Suunto Spartan Ultra 

The Suunto Spartan Ultra All Black Titanium watch that I’ve been testing for the last few months is basically the same size and weight as the Garmin Fenix3 (which we previously reviewed) but 16 grams lighter than the Ambit3, and a few mm thinner. The Spartan Ultra’s battery life (in training mode) is comparable to that of the Fenix3 and Ambit 3 at 16hrs. However, in standard time mode it will only last 15 days, whereas the Fenis3 will hold its charge for up to 6 weeks.

One of many watch faces to choose from on the Spartan Ultra, complete with secondary information such as the date and elevation.

The user interface of the Spartan is super simple to use as it’s been streamlined down to only three buttons instead of the previous 5 on the Ambit3. (Less is more after all.) If you prefer, you can also navigate by interacting with the built-in touch screen display. While I found the touch screen worked well most of the time, it did occasionally have a slight lag from when you touch it, to when the actions on screen take place. If this proves bothersome then at least you have a choice between screen and button navigation for most features. The colour display is also one of the cool new features on the Spartan, however it’s not used excessively at this point. Hopefully this will change as apps are developed and released down the road.

A few of my other favourite features of the new Spartan Ultra are: The step tracking feature; which accurately tracks your steps and spits out totals and other metrics. This was a key feature that was missing from previous Ambit watches and has only been available on the Suunto Traverse, which is still one of my favourite watches (read that review here). Similarly, “recovery time” was also available on the Traverse watch and is also now included on the Suunto Spartan Ultra. The other feature I am happy to see integrated into the Spartan watches is vibration alerts. This feature is super handy when you don’t want your wrist pinging ever 5 seconds for social media alerts. A subtle vibration lets you know to look down at your watch without disrupting your friends and colleagues.

Suunto has been very busy behind the scenes revamping the movescount.com website, now featuring a simpler user interface as well as heat maps which allow you to sort data points by sports in major cities. Movescount has been around for several years now without any major upgrades. Its time has come, and this is a welcome upgrade. Movescount is where you store all the data collected with the Spartan Ultra, you can then share it with the adventure community at large. With 100 million activities already on the site, it’s a great community resource and place for sharing. The mobile app however has not been upgraded and remains unchanged to date. Suunto has also created new software to download your data to Movescount; it’s now called “Suunto Links” and you’ll need to download that before you can sync your data to Movescount.

• Touch Screen
• Colour Display
• Display resolution - 320 x 300
• Titanium 5 / steel bezel, sapphire glass
• Barometer
• Altimeter
• Temperature
• Vibration alerts
• Multiple watch faces
• Digital compass
• Connectivity - Bluetooth
• Smartphone compatibility
• Activity monitoring
• Optional heart rate belt
• Chrono
• Alarm
• Stop watch
• Rest and recover data
• Downloadable routes
• 100m 300ft water resistance (according to ISO 6425)
• GPS/GLONASS route navigation
• Sport expertise and support for over 80 sports 
• Battery - rechargeable lithium-ion. Battery life up to 26h in training mode and 15 days in time mode
• Training insights and community powered tools in Suunto Movescount

One of the main menus if you scroll up, this one shows the battery life.

The compass is buried under sub menus now which is an odd location for such an important feature.

While tracking a route this is the view you will see, to date it is not customizable.

You can pause tracking of a route, but the Spartan will not display the time until the route is ended.

You can provide feedback as to how you felt after the training or route is complete.

The log book stores all of the route's data, you can save it on the Spartan and also on Movescount.com

The Suunto Spartan Ultra is a beautiful watch and on looks alone it rivals any other GPS watch on the market today. There are many features that make this a great GPS watch such as the three-button navigation which is minimalist in nature and easy to use. The colour touch screen also adds to its ease of use and provides a little ‘wow factor’. However, while the hardware delivers, the software is still lacking features that are already available on competing brand’s watches. Since receiving the Spartan Ultra in late September, there have been two software upgrades which added much needed functionality, some of it rather basic such as a stopwatch. The software versions installed were 1.1.30 with the following hardware and software specs to give you a baseline for this review: hardware 1740G1, GPS 5.7.9-P1_5.7.9, Touch 2.0.27, and Bluetooth 2.3.17. On October 14th, the software was updated to version 1.2.4 with a major upgrade scheduled for early November that I am eagerly anticipating. So, as you can see Suunto is working very hard to get the software up to speed, but here are some of the features which are not yet available, to give you an idea as to where things stand in the current version: 

• No alarm
• Cannot delete activities in log
• No GPS acquiring or tracking feedback
• No ability to customize sport screens for activities
• No apps
• No ability to delete activities from the log book (have to do this on movescount.com) Can’t scroll text messages and social media alerts
• Bread crumbs view of route does not zoom and unable to navigate theview
• No auto gps time reset
• No elevation graph
• No Temperature
• No storm warning
• No ability to invert the display colour
• No GPS way points 
• No sunrise sun set times

This is just a partial list of what the Suunto Spartan Ultra is currently missing, and as you can see there are some important features in there. In true Suunto fashion, however, I’m sure once the major software upgrades are complete the functionality will rival and exceed that of its competitors. Rumours also have it that future hardware upgrades will include an optical heart rate sensor built into the watch itself. Nice!

Overall I am happy with the way the Spartan Ultra currently operates. The touch screen is pretty cool, and the larger colour screen is a huge bonus. I am still missing the crucial features that I would have expected to be standard on the Sparta Ultra at release time. The potential is huge for the Spatan Ultra, and when the software is complete this watch will easily rival the Garmin Fenix3. Until then, Suunto has a lot of ground to catch up on. 

If you’re a total tech geek and just need the latest and greatest gadget and don’t mind being an early adopter, then I’d recommend the Spartan Ultra. If you already have a GPS watch such as the Ambit3 and can hold out a little longer then I would recommend doing so, as $1k+ is a lot of dinero to pay for a product that’s yet to reach its full potential. Suunto never disappoints, and the Spartan line of watches will be no different, we just have to be patient.