This is Sparta! Suunto battles the multisport watch category with new Spartan Ultra

New Spartan Ultra multisport watch

Suunto has unveiled Spartan Ultra, which is billed as a premium multisport GPS watch for athletes and adventurers. At the same time, Suunto is renewing its online sports service, Movescount, with a range of new features and improvements.

“People have been asking about what’s next after Ambit3 for quite some time now,” said Sami Arhomaa, Performance Business Unit Director at Suunto. “So it’s a great pleasure to announce our next generation Suunto Spartan solution for athletic and adventure multisport.”

The latest offering from the company comprises the Suunto Spartan Ultra watches, a renewed Suunto Movescount service and mobile applications for both iPhone and Android.

“In a fast-paced world with an overwhelming flood of information, athletes need better tools to determine how to efficiently achieve their goals,” continued Arhomaa. “People who are driven by the passion to progress want to know if they are doing things right. More and more people are reaching out to communities of like-minded people for guidance and inspiration.

“With the Spartan solution, we are building on the insights we’ve gained through our constant dialogue with athletes and coaches around the world. The new Suunto Spartan multisport solution will offer customers new community powered tools to progress. We are convinced these tools will help them progress beyond their expectations.”

 

 

‘Adventure proof’
Suunto Spartan Ultra watches are hand-made in Finland and ‘built to last in any conditions’. Water resistant to 100m, the watches sport a durable colour touch screen with a wide viewing angle and visibility in bright sunlight. The watch is built with a glass fibre reinforced polyamide casing, sapphire crystal glass and a grade5 titanium or stainless steel bezel.

For multisport adventures, Suunto Spartan Ultra offers guided route navigation, barometric altitude with FusedAlti, a digital compass, as well as a ‘competitive battery life’.

‘True multisport watch’
The Suunto Spartan Ultra is billed as a true multisport watch. With GPS, FusedSpeed, heart rate measurement and in-built accelerometer, it tracks training and provides insights on progress for a multitude of sports.

The watch offers dozens of pre-set sport modes, e.g. for triathlon, swimming, cycling, running, adventure racing, and snow sports – including modes for specific types of training, racing and activities.

For example, runners can choose a basic running mode that offers the essential information for running, or an interval running mode, a trail running mode, and more. The Suunto Spartan Ultra also provides visual overviews on training load, rest & recovery status and progress to help athletes plan their training. The company adds, ‘With the watch you can also track your feeling after each workout.’

Suunto Spartan Ultra monitors overall activity 24/7, with daily and weekly steps taken, calories and active time. Athletes can pair the watch with the Suunto Movescount App to get smart mobile notifications. The watch will also keep the user up to date on personal bests by sport.

The Suunto Spartan Ultra collection includes four models: Suunto Spartan Ultra All Black Titanium, Suunto Spartan Ultra Stealth Titanium, Suunto Spartan Ultra White and Suunto Spartan Ultra Black—each available with or without the Suunto Smart Sensor for heart rate monitoring.

The RRP price of the Suunto Spartan Ultra Titanium will be US$799 and Suunto Spartan Ultra US$699. (Prices with a HR sensor are US$50 higher.)

Further details of the product will be released in July 2016. The watches become available in August, and Suunto adds that ‘the solution will continue to grow in functionality via SW, service and application updates during the remaining year’.

‘Community-powered progress’ in Movescount.com renewal
Suunto has in tandem with the new Spartan watch launch unveiled a major renewal of its online sports service, Suunto Movescount.com. The key benefit brought in the first phase of the upgrade is sports-specific heatmaps based on millions of user-generated activities (‘Moves’), ‘allowing anyone to benefit from the power of the Suunto community to find the best places to train and new areas to explore.’

“Suunto Movescount is an essential piece of the Suunto offering,” said Janne Kallio, Performance Business Digital Lead at Suunto. “The service has today over 100 million Moves and counting. We want to give back to the community by introducing new community powered tools. In addition to the heatmaps launched today, we’ll bring further improvements and other tools during this year.

”We have worked quite intensively together with our customers on this project, and we would like to thank everyone who participated. Their knowledge and feedback have helped us to create what’s going live today.”

Discovering new routes with Heatmaps
Suunto adds… ‘If you train for a specific goal, you want to find the best places and routes for your workouts to optimize your training – whether you want to find the most popular places or avoid the crowds. You also want to keep up with your training during holidays and business travel. When you are training in an unfamiliar location, it helps to know where the locals go. The new sport-specific heatmaps in Suunto Movescount show you great routes to use.’

Heatmaps are available for anyone, without even signing in to Movescount.com. Athletes can choose a preferred area on the map, select a sport and zoom in to the most popular tracks for trail running, cycling, open-water swimming, skiing and more.

Suunto adds that the variety of heatmaps for different sports will keep growing. Based on the heatmaps, users can plan their own routes in Movescount.com and transfer them to their Suunto GPS watch to get navigation guidance.

Heatmaps will also become available in the Suunto Movescount App (iPhone and Android) later in June 2016.

Simplified user experience and training insights
The service renewal has also introduced a ‘new simplified, yet enriched user interface’ with a responsive design optimized for mobile, allowing full use of the Suunto Movescount.com platform with any iPhone or Android mobile device.

Users can enjoy clear infographics, prominent visuals and their own activity feed to collect content in one place. The activity colours have been refined based on customer feedback, making it easier to separate your various workouts from each other.

Additionally, Suunto has introduced a new way to look at Moves through Training Insights. The company continues… ‘Use these rich and informative visualizations of, for example, your training load and your feeling trend to see if you are recovering adequately. The new insights help ensure you’ve got the right steps in place to progress toward your goals. Additional Training Insights will be added later this year.’

Suunto was born in 1936 when Finnish orienteer and engineer Tuomas Vohlonen invented the mass production method for the liquid-filled compass. Since then, Suunto has been at the forefront of design and innovation for sports watches, dive computers and sports instruments used by adventurers all over the globe.

Suunto’s headquarters and manufacturing plant is in Vantaa, Finland. Employing more than 400 people worldwide, Suunto products are sold in over 100 countries. The company is a subsidiary of Amer Sports Corporation along with its sister brands Salomon, Arc’teryx, Atomic, Wilson, Precor and Mavic.

www.suunto.com/spartan
www.movescount.com