Latest revision as of 10:00, 28 October 2017

The Suunto Spartan Trainer has a lot to offer, and is a worthy contender for a place on your wrist. It has outstanding GPS Accuracy, as well as great support for the Stryd Footpod. However, it lacks the extensibility of Garmin's Connect IQ. (This review is based on 1.11.56 firmware.)

1 Support This Site

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2 The Big Questions

For a simple evaluation of a GPS watch, I look at how well it can answer some basic questions. There are many things a runner might look for in a running watch, but I feel these four questions are critical.

• How far did I run? This is the most basic question, and the Spartan Trainer has about the best GPS Accuracy of any watch, coming close to the Polar V800. It also has great support for the Stryd footpod. Even with the Spartan Trainer's GPS accuracy, I'd still highly recommend getting a Stryd, which thankfully the Spartan supports great.
• How fast am I running? Knowing how fast you're running can be a nice to know, or it can be vital for your training or race performance. Because of the nature of GPS, watches that rely on GPS signal alone tend to have serious problems with current pace. Currently the Spartan will display your current Pace From A Footpod while getting all other data from GPS, something I find is the best option. When paired a Stryd footpod, the pace data is vastly better than any GPS watch.
• Where am I? The Spartan has a breadcrumbs-display and the ability to download a course outline, but there's no "off course" warnings or directional information. There's also no "back to start" though you could manually add the start as a waypoint. The navigation to waypoints works reasonably well. There's no magnetic compass, though I've rarely found that useful in the real world.
• What's my cadence? Cadence is one of the most critical and often overlooked aspects of running. If you get your Cadence right, many other things naturally fall into place. The Spartan Trainer will get Cadence from a Footpod, and it has an internal accelerometer, though I find that's not as accurate. There are no alerts for Cadence (or any other metric.)

For ultramarathon running the battery life of the Spartan makes it a poor choice unless you Charge On The Run. See Watches for Ultrarunning for more details.

3 Pros and Cons

Like most things in life, the Spartan Trainer has its pros and cons. I find that focusing on the positive and the negative provide greater insight than producing a "user manual" style of review.

• The Spartan Trainer has remarkably good GPS accuracy (see below.) It's one of the best watches that's been released recently.
• The support for Stryd is excellent. You can get the pace and distance information from Stryd, which is far better than even the excellent accuracy of the Spartan Trainers GPS system. This works in outdoor mode, where the Spartan has GPS on for navigation or to record the track for later analysis. In addition, you get to the Stryd power estimate natively, which means you can see things like your power over various time periods (3/10/30 seconds.). You also get power available in the web application and in file exports for analysis in other programs like Golden Cheetah.
• The display is only 218 pixels diameter, but it looks great. Unlike the earlier iterations of running watches with color displays, the colors seem rather more saturated and distinctive.
• Support for Firstbeat's recovery time is a nice addition. While I see its value is a little limited, I suspect many runners could benefit from even this crude advice to prevent Overtraining.
• While the navigation features are not the best available, there still pretty reasonable for a watch at this price point. Even a simple breadcrumb display can be of enormously value if you're a little lost.
• While the battery life is only about 10-11 hours, it is practical to recharge it while running. This means that while it's not a great choice for ultrarunning, it is an option that you could consider.
• The physical design of the Spartan Trainer is small, watch like, and unobtrusive. It's not going to win any awards, and while I don't think anyone's likely to buy it for its looks, I don't think anybody will be put off either. If you're prepared to spend more money, you can get versions made of nicer materials, that are quite attractive.

The Spartan Trainer has a number of shortcomings you should be aware of.

• While the display is sharp looking with nicely saturated colors, the text size in the running display is tiny, with a font that only 3.2mm high, which is about a 9-point font. I find this really hard to read while running, and it's even worse when using the backlight at night. If you have a less than great eyesight, I suspect this is likely to be an issue for you.
• The Optical Heart Rate Monitoring is by far the worst of any watch I've tested. Not just the worst, but vastly worse than any other device. See Optical Heart Rate Monitoring for more details.
• Unlike the Garmin watches with their Connect IQ, there is no extensibility in the Spartan range. However, to really appreciate the Connect IQ range of watch faces and data fields. It's especially useful for support of new devices.
• The Spartan range has improved in many areas since it was first released, but it still feels incomplete. This is not quite such an issue as it is for the rather more expensive Suunto Spartan Ultra, but it's still a concern.
• There is relatively little in the way of display customization, something that's been the norm in sports watches for as long as I can remember. I think Suunto will eventually get this sorted out, but it's been a long time coming.
• There is no support for alerts, such as your Cadence being out of range. I find that's a useful feature on some of the Garmin watches, and something I miss. With native Stryd support, and alert on running power would have been really useful.
• The Spartan Trainer only supports Bluetooth sensors, and only one of each kind at that. While the array of Bluetooth-based sensors is growing, Ant+ is still a better system.

4 Physical Characteristics

The Spartan Trainer is a modest sized watch; it's quite a bit smaller than the likes of the Suunto Spartan Ultra or Garmin Fenix 5X, and way smaller than the older Garmin 920XT type watches that looked like dive computers. On the other hand, it's quite a bit bigger than the svelte Garmin Vivoactive, or the newer Garmin Vivoactive 3 (which is thinner but yet has a larger display.)

5 User Interface

The user interface has 5 buttons, but no touchscreen, and is mostly clean and intuitive. The menu system has a simple up/down/enter approach, with one of the menu options being a return to the previous level. Occasionally, the user interface doesn't stick to the Paradigm, which is a little annoying. In the scale of the infuriating user interfaces that some watches have (I'm looking at you Epson) the Spartan is a delight. The interface is mostly responsive, though occasionally there is a slight lag. The display is much higher resolution than other watches I've tested to date, but this results in some tiny fonts. I estimate that the five-field display has a character height of 3.2 mm, which is tiny.

6 Configuration

Most of the configuration of the Spartan has to be done via their website and then synced to the watch. There is some configuration built-in, but not much. I generally prefer having a website for configuration as it's much easier than trying to do it on the watch, but it does mean you can't change the configuration when you're away from your computer. Most running watches have a few modes to choose from, such as running indoors or running outside, along with other sports such as cycling or swimming. The Spartan has dozens of modes with the idea that the watch would be configured more specifically. There are modes like "interval running", "race running", "track running", etc. This is an interesting approach as it allows the watch to be set up for that specific activity, displaying different information in different situations. You can also configure the sensors that are used and the GPS accuracy/battery life trade-off for each mode. You have limited screen options, even when you create a new custom mode. The mode has exactly 3 screens to configure; a 4-field display, a 5-field display, and a list of recent laps.

7 Navigation

The Spartan will show a breadcrumbs trail of where you've run, which can be useful for backtracking. You can also load a course into the Spartan and follow it on your run. Creating a course on the Moves Count website is fairly straightforward and intuitive, and they include an elevation profile of the route. The Spartan makes good use of color on its map display, making it fairly easy to understand. It won't tell you when you are off course, or how far it is to the end, or anything else you might expect if you've used a Garmin. All you get is the course outline on the display. You can add waypoints and the Spartan will allow you to navigate to them, including a direction arrow and distance to the point. There's no preloaded maps; if you want that, then your best bet is the Garmin Fenix 5X (expensive), or either the Leikr or the Garmin Epix (not well supported by the manufacturer).

8 Sensors

The Spartan works with the various Bluetooth heart rate monitors I tried, including the Polar H7, Wahoo TICKR Run, and Suunto's own heart rate monitor. I found the heart rate monitor that is optionally packaged as with the Spartan worked fine, though I've generally used the Wahoo as I can get the heart rate data on any Ant+ watches I'm also using. The Spartan has an internal accelerometer that will give a reading for Cadence without a Footpod, and I'd say this is broadly adequate but far from perfect. I tested the Spartan with the Polar Stride Sensor and the Adidas footpod and they transmitted pace and cadence information.

8.1 Stryd

The Spartan is unusual in supporting the Stryd footpod natively, a Running Sensor that will transmit "Running Power." It's nice to see these new Running Sensors supported as first-class devices as it provides more insight into the power estimate than from a Garmin watch. The Spartan will display average power for the run, average power for the interval, average power for the lap, maximum power for the lap (great for High Intensity Interval Training), maximum power for the run, average power for 3 seconds, 10 seconds, and 30 seconds.

9 Activity Tracking

Like most modern running watches, the Spartan will act as an activity tracker by counting steps. This seems to be something of an afterthought with the Spartan as the standard display does not show your step of progress unless you press the middle button. The Spartan step counting seems to be reasonably in line with the other devices that I've tested. There's always some variation in the precise account, as different watches will detect or ignore small steps, especially if you doing something like cooking and moving around the kitchen rather than striding down the path on a walk. The target number of steps for the day is set on the Spartan, not the web site, which is a little confusing. The sleep tracking seems worse than Garmin watches, though I don't have a gold standard to compare against to provide an objective evaluation.

10 Recovery

The Spartan will track recovery time based on the Firstbeat algorithms, something I've found of extremely limited value.

11 Syncing The Spartan

You can either sync the Spartan using a USB cable to a computer, or over Bluetooth to the smart phone app. Syncing the Spartan will upload your workouts to their website, download information to speed up satellite lock, and to download any configuration changes you've made on the website.

12 Smartphone App

The Suunto Moves Count smart phone app for the Spartan is rather limited, and like the watch itself feels incomplete. The most obvious functional deficiency is that you can't configure the Spartan from the app; you have to go to the website. When I compare this to the Garmin app, this feels like a prototype. If you have your Spartan connected to your smartphone, you will get notifications for things like incoming texts and anything else that you have a phone notification for. You can disable the notifications while keeping your Spartan and phone linked.

• 

  The initial screen gives some rather underwhelming information. There is the amount of time you've spent in each sport, which if your runner doesn't tell you too much.

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  Scrolling down you see a list of each exercise, showing the time and distance. You'll notice the distance is in kilometers even though I've specified miles as my units.

• 

  If you select a specific workout you'll get a few more details on the first screen. This seems like rather poor use of screen real estate to me.

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  You can view some graphs of your workout, but this is not as sophisticated as the website.

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  One rather cool aspect to the app is the map display that shows where people have run and uploaded their workouts. I suspect this will be a great way of finding places to run in new locations.

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  The app has the ability to create a virtual movie of your run, showing your position as a dot with a trail marking your route, while a virtual camera flies over the terrain. I'm not sure how useful this is, but it's certainly an entertaining novelty.

13 Moves Count Web Site

I know of runners that find the Garman site more intuitive and richer in functionality than the Suunto, but I'm the opposite. I find the Move Account website to be reasonably intuitive and rich in functionality. The Suunto website exposes some interesting information from the Spartan, and provides some good analysis options.

14 Battery Life

Suunto claim 10 hours of battery life, and my tests got 10 hours. That's enough for most runners, but if you're into Ultramarathons, I'd suggest looking elsewhere. The Spartan can extend its battery life by reducing GPS accuracy, up to 30 hours. You can charge the Spartan on the run, and with the clip style connector this works reasonably well. See Charge On The Run for more details.

15 Optical Heart Rate Monitor

I've yet to find an Optical Heart Rate Monitor (OHRM) that's accurate enough for real world use, but I found the Spartan Trainer to be amazingly bad. Even under ideal conditions (warm weather and steady heart rate) the Spartan Trainer was within 25 beats less than half the time! See Optical Heart Rate Monitoring for more details of my testing methodology and results.

16 GPS Accuracy

The Spartan Trainer has some of the best GPS Accuracy of any watch I've tested. My GPS Accuracy page has detailed, objective, statistical analysis of the Spartan and many other watches. I know that many readers prefer something a little less technical, so I've also included some rather more subjective visual representations below. I suspect that the key to the success of the Spartan Trainer is the antenna bump on the bottom of the watch, which will point towards the satellites when you're running. If you look at the tracks below, you can see how good the GPS is on the Spartan Trainer. The blue lap markers reveal that in many ways it has some advantages over even the remarkably accurate V800. (Note that the GPS chip has its own firmware, and I tested 5.7.10-P2.1-SNT.003.)

This diagram has tracks color coded with green indicating good accuracy through to red indicating poor accuracy, and the lap markers as blue dots.

The Polar V800 is one of the most accurate devices I've tested, and you can see that the majority of the tracks are green indicating good accuracy. Notice the problems the V800 is having at the bridge. Rather strangely the lap markers are far more spread out than I would have expected on a device this accurate.

Here's how the Suunto Ambit3's accuracy looks.

17 Comparison Table

I evaluate running watches in three distinct ways. Firstly, you can use a watch on its own, without any kind of Footpod. This is probably the most common way runners use their watch, but you miss out on a lot. The second rating is with a standard Footpod that is available quite cheaply. These Footpod's can be reasonably accurate once the calibrated, but calibration is a little tedious. The final evaluation is with the Stryd Footpod, which is vastly more accurate than any other type of Footpod, or and more accurate than GPS. The table below looks at the score, and the value for money of each watch for each of the three conditions. (I’ve also tested the Apple Watch 3, but I’ve not included it in these tables as it’s not really a running watch.)

The score is the sum of how well each watch can answer the four basic questions (how far, how fast, where are you, what's your cadence), plus some bonus points.

1. The "How far you've run" will be based on GPS only for "without Footpod" and "with Standard Footpod", but based on Stryd if supported in the "with Stryd Footpod" table..
2. How fast you're running assumes you're using a Footpod if it's supported, otherwise the rating is 0-2 based on GPS accuracy.
3. The "Where are you?" is based on various navigation features such as back to start, breadcrumbs, and preloaded maps. For some watches, you have to turn GPS off to get the benefit of Stryd, so those watches have worse "where are you scores" with Stryd than without.
4. The cadence score uses 1 point for an internal cadence sensor, 2 points for footpod support, 1 point for support from chest strap cadence, and 1 point for cadence alerts.
5. I give 1-2 bonus points for application support, 1-2 bonus points for data upload, 1-2 bonus points for Optical Heart Rate Monitoring, and 0-1 bonus points for battery life.
6. Value for money is the score divided by the price (at the time I last updated the table.) Your needs may be different, so you might weight the different aspects of the watches differently, or be basing your decision on different criteria totally. Hopefully this table will give you a good starting point for your decision.

17.1 Score Breakdown without a Footpod

17.2 Score Breakdown with a Standard Footpod

17.3 Score Breakdown with a Stryd Footpod

17.4 Basic Features

18 Navigation Features

For "navigation":

• Color Maps gives you full color maps, rather like a smart phone, with roads and paths marked out.
• Track Outline is a display of where you've run, rather like a breadcrumb trail. If there are maps, the outline is superimposed otherwise this is just the outline on its own without any context.
• Course Outline is an outline of a route that can be downloaded. I've found this useful during ultras or in unfamiliar cities where I've needed to know where to go.
• Back To Start is a simple arrow point to your starting point, so it won't help you backtrack.
• Back To Waypoint returns you to a previously marked location using a simple arrow to point.
• Compass. A magnetic compass can help you orient yourself or the map. Without a magnetic compass you have to be moving for the GPS to give you a sense of direction.

(Older Reviews: Polar RC3 GPS, Soleus 1.0, Motorola Motoactv.)