race with it I'd pick the Suunto, but if I want to use it as a smart watch that I can also train with then a Garmin is probably better.

The only other thing I wish my Spartan Sport had was barometric altimeter. I sometimes wonder if I should've gone with the Spartan Ultra, which has barometric altimeter and a crazy long battery life but is more expensive and bulkier than the Spartan Sport (though thinner than my original Ambit).

Thanks for all of the feedback. I don’t really care for the smart watch functions. It’s nice to be able to see texts and calls but not a big deal.

I’m more into reliability and long battery life.

I've been training with the white Spartan Ultra since September, and have been talking about my experience of it on Reddit if you're interested (I'm SpoonyGreyBeard on there).

In short: awesome for running, especially with Stryd. Cycling: average, no real difference IMHO to my 920XT. Works fine with the Kickr and the DuoTrap sensor on my Speed Concept.

Pool swimming: initially I hated it, but ability to change pool length mid-exercise for sets that split a 50m pool into 25m efforts has been very welcome. It's a very different approach to Garmin. There's no drill timer as yet. Open water I haven't tried yet but will have by 13th January.

Battery life is very impressive indeed. Very. If I were a pure ultra runner I don’t think I’d want anything else other than manybe a previous generation Ambit Peak or 3.

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I have an ambit 2 and a garmin edge 1000. Very different uses. The suunto is very reliable but I was thinking about the spartan but I've heard of lots of bugs and returns (from staff here in Finland) plus I don't think it has ant connectivity which is useful for my power meter

Can anyone tell me how the Suunto Spartan holds up during a triathlon?

Easy to transition?

During training I will be using it mainly for swimming and running. I have a wahoo bolt/kickr that I will be using for my biking.

Started the wearable fun years ago with a Forerunner 305, which was excellent in many regards except of course with water. Its size didn't bother me at the time, as there wasn't anything considerably less bulky available at the time that offered better features.

Got the Ambit 3S as my first 'upgrade', and liked several things about it:

• Size - less bulky
• Strap - Suunto straps to me, are the gold standard. Comfortable, stretchy, don't get overly hot underneath, durable.
• Bluetooth upload to the phone
• Configuration - as noted by others, the ability to push screen config to the watch is really quite nice
• Water! Excellent tracking in both open water and pool swims, and I liked the drill feature - it actually forced me to keep track of my laps for drills.
• Picked up GPS quickly. compared to Garmin

I didn't like that it was BLE-only, as I had a foot pod and a power meter that were Ant+. I also knew I made a mistake with the S model, as it didn't last for an IM distance. I ended up swapping out the 3S for a 2 and solved all my problems. The only thing I missed was the bluetooth upload to the phone, which really wasn't a huge deal - the Movescount app is not my primary tracker, it's just a throughput platform, so syncing daily wasn't\isn't critical for me. However, let's be clear - the Movescount app is a joke. It's more like a crap social networking platform than anything useful for training.

The Ambit 2 is still in rotation for me - I'll echo the gripe about transitioning in multisport use, but if I'm really honest about it, i should only be wearing a watch for the run in a race. I can't look at it during the swim (although it's occasionally useful for analysis later), and I'm already collecting and watching a power display on the bike (I can't read the watch in aero anyway). However....at one point it started to piss me off in training, particularly with OWS training. It started to drop GPS, track horribly, or simply never pick it up during training. My buddies were having zero issues with their Garmins and Apple wearables...so I went for a used 920XT, which solved the last remaining issues. I think it's (920XT) pretty ugly, but it works well as a day to day watch, restores the bluetooth connection, has no OWS issues, good in the pool, no longer had trouble finding GPS...all good. EXCEPT....it died on me at 10 hours in IM. I read afterwards the culprit was GLONASS...but that ticked me off pretty bad - can a guy not get everything he wants?? Garmin knew they had an issue there - as they more than addressed it with the 935XT. The 935 is also not fugly. The 935 compares with the Suunto Ultra Sport...if Suunto had Ant+, had done anything to improve Movescount to be useful in the last 5 years, and could last more than 10 hours. I'd go Suunto on price since it's significantly ($329 v $499) cheaper, but - those things matter to me. I'm not capable of a sub-10 IM, and simply don't see myself ditching all my Ant+ accessories just to please my watch. Once Garmin releases the next gen and the 935 prices fall, that will likely be my huckleberry for a good chunk of years.


Along the way I also briefly had a Garmin Swim, and got sufficiently used to the interface that I don't mind all the 'extra' button pushes it requires ahead of the Suunto, which I prefer in the pool, again for the reason that you can set up your own screen to see everything you want, as opposed to flipping around on the Garmin. Not a good enough reason to go one way or the other in my opinion, though.
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I didn't get the Spartan until a little over a month ago, and the last tri I did was late September so I haven't raced with it yet. Just did a test of the triathlon mode though and to switch between legs you use the top right button. If you just press the top right button it asks if you're done with your activity (you can choose to "resume" or "end") but to switch from swim to T1, for example, you have to hold it down. I timed how long it takes to switch between each leg and using my phone I measured it at roughly 1.6-1.7 seconds. One nice thing is you only have to hold the button down for the ~2 seconds when going from swim-T1 and from bike-T2. When switching from T1-bike and from T2-run all you have to do is a quick press of the same upper right button.

I actually like the screen setup for transitions, which gives you two timers on one screen: one showing how long you've been in transition and the other showing your cumulative race time. But in reality if I'm ever really looking at my watch in transition then I'm doing it wrong.

Regarding battery life, the Suunto Sport is only listed as lasting 10 hours when in "best" GPS mode – BUT – you can select different GPS accuracy for each of the swim, bike, and run. So if you choose "good" GPS mode for the bike, which increases battery life to around 20 hours, and "best" for the run then you should be able to get a lot more than just 10 total hours. Then again, leaving everything at "best" is a good motivator for coming in under 10.

Awesome. Thanks. Right now I am only going as far as the 70.3 distance so battery life shouldnt be an issue.

Had a Suunto X6HR. Had issues with the heart rate functionality within 6 months of purchase, they took care of it. Same thing happened within another 6 months, they refused to take care of it. I told them I'd bad mouth them every chance I got. So here's another chance... I won't ever buy a Suunto product again.

I got a Polar M430 this summer, have been very pleased with it. I haven't raced tri much the last few years so can't comment on how good it would be specifically for that. In terms of run training, cycling, hiking, XC skiing, so far the M430 has exceeded my expectations in all aspects. Only complaint is during hiking (White Mountains mostly) it reads quite short of the actual trail length, as compared to book distances and also as compared to a Garmin eTrex 30. In talking with Polar it seems that it an issue with the steepness of terrain, losing signal getting blocked out by the mountains. Around town and in the woods (less extreme terrain) I haven't had issues with distances being off during running or biking.

Wanted to change from Garmin after I misplaced Vivoactive HR, ended up doing the research and I got the 735XT. At this stage and maybe for the next couple of years, Garmin are the industry leaders. It's a shame because connecting all of my sensors initially was a pain as I kept getting error codes. Once connected though I have had no problems.

Some of the mixed reviews are based on the fact that when Spartan Ultra came out 1.5years ago it was missing lot of key features, which were then came on several software at the initial launch. The reviews have been getting better.

Janne
Ps. I work in suunto

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Just to make sure. You will get the notifications to the spartan watches. Basically these are based on phone notiifcations, so its the calls, text messages, twitter tweets etc.

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The bugs would be something you could refer to the early days. But currently the quality is in the level of ambits. Yes, it doesnt have AnT+ (the only suunto that had ant+ was the ambit2 famiky products)..

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Sorry to hear about your history with Suunto. Wasnt in the company at that time, lot has changed. X6hr was launches more than 10years ago.. very different times than today..

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Suunto need to look at the latest Garmin watches, see what they can do and then produce something that is better not as good as or nearly as good as. I love my Fenix5, but it's missing a few features e.g wifi, mp3 capability, optical HR isn't accurate, issues with instant pace (probably a GPS limitation?), so the door is open for Suunto... make a watch that has more features, better battery life, looks better etc etc

Zedzed,

Thanks for the input. For sure. That driving us. To make the best products...there is so many possibilities that the key challenge is to select the best possible options and avoid the waste..

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