September is a busy month for many watchmakers, and that includes Suunto. Over the past few days, the company has released some 14 new SuuntoPlus apps. SuuntoPlus apps are essentially really advanced data pages to add to your sport profile (e.g. running, cycling, tennis, etc…). So somewhat like how you might add a page that shows an elevation or heart rate graph, the SuuntoPlus app is another page you can add to that set.
All of these apps are compatible with the Suunto Vertical and Suunto 9 Peak Pro. However, most of the apps are also compatible with the Suunto 9 Peak, Suunto 9 Baro, Suunto 9 Nacho Cheese, Suunto 9, Suunto 5 Peak, and Suunto 3 watches.
The list of new apps is bucketed into three core areas – ‘Physiological Insights’, ‘Racing’, and ‘Sport Specific’ things. You can see longer descriptions of all these apps in the full online catalog, though Suunto has also put together a handy little three-pager, which shows a quick look at the screen from each app, and then a short description, below. These three pages are grouped into the same buckets as noted, except the Gym Timer, which has escaped the group it’s supposed to be on, and is posing on the Physiological Insights page. Once a gym rat, always a gym rat.
First up, that physiological insights set. For example, the Movement app, is primarily designed for indoor sports with acceleration values, but at the same time can be used in other sports to see your peak power/pace values throughout the workout.
Next, the racing set. In the case of both the Race Nutrition as well as Race Companion app, these have settings that can be configured via the Suunto App (as in, the other app – your phone app, not the watch app. So, big app talks to the little app).
And finally, the scoring/sport-specific ones. Suunto notes that these ones are notable in that they’ll even tiebreak in the case of tennis. Thus, this is more than just your average heart rate graph, and now a bit more interactive.
And for fun, since I was on a roll and realized that the PDF I have has a ton of really good info in it that I don’t see elsewhere, here’s a gallery of a ton of details on all these new apps. I love creating galleries. Dig in!
These are cool to see, and in particular, we’re starting to see these apps being more than just core data pages. Meaning, when Suunto came back to apps a year or two ago and started investing in them, one of my criticisms was that most of the apps they’d developed were basically standard issue data pages that other companies already had. But in the case of Suunto, adding these to your sport profiles took up valuable ‘app slots’ (since you’re limited in how many you can have during a workout), and thus left you unable to add the cool ones you really wanted.
While some of that is still true, these newer apps are going beyond some of the standard functions – and in particular, starting to have more data on them to be able to bridge the gap better. Additionally, since their launch way-back-when, Suunto has made it such that apps now remember the last sport app you used in that mode, allow two apps concurrently used in a sport mode, and notably allow up to 100 sport apps loaded onto the watch. I’d still like to see a number of these become stock data pages so they don’t count against the limit (or, just raise the 2-app limit, in the same way Garmin’s Connect IQ limit of two apps on wearables is silly).
Suunto says that going forward, they’re working to automatically add some of these apps to specific sport modes, by default. Meaning that if you add the Tennis sport profile to your watch, it’s might automatically add the Score-Tennis SuuntoPlus app alongside it. You can still remove that if you want, but they figure some of these are pretty natural pairing that someone probably wants. It’s a smart move, and seems to be inline with eventually trying to make these functions truly native to each sport mode. The reason today they’re separate is that it allows them to separate/abstract the development effort away from the watch firmware side, which has a much wider development effort (especially around QA/etc) anytime something is changed at the watch level.
In any case, cool stuff. As always, thanks for reading!
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