Losing faith in Suunto.

Disclaimer - I don't own a Suunto Spartan. I'm just angry for all those people that do. 

What are Suunto playing at?
I really have no idea.

my original ambit

The Spartan series was launched quite a while ago now. Summer 2016. At that time I was pretty impressed. Theoretically they should have been amazing watches. Lets face it. If they can take the Ambit series and improve on them, wow, the next generation of watches should be superb.
Yeah. In theory.

I've watched in dismay at the number of people that have shelled out ridiculous amounts of money for a Spartan to get what is pretty much a semi-functioning watch. We should have figured this was going to happen as it is what happened with the Ambit series, and just seems to be the way Suunto now operates with its GPS watches.
They make the watch and give it fairly rudimentary things, a shoddy operating system and a load of bugs and then just go straight to market with a really snazzy advertising campaign, pushing it with a load of high profile runners.
Lots of people buy the watch for nigh on £500 and then, for the next year or so essentially work as beta-testers for the company getting more and more frustrated by the fact the watch doesn't do what they bought it for.

What a time in the morning to be up... My Ambit Vertical

A friend bought an Ultra last year so that he could use it for the Dragons Back. Used it through the race and then a glitch meant that the entire week of running was lost from the memory. (Ok, so losing data is not a massive thing for some people... he still got to run the race and has the experience, but if I lost that amount of data, I'd be pretty pissed off).
Think about it. Spend that amount of cash on a watch, and you'd expect the thing to work, and work well. You don't expect to be a glorified tester for a company that doesn't seem to care about the details.

When the Ambit came out I was one of those that was less than impressed about the continual issues. When the Spartan came out I figured it would be a long time til the kinks were ironed out. With the latest upgrade as of October 2017 - more than a year after its original release, the Spartan range finally get things which the Ambit range has had for ages. People shouldn't be excited about the fact they *finally* have a countdown on their watch. That's ridiculous. It's barely creditable that Suunto didn't put one there in the first place. For that amount of money glitches should be few and far between, not a regular annoyance. I'm angry even though I never bought one!

My Ambit vertical still works, it's ok. There is currently no need to buy a new watch. However, when it decides to die on me, I suspect that my next watch will not be a Suunto - from the current crop, it would be far more likely to be a Garmin FR935. Hellishly expensive, but a product that works as you expect from the moment you get it out of the box.