I completed the Apple May Activity Challenge yesterday. The goal was to walk or run 349 kilometres within one month. I finished this challenge two days early.
Using the Apple Watch Series 3 and the SUUNTO Spartan Sport Wrist HR BARO I tracked all of my activities. For the first two or three weeks I tracked activities with both devices and then deleted the duplicates on Strava and then I stopped tracking with the Apple Watch as I saw that activity data could be communicated to Apple’s Activity tracking.
Suunto and Wear OS is a cultural shame. I like Suunto because it’s a European company with a European OS developed in Europe. It’s nice to buy their products because they’re reliable and hardly ever let me down. They’re also great because it’s European tech developers working together to create something interesting and reliable.
It’s not that I don’t like Google as a company. I do. I have liked Google since I first learned about them on my website’s visitor log.
After just three climbing activities the Apple watch screen broke, rendering its smart features unusable. Indoor Climbing and the Apple Watch are a bad mix. They are a bad mix because the Apple watch has an unprotected glass screen. The screen is so exposed that last Thursday I shattered the screen without realising until I got home and tried to use it but the capacitive screen did not respond. At first I couldn’t see anything so I tried to feel it with my nail (whatever is left of it after an evening of climbing) and I could hardly feel anything.
Suunto Spartan Wrist HR My latest Suunto device is the Suunto Spartan Wrist Hr. This is a practical device that finally includes two features that I really wanted to see in a suunto device. The first of these is the Wrist heart rate monitor function and the second is a step counter that tracks physical effort on a daily basis and that can be reviewed later. [embed]https://www.instagram.com/p/BbouNhhnbAO/?hl=en&taken-by=richardazia[/embed]
Used for a multitude of sports.
I have logged 799 activities with my Suunto devices. This includes hikes, via ferrata, climbing, swimming and scuba diving. I like Suunto devices because their battery life is good enough to last through entire days of hiking and the battery lasts for weeks between charges when used as a simple watch. I like to track my heart rate but I often feel self conscious about putting the heart rate monitor belt on.
I have been using sports tracker for years. I first used it on the Nokia N95 8GB several years ago. This was an excellent app that allowed you to track your moves using the mobile phone as a GPS. The limitation of such an app was battery life on mobile phones. The battery usually did not last more than an hour at first and eventually progressed to two hours or more.
Today Amer Sports announced that it has bought Sports tracker. Sports Tracker is an application that I have been using since I had the Nokia N95 8GB. I used it on symbian, iOS and Android devices over the years. What I love about this app is the way it displays information about the work out. It gives you several screens while you are exercising with the option to select which information you want to see most.
The Apple Watch rather than fill a niche provides a fifth screen. According to Wikipedia the four first screens are the cinema screen, the television screen and the mobile phone and tablet screen. The fifth screen is the smart watch as designed by Apple, Samsung, Sony and others. Apple and others have designed phones that bring the mobile phone experience to the wrist. Energy efficient Suunto, Garmin, Fitbit and other brands fill the wrist worn niche effectively because they have designed devices with energy efficient displays that provide tracking whilst at the same time giving extended battery life.