Why The New Suunto Spartan Adventure Watch Is Charting the Wrong Path

I really wanted to love the Suunto Spartan Ultra sport watch. For the past several years I have owned its predecessors the Ambit 2 and 3. These are rugged, long-lasting, special purposed GPS “adventure recorders”. The Ambit 3 Peak in particular has been a great companion on trips ranging from local bike rides, runs and hikes to an eight day ski touring adventure across the Alps (the Haute Route), an amazing week of skiing from a boat on the West Coast of Greenland to back-country powder skiing in Hakuba Japan. The list goes on.

Ski touring in Greenland recorded with the Ambit3 Peak

I have become a bit hooked on recording my climbs and descents. Why? Not really sure. I have a log of most (outdoor) exercise I’ve performed for the past four or five years. That’s kind of cool. I also get some happy satisfaction when, like this past Saturday, I have proof on my wrist that I burned more than 3,000 calories on my four and a half hour bike ride. Once I’ve synchronized my iPhone snaps from my trip with the Suunto MovesCount app, I have an official record including lots of data and pictures. I also find it valuable to be able to glance at my log now and again to get a sense of whether I’m getting out there as often as I’d like.

Suunto is a Finnish company that builds specialized products for outdoor adventure geeks like me who want to record his (or her) trails and tracks. The Spartan is the company’s latest premium adventure watch. Familiar form-factor, but new design. Color touch screen as opposed to the high contrast black-n-white screen of the Ambit. Only three big buttons, as opposed to the Ambit’s confusing five. Noticeably lighter than it’s predeessor. The promise of lots of new software functionality too, with frequent upgrades to come. It all sounded great. Regrettably it’s not.

The Suunto Ambit3 Peak (top) and Spartan Ultra (bottom) on my wrist.

I wrote a Medium piece late last year called How do You Beat iPhone?. The punch-line was that it’s possible to enter the smart phone market and ultimately gain market share by first specializing and being a niche player, then expanding. The key is you’ve got to nail and own your vertical niche before you start to branch out. Suunto is a niche player. You chose their product because they know how to build adventure recorders. So when the Spartan Ultra became available I paid a whooping $900 (incl. CA sales tax) for a hot off the press version w/heart rate strap.

The Spartan failed for me for one big reason… it lost track of it’s core mission: to be an adventure recorder above all else.

I’m sending it back. Sticking with my Ambit3. It wasn’t like I hated the Spartan. I just didn’t love it. I especially didn’t love it at $900. The Spartan failed for me for one big reason and because of lots of little stuff. The big reason is that it lost track of it’s core mission: to be an adventure recorder above all else. While the Spartan certainly has some really cool adventure recorder features, it also feels like it’s trying to be an every day smart watch, taking on Apple-like functionality. That’s certainly not why I bought it. When you add to this the many small things that just didn’t quite measure up it caused the sum of the total experience to be a fail. Here are some examples:

• The user interface is inconsistent. Some times you can scroll to the top to see a minimalist fish hook that takes you back to the previous screen. Other times you can only get back by swiping. Some times you actually have to hit the center/select/forward button which enters a value and takes you back. In short, you never quite feel confident what to do. Confusing.
• The touch screen feels “sticky”. Far too often I went to swipe up or down to get to a function and was forced to try two and even three times before the screen appears. Frustrating.
• When the screen gets wet, or if your finger is sweaty, the touch screen stops working alltogether. Suunto points out that the buttons let you perform all the functions of the screen, but now you’ve got to learn and remember both button functions and touch functions raising the usability threshold further. Frustrating.
• The outdoor readability is not good enough. While it’s not terrible, it definitely takes effort to see the screen in many lighting conditions. When wearing sunglasses the screen is practically unreadable. Remember, this is an outdoor sports and adventure watch. And while Suunto claims the Spartan has a good viewing angle, I often found myself having to twist my arm/wrist unaturally to see the screen when outdoors. For an outdoor adventure watch that’s a BIG DING.
• Pairing with the iOS app via bluetooth was spotty at best. The software honestly felt like alpha or early beta quality. (This BTW is also an issue with the Ambit 3.) It’s super frustrating how often sync fails with the iPhone app. Common guys! Annoying.
• Upgrading the on device software to the current released version took several tries. I had to hunt-n-peck with the assist of some Google searches to figure out how to get it to work. And that was after I had installed the Suuntolink desktop app / utility. How Suuntolink related to MoveLink2, the prior utility, was also not at all clear. Frustrating.
• Once the Spartan was connected to my iPhone I began to receive notifications. Cool right? Well, by the time I looked at my watch they were gone. And if I caught the alert the font was so tiny that I needed reading glasses to see what it said. Moreover it took a button tap and a sticky swipe to find an alert after it had gone away. Confusing and annoying.
• Finally, this is an expensive product. So I was glad to see that shipping was free. (UPS in the US.) Less excited when it was the slowest UPS available and it took almost a week to get me the product. Annoying.
• Oh, and just one more thing. The day after I did receive my new Spartan Ultra, registered it with my MovesCount account, downloaded the SuuntoLink sofware and spent a few hours getting the watch set up, I received an email from Suunto. It was telling me that the Sparta Ultra was shipping and I could buy one from Suunto. No thank you email for registering my new device with tutorials or pointers to help. Just a pitch to buy the product I had just bought. Amateur.

Look, none of the items above by themselves are deal killers. I get that email systems aren’t always synchronized. I understand that you have to make product tradeoffs. I certainly get that you need to ship. It is very seldom that a product lives or dies on a single feature so if some things aren’t perfect the first time around, I’ll live with it. Yet a product is an experience and that experience ends up being the sum of its proverbial parts. I really wanted to love my Spartan Ultra, but regrettably I barely liked it. And “like” is not good enough for a product to delight and excite.

Suunto may simply have over reached. Their new flagship product doesn’t feel ready and has lost track of what it is. I suspect a string of rational decisions were made in order to stay “competitive” (e.g. touch and color screen, phone notifications and step counter…) and while making these decisions they lost sight of the core promise that I associate with Suunto — to be your no frills adventure recorder.

Great products don’t succeed because they demonstrate a list of features that match a market leader in a broad horizontal category. Great products succeed because they know the customers they’re targeting, the problem(s) they’re solving and then execute towards their north star with relentless precision and focus. With the Spartan, Suunto has lost track of its north star by trying to be a little bit of Apple Watch, a smithering of Fitbit, oh and yes also be your sports / adventure recorder all in one.

If Suunto sticks to their knitting with focus, focus and focus on their niche they have a shot at differentiating and staying relevant in a category where I suspect you can build a good business. If on the other hand they continue on their current path I worry they’ve chosen a formula that will lead them down a sad and lonely road to oblivion.

I’m returning my Spartan Ultra and going back to the Ambit3 Peak. Oh, and just in case you might be interested they’re selling Ambits at a steep discount right now for $299 while they make room in their inventory for the Spartans.

Just as I was about to hit the “publish” button for this piece Apple announced their new Apple Watch Series 2. It looks like a big improvement over the original. Faster processor, brighter screen and built-in GPS will add versatility and unlock new applications. Moreover their active life emphasis chips away at the reason to own everything from FitBits to Suuntos. That said, the new Apple Watch also drives home the points above. You don’t beat the 800 pound gorilla by attempting to do a partial version of what they’re really good at doing. Instead, you become radically focused on a complementary game. I won’t take an Apple Watch on the Haute Route because it’s not rugged enough, not singular in its focus and only has a day of battery life. Nor will I wear a Suunto Spartan every day around the house and office because it’s too big, bulky and doesn’t give me nearly the control of a real smart watch for how I consume my calls, messages and other notifications. In short: know thy customer. Know thy strengths.