I've been doing a bit of running this year, and on the advice of some trail running friends, I bought a Suunto watch rather than the Garmin equivalents. I have a Suunto Spartan Ultra.
Now, it's lovely hardware, and the software is way more 'slick' than Garmin's.
But...
Here's the thing: Other than the firmware, you really don't need to use any Garmin software.
It presents to the PC as a generic USB Mass Storage device.
You can pull the files off manually, and do what you want.
But the Suunto presents as a USB Serial HID device ( a COM port ), and it talks a proprietary serial protocol.
The *only* way to extract your tracklog is to use Suunto software, either on the PC via USB or on a mobile device via their app and Bluetooth.
The software *only* syncs to their web service.
Their is *no* offline way to get your files.
So it works so long as they decide it works and provide the web service.
If a sync fails ( eg the watch syncs to your phone in an area of patchy data coverage ) then the tracklog can be lost forever, and cannot be recovered.
It's not possible to delete the activity on their site and re-sync it.
It's still on the watch, but marked as already synced.
There's no way to manually grab the file out of the watch.
Now, some people have reverse-engineered the serial protocol of their other watches ( Ambit series ) and there's an OpenAmbit software for Linux that can pull data from these devices. But it has not been extended to other watches which use a similar protocol. I'm kind of feeling a finger pointing towards me here!
So just be aware of this if you are looking at their Shiny.
