Review on Suunto Spartan Sport Wrist HR Tracker by Dean Love

I wish I could give this watch 4.5 stars. It is very good. I have had a Garmin Fenix 3 Sapphire for almost 2 years. It was a beautiful watch - strong, stable, durable. But I hated the menu and the slowness. The GPS worked forever and sometimes made me wait up to 5-8 minutes just to connect to a satellite. To its credit, Garmin released updates about every month, although they didn't add any new features that caught my eye. it is a try. I'm glad I did. This watch is significantly lighter than the Fenix. However, I can't say it seems to be as durable as the Fenix. But the Spartan looks good. The GPS function is significantly faster than the Fenix. Normally, Spartan connects to the satellite within 30 seconds. Tracking seems consistent, albeit with a variance from the Fenix. By doing the same test I always do, I know the distance I'm covering in a given section. I know my phoenix said with a big stretch and the spartan has a slight deviation. This isn't anything to alarm me, however. As far as I can tell, the difference is no more than 20 meters. Spartan's menu is no better than Phoenix's. The touchscreen isn't that great. It works, but Suunto clearly hasn't tried to make an actual smartwatch. The software is also a bit slow. It takes too long to update my workouts over the phone. My Fenix updated workouts within a minute of connecting to my phone. With the Spartan iron, that's no problem. They're just clumsy and troublesome operating systems for phones and watches. Suunto needs to speed up this process. Suunto requires you to open a Movescount account. It's basically a website where you can view synced workouts, access the Suunto community, and create and subscribe to training plans. This is a good feature. It's especially fun to pick out someone else's workout plan and see if you can pull it off. Some of them are very difficult while others are suitable for beginners. Looks like they have plans for many supported sports. After signing up for a training plan, you need to sync your watch. The real problem is that you cannot start a scheduled workout from the schedule screen. In fact, following consultation with Suunto, it is not possible to simply start a planned workout. You have to go through the exercise menu, select a workout and then go. For example, if I ran 4 miles in 1 hour today, I see that on my watch. I can even see the training for the next few days. But I can't just hit the start button and start running 4 miles. Instead I have to go to the general exercise menu, scroll through the exercises and select "Run". The clock is NOT tracking me specifically for the scheduled plan. You can still manually set the options before you begin, but these are just extra steps you need to take. To be honest, this is the watch's biggest shortcoming. Again, this is a software issue. Suunto just needs to improve their apps. If they make the job faster and add some new essential features I would give the watch 5 stars. Definitely a worthwhile purchase.