Changes

* '''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" or ability to navigate to waypoints. It does have a true 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 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.)

=Will It Be Nice When It's Finished?=

The Spartan has improved in many areas since it was first released, but it still feels incomplete. The first firmware versions I tested seemed like they were barely ready for beta testing, let alone production release. These early versions of the firmware didn't have even the most basic functionality, such as the ability to customize the displays. It seems like Suunto still have quite some distance to go before the firmware is relatively complete, and this poses a significant risk to purchasers. If Suunto were to abandon updates, as happened to the [[Garmin Epix]], you'd be left with a rather inadequate device. So, will the Spartan be a nice watch when they finally finish the updates? Predicting the future is something of a fool's errand, as nicely described in [https://www.amazon.com/dp/0143125087 The Signal and the Noise], but so far there are no indications that the Spartan will have much to justify its price tag. It is an attractive watch, made from lovely materials, and it has the highest resolution display of any watch I've tested. But beyond that these anesthetics, I don't see any functional aspects that make the Spartan a compelling purchase. There are a number of things that I feel are missing on the Spartan.

==SGEE and Accuracy==

There are some suggestions online that syncing the Spartan before you run will improve GPS accuracy. The idea is that the sync will update the cache of satellite information (SGEE), which in turn will improve accuracy. This satellite information is a prediction of the GPS Ephemeris data, which gives information needed to use a satellite's signal for calculating the watch's position. Because it takes about 30 seconds to get a satellite's Ephemeris, having it preloaded reduces the time to get a usable location (Time To First Fix, TTFF.) This predicted Ephemeris data is not typically used to improve accuracy, but [http://www.telit.com/fileadmin/user_upload/Telit_Jupiter_SGEE_InstantFix_5_App_Note_r1.pdf a publication from Telit] suggests otherwise for the chipset used in the Spartan. The document is rather ambiguous, but I interpret it to mean that for the time between the watch getting an initial fix using the SGEE data and getting the true Ephemeris from the satellite the accuracy will be compromised. Given this should only be for a minute or so at the start of a run, this shouldn't have a practical impact. It's possible the situation may reoccur mid-run as satellites drop below the horizon and others rise up, as the watch will use SGEE data until the new satellites Ephemeris has been downloaded. To test how this worked in practice I did a few runs with the SGEE data expired (>7 days since the last sync) and I found that the GPS accuracy was not impaired. If anything, the accuracy might have been better without SGEE data, but I didn't collect enough data for statistical analysis. Of course, it's possible that slightly stale, but usable SGEE data might cause a problem. To test that I'd need to wait for a few days between syncing and gathering data, and repeat that for every run, which would take ages.

=Comparison Table=

{{:Best Running Watch-table}}