After more than two months of using the apple watch everyday, I decided to stop using it during sport. Since my initial review I was using it besides my Suunto Ambit 2S while running and cycling. The only reason was to fill the activity rings, all my sport statistics are done within the system of the suunto.
Apples activity tracking system is not mature enough to rely on the data. I was finding myself running around the appartment and walking up 9 floors, only to fill the green and red ring at the end of the day. This usually happend on days where I was going swimming for 2km without the watch. On the other side I was filling the green (activity) ring by beeing ill in bed or on the couch, just by the elevated heart rate (or some other weird reason).
The advantage of the apple watch (during sports compared to my Suunto) is the integrated heart rate sensor. With the Ambit 2, I’ve got to use a chest strap to monitor the heart rate. But as we have seen this kind of sensor in other dedicated sport watches, I expect it to be integrated in a future version of the Suunto Ambit watch.
With the Version 2 of the watchOS, Apple introduces the capability to fill the rings with the data of other apps. I still wonder why they don’t rely on the data already collected in the Health app. I don’t expect Suunto to create a watch version of their movescount app only to fill the rings, they don’t even bother to integrate health kit (the framework to push data into and pull data out of the Health app). As long as Apple doesn’t integrate health kit into their own activity app and as long as there is no automatic way to push the suunto data to health, I will stop worrying about the rings on the apple watch and limit the used functions to reading iMessages and getting informed about the time.