Suunto vs Garmin vs Suunto // Flashlight Fight!

0:00All right, so welcome back to the FitVal podcast. And we have yet another spicy episode. And I don't know, like if stuff like this happens, we gotta talk about it. We do, and this one we've been probably mean to talk about for a while, but the spice level has increased in the last little while. I heard to make this worthwhile and most interesting to talk about. Up until now it's been like, eh, kind of just a warm smoke in the distance, but now it's fun. So last year, Strava sued Garmin over some things, and then I think right around the same time, Suntu actually sued Garmin. And we had intended to actually talk about that at some point, but I don't know, it's probably good that we waited because now Garmin has actually come back. And kind of basically said, oh, you did not do that. Yeah, basically. And the thing here is that in the whole entire like, Strava-soothing Garmin thing, Suntu had dibs. Suntu had first dibs before Strava even had a dibs on Garmin. So that happened like about a week before. So everyone kind of assumed that, oh, Strava sued Garmin

1:02and then Suntu came back inside the suit and, but no, no, no, no, Suntu had first comment, right? Like on YouTube, first. Yeah. But like you said, things got fun here at the end of December and then since then the core, the ball from going back and forth across the core, that's getting pretty interesting. Well, I think one of the most interesting parts about this counter suit is that it involves flashlights on watches as well as some throwback cartoons to the 80s too, which is I think that's particularly interesting. We got cartoons. I went down so many rabbit holes on this thing from cartoons, to movies, to you name it. And all of it, it's actually really, really important when it comes to patent battles, as we'll get into a little later on. So as much fun as this to joke about its spectrogaget and his niece, at the end of the day, those are very real when it comes to how patents are decided. Yep. So with that, how do we want to jump into it? How do we talk about Sundos initial volley first and then we'll kind of go from there, kind of like chronologically? Well, first, I want to remind the audience

2:03where to listen and where to listen and watch the Fitball podcast. So anyways, we publish this podcast on Spotify, YouTube music as well as Apple podcasts and then on YouTube side of things, you can actually switch back and forth between the video or audio version. And you know, these episodes, we're gonna try to keep these a little bit shorter and more frequent this year. But still, these are great episodes to just put on them in the background, like if you're on your indoor bike ride or your treadmill run, right now it's winter for all of us in the northern hemisphere. So yeah, I mean, you know, just great to have in the background on any of your activities. And for this episode, we'll take there. We've got some interesting stuff that we'll show on the screen. So if you're of the legal type, we will show a bunch of the actual snippets from the lawsuits so you can pause it and just geek out of that kind of stuff. Likewise, obviously, when we talk about important things like intended design, we're gonna throw some of that out there and of course, Inspector Gadget. So that's all important here. Yep, for sure. So we should definitely start to talk about

3:04the timing of these lawsuits first. And I think we should probably go ahead and start last year. So soon till fall their lawsuit back in September of last year and then Garmin basically came back with kind of like a late Christmas present, like December 29th with their counter suit. So we should probably talk about the soon to lawsuit first, which basically was around five different patents. So the first one was a golf tracking patent using the accelerometer to detect when the club was hitting the ball. And then the second one was around the respiration rate, via an optical heart rate sensor and then the three other patents were around intended design. Correct, yep. So kind of very random assortment of things, right? If you think about how different they are, they're very, very different. And it'll be interesting as to why they chose these patents. And I think that's probably a good thing to mention at this point in time, is that in Garmin, I like this really clear as part of the response. But when it comes to this lawsuit,

4:06you have to keep in mind that, you know, soon to in Garmin have actually worked together for like literally decades. And so while they are competitors, soon to for the longest time, a license from first beat, which Garmin eventually acquired. And I think that 2019, 2020 timeframe. But prior to that, the two companies, you were closely on AMP Plus initiatives. So if you remember, way back machine, soon to used both AMP Plus as well as on a private version of AMP, before going full on Bluetooth, which of course, AMP being owned by Garmin, the two companies have a long history of working together. And one of the things we'll also kind of talk about later on is sort of the whole mutually assured destruction concept where basically lots of companies in this space have patents that may or may not infringe on other companies. And these are two of those companies that have plenty of patents going way back, in fact, too. So soon to actually has a great page that outlines every single patent they have. It's pretty interesting. So in terms of like when the cooperation ended, so for those of you who don't necessarily know,

5:07so soon to it was actually required by Chinese entity, they were required by them a little while back. And I guess that's possibly like when the actual cooperation started to deteriorate a little bit. Yeah, exactly. So we're just going to call them a deal in the context of this here, because we can both pronounce that properly. They were carved back about two to three years ago now by them. And that is when some of the licensing pieces ended, but keeping in mind, I wouldn't necessarily entirely blame that on them. And the reason is that when Garmin acquired first beat, they said yes, we're going to keep our existing license agreements, but we're not going to have new ones. But from what I've heard, most of those license agreements going forward, Garmin hasn't renewed or allowed renewals for it. So in this case, I'm not necessarily pinning that, non-renewal entirely on Sunto. This could be fully a Garmin thing saying, hey, we're done licensing, because why would we want to help our competitors at this point? Given that first beat is now such an integral part of Garmin's product portfolio, if you will.

6:09Well, and I think that's going to come up with Garmin's countersuit too, because I think one of the items in Garmin's list of items is actually surroundings, some of the first beat features in there. Exactly. And so basically, Sunto filed that patent, and they filed it in a particular court in Texas that is basically known for a railroading would be the wrong term, but like fast tracking, if you will, these patent battles through. And generally in favor of the entity filing that lawsuit, so in this case, generally in the case of Sunto. And in this lawsuit, Sunto did this largely under the Sunto umbrella. So it's not under deals from a legal standpoint, but Garmin is going to twist that around when this lawsuit gets, you know, flung back at them. And so Sunto's claim was 56 pages long, and it covered every single Garmin watch you can imagine from the last roughly decade. So anything with those, you know, five different areas,

7:12in particular, the golf trucking one is one that really kind of was in a lot of different models. That Sunto is going for versus the intended design one, intended to be in, it's just a lot of the newer models there. And then also the respiration rate piece that's been around in most of those models, since like 2018, I should I think you ever take, since whatever Garmin made, Optical Heart Rate Sensor standard in their watches, then that was standard as a standard feature in all those watches since then. Sure, so they're like the end goal of this lawsuit, is this truly just trying to protect their technology, or is there like, is, Oh, this is about money. This is all about money. So this is money. Okay. So this is, and you can see that in the wording of the lawsuit, depending on how they ask for relief, as it's called. So if we go back to other lawsuits, for example, the Zwift and Wahoo one, and even the more recent one on Wahoo against Jet Black, in that case, we're on Wahoo versus Jet Black, going to ITC, which is basically like, the way things get imported into the US essentially. They're asking for a ceasing Jet Black's ability

8:14to import into the US versus, soon to here just wants money. They're looking for, they are, if we ignore the names, right? If we take out the name soon to take out the name Garmin, and we just look at this, you know, as a typical patent battle, this is like classic patent troll behavior, right? You have a portfolio of patents that you believe, you can extract money from, that you may or may not use, and they're looking for the biggest targets financially, that are just gonna say, you know what, we're just gonna pay this thing off and be done with it. Which, as we'll see, I think, well, I think everyone here thinks it's probably, they chose the wrong company to go after. And I think one last important thing we talk about the response here is that, I wanna separate out DL's legal strategy, or soon to legal strategy, how do you wanna define it from the products? I think, you know, from a product standpoint, when I review Junso products in the last couple of years, they have been doing great work, and they've been really improving their products, and making some incredibly competitive products,

9:15not just technologically, but also from a, you know, cost standpoint, and in terms of features, et cetera. So I would separate out my opinions on the legal merits of this from their products. So it's two different things. And in fact, one of the very first things you see Garmin do in their sprawling 200-plus-page lawsuits is essentially say the same thing. That they're basically saying like, hey, little Sunto, we know a little brother, this isn't about you, we know this isn't about you, this is about your new owners. And so that's, it's a really fascinating thread here as to how that happens. Well, yeah, so I guess that gets us to Garmin's counterclaim here. So the first is a first and second actually around GPS antenna design. The third is around first-speed recovery time and other metrics around there. The fourth is actually around recovery data as well. And then the fifth is probably the most interesting though, being the watch flash line.

10:16Exactly. So in this case, Garmin, so the way to counter suit works here is that it's not a separate lawsuit per se. Like from a legal standpoint, it's all in the same legal docket. So when I look at the legal docket status, I see them all in one thing. This is Garmin responding back to Sunto saying, okay, for each of these patents, we raise you five additional patents or not each, but we raise you five patents for your five patents. And some of these are head on, like in case of the antenna design. Some of them are like side close by in the case of the first-speed recovery metrics. And then just like with a golf tracking one, Garmin threw a flyer out there being the flashlight. And so something totally different. And keeping in mind, that is separate from the response in terms of Garmin's response to the original five that Sunto has sued them for. So the way that we'll kind of walk through this is we're gonna walk through primarily Garmin's response to those original five, because that's just, it's the sounding. It's, you know, it's funny, I was thinking about this,

11:16is that it's funny with these types of legal battles, because you're mentioning that Garmin's coming back with these counterclaims in response to the original claims, which it's like, I would say that shouldn't you just respond to those claims and say like, oh, they're not valid or are valid or whatever the case may be. It reminds me a lot of like Strava's suit last year, where ultimately from their statement from one of their officers there, it wasn't necessarily even about those patents. It was actually about Garmin's brand guidelines at the end of the day. So it's like, why are you like starting these legal that anyways, yeah. Should we go, should we go into each of these patents though? I think so. And so starting off with kind of your point that around responding. So Garmin does start to respond to some of these. And so they have what called defenses. And so they have these in their spelled out, like the word first is spelled out the full word first FIRST, right? So like the first defense, the second defense, the third defense, the 11th, the 12th, the so on, right?

12:17But the first and the second defense are the funniest because they basically say, by the way, Sunto, you sued the wrong company. So which is technically true, right? But practically speaking, it doesn't really matter. And it's kind of Garmin even sort of emits this in a grand scheme of life, because they're like, okay, if they really believe this was the end, I'll be all, they would stop after the first and second defense. But essentially Garmin has multiple different corporate brella entities and things like that. And effectively, Sunto sued the wrong one. Sunto sued Garmin and limited as opposed to Garmin International. Again, a legal thing on paper, but this is just Garmin. Like, I feel like this entire 218 page response from Garmin was written after a holiday Christmas party at like two in the morning, right? Well, they just sat down. They had definitely a few drinks and they're like, hold my, never mind, don't hold my beer, give me another beer, right? So they start off with basically just this whole like,

13:19you sued the wrong thing. From there though, I think this isn't about you. This is about your new corporate owners or new-ish corporate owners. And there's just slide hosts is really interesting. And they say, Sunto and Garmin cooperated and competed constructively for years. Sunto was a longtime purchaser of Garmin's wireless and wellness technology. But since DL bought Sunto, move production designed to China laid off many Sunto's employees and filed this basis lawsuit that cooperation has ended. So basically, this is kind of them saying, look, we've been friends for a long time until the new owner came in and started to mix things up a bit. And in fact, just immediately after that, instead of focusing on the Sunto products that are offending, Garmin actually focuses on the DL products that are on Amazon, which is really fascinating. So Garmin has basically pivoted this whole lawsuit saying this is Sunto for his Garmin and Garmin has said, no, no, no, my friends, this is Garmin first, everything. Every one of DL's products that are on Amazon

14:20are basically infringing on our patents. And they're picking like cheap ones. They're picking these $19 watches that, you know, you've probably never heard of before from brands that are just, you know, kind of effectively made up brands of some cases. But they're going after the entire portfolio of products, not just the Sunto ones. So after all these pleasantries, which is for the record, like 120 pages of pleasantries, we then get into responding to some of the patents. And the very first one they respond to is that a respiration patent. Or basically, this is the one that Sunto is saying Garmin stole their technology. And this particular one focuses on using the Optical Heart Rate sensor to determine respiration rate. So using algorithms behind that to figure out respiration rate, that's your breeding rate effectively. Something that if you went back to kind of the COVID era, a lot of people looked at swift changes in respiration rate as an indicator for a COVID and other illnesses. So this is something that's been around, you know, for a while, a long while in the case of this. And Garmin Baske says, hey, Sunto, two things.

15:22First of all, you can't file a lawsuit against us for something that we taught you. And by the way, you licensed this technology from us all the way back in 2003, right? And so I've got to imagine the poor people at Sunto, the engineers, right, are sitting back just with their heads in their hands, like just hurting at this point, because they know, right? I know those engineers, they have been there since the beginning. Like that's kind of the neat thing about the sports tech universe is most of these engineers at Garmin, Sunto, Polar, Wahoo. They have been there for like 15 to 20 years. In most cases, like those people have not changed. And they all know the history of this stuff. I'm guessing the lawyers just picked random ones and went with it because yeah, it's a brutal, we'll put the text to screen right here, but it is absolutely brutal. Or basically Garmin pulls out these patents that they have from first beat, that Sunto had licensed from first beat and just says, how are you possibly suing us for the thing?

16:25And it gets even worse because as part of the patent that Sunto is leveraging, that patent actually references the first beat Garmin patent to begin with as one of their things that they looked at. So it's called prior art. So basically things that you have to acknowledge in your patent. And to be clear, having prior art does not excute you from having a patent. You're supposed to declare prior art in a patent and Sunto certainly did that. But in this case, it was a little bit on the nose. Well, and the prior art term will actually come up quite a bit when we talk about the watch flashlights here in a second too. The response to the golf patent was, I don't know, it had out, it's kind of written all over it. So Garmin's response with Sunto's patents describe obsolete functionality, not use in any Garmin products. It is difficult to have meaningful patents for Sunto as it is consistently behind its competitors such as Garmin. Again, kind of like, you know, kind of like really, really digging in there.

17:25Yeah, they were brutal about it. And it's true if you look at how to find like, again, any engineer there would have said, of course, this doesn't apply. Like, one of the reasons I was hesitant to kind of analyze all these patents earlier on back in, you know, October timeframe is that a lot of them are very enduanced in how they work, especially the antenna ones. The antenna ones, I even here, largely not going to like decide who's the winner because it requires looking at the internal structures of the antenna, as you'll see if you're looking at the YouTube video in a minute here. And figuring out, you know, whether one is infringing on the other. And I'll just put that off the side. But I think the golf one is interesting because, you know, at first glance, you would have seen Sunto's patent even like, ah, yeah, maybe Garmin is. But then once Garmin explains what they're doing, and it's very intuitive as a user, because basically the patent that Sunto has essentially says you have to have. You must have a GPS position to be able to figure out shot tracking from a golf standpoint. And Garmin comes back, goes,

18:26we don't use GPS position at all. We've never used GPS position from a shot tracking standpoint. So that patent doesn't apply, and it would never have applied. And it's just, again, like, it just absolutely brew responses every single time. Moving on to the antenna design one, I think what's kind of interesting here is that there's a lot of like, cards put face up on the table on this one. Like in terms of technical drawings and technical explanations here, we're seeing a lot of like, behind the covers here about what exactly's happening. And again, like I think that, yes, we are like super sports tech geeks, but this goes into some high level geekery stuff here. They were fired up. You could tell, like, you can usually tell in legal documents when it's lawyers handling it versus engineers that are starting to like fee that day. And obviously there's both sides involved in these pieces here, but you can tell at some point, some engineer on Garmin's side is really, really angry. And they have gone through, and they've x-rayed Suntos watches,

19:28the recent watches. They've created diagrams, they've highlighted antennas on both watches side by side. They spent 25 pages of this lawsuit. And keeping in mind that's like the good chunk of the response you're talking about the antenna design and showing all these x-ray diagrams and showing cases where basically Suntos has in Garmin's opinion anyways, duplicated the Phoenix designs like straight up, like literally gone in and made the antenna is the same. And again, I don't know if that's correct or not, but Garmin's response here is pretty, pretty damning. And ultimately when it comes to that antenna design, it was so damning that Suntos kind of went, never mind guys, we're good, we're good. We're gonna drop that particular part of the lawsuit to the antenna piece if you drop your piece. And they went to the courts and the courts, the judge agreed to that. So the entire antenna design piece after Garmin's contrast to a nose portions has been resolved. And so we can actually see those live updates in the case docket where they both agreed

20:30to drop the antenna bits there. So basically to summarize on Suntos end of things for their first suit. So basically the golf tracking one, they were Garmin responded back with, well, it's not really valid just because it's not actually how we implement the technology. The respiration rate one was something along the lines of well, they essentially used Garmin's technology first. And then the antenna design, that was essentially dismissed altogether. Is that a good summary? Correct. That's a good summary. Now keep on, the other two, the other ones, all the non-intended design ones are still in play. And the legal document is a bit fuzzy on which of Garmin's counter suits they've agreed to drop. I don't see the exact number or list of there versus Suntos, like we were dropping our antenna design if you drop yours, they agreed to that. But in the document that I see, I don't see where it's showing us to which of the Garmin's five they're dropping.

21:30But either way, four Suntos claims are still in play here at this point in time. But before we get into some of the flashlight pieces here, I do want to mention a couple of things where Garmin has made some flubs in this document as well. And made some interesting, like, I would say exaggerations of the truth, if you will. Keeping in mind, the first couple pages at least of both these documents from both companies is all about bravado, right? It's all about like Suntos or Garmin, whichever lawyers you're talking about or talking about how they may have the greatest company in Earth, the greatest products on Earth, the Earth could not keep on spending without their products, et cetera, right? And this goes on and on and on. And at one point, Garmin says, Suntos is a finished brand that sells fitness watches, Suntos launched its first GPS product in 2003, some 12 years after Garmin lost its first GPS product and also after Garmin's first fitness watch. And these, you're probably doing a bit of double take, like 2003, 12 years after Garmin,

22:31that means Garmin is now 1992, right? I know these are typos, but they're little ones that feel more like GPT wrote some of these lines because they're mixed up. In reality, Suntos launches first GPS watch in 2012, and Garmin is the one that launched their first watch in 2003, the 4201, and that would be nine years, not 12 years, and the names are flipped and wrong, like it's just little things. And then the same goes a bit later on where Garmin is like on this role of how great they are and how Suntos keeps copying all their features, kind of the quotes said, as mentioned earlier on. And they talk about saying, in 2015, Garmin launched its application platform for smartwatch products, Garmin Connect IQ, Suntos followed by releasing its own seven years later, but that's actually not true. In fact, Suntos beat Garmin to the App Store game, Suntos launched their App Store in 2012, and then re-launched it again later in 2022 in a different way, but either way, 2012 beats Garmin's 2014. Garmin says 2015, which doesn't make sense

23:32because they actually launched it in 2014, I've got entire posts at the, but whatever, it's weird. They then go on to say, in 2017, Garmin launched Garmin Pay, Suntos followed by releasing contactless payment features for their own watches three years later, but that itself is a really quirky way of saying it, because in reality, the Suntos seven watch was a where or less watch, and where or less introduced contactless payments all the way back in February of 2017, approximately eight months before Garmin did. So it's like, yes, Suntos via the Suntos seven launched it after Garmin, but the underlying platform was actually before Garmin and on and on and on. Yeah, I mean, we saw some of those like same sort of like timing errors in Strava's lawsuit against Garmin too, about like which company actually came up with things first. So I don't know, maybe somebody was just wrong, reading the wrong Wikipedia page. I think so, yeah. Something to work out there. Well, I think before we get to the fun stuff, though, we should probably pause and talk about our sponsor,

24:33precision fuel and hydration. Are you saying that gels are not fun? I have lots of thought with gels, and precision and fuel and hydration, they're a fun company to be a fair. Well, exactly, it's leading up to fun. That's what we're doing here. That's true. Okay, so sponsor takes up so precision fuel and hydration is a company that both myself and my wife have used for many, many years alongside and many pro athletes toward France, majorly baseball, et cetera, to fuel our long adventures, whether it be some like crazy long hikes across the islands or whatever the case may be, mountain ranges, et cetera, to my wife racing in Ironman events, et cetera, both of us have been using those for many years. But probably one of my favorite things about present fuel and hydration besides the fact that they're a pretty awesome fun company that set up a Martini booth stand at the Ironman World Championships is the fact that they have the sports scientists on staff that you can call up and have a 20-minute or so zoom call with to go ahead and figure out what your exact nutrition needs are for training and racing. So you basically talk through your schedule and your event and they can help you figure out how to go ahead and fuel for that.

25:34And of course, they also have a race intake planter as well in case you want to do that. Align and don't want to talk to a human, but that also would not be very much fun. Now, all their products are in Florence, but it's certified. All of them are vegan. All of them are two to one glucose fructose and contain no artificial ingredients. And most importantly, they're actually edible. They're inoffensive to eat when you have to do it for 12 hours in a row. I just have no problem consuming them for that duration of time. You can go ahead and say 15% on your first order using a coupon code, fit file on the screen right there and have fun of your own. Yep, for sure. And all those things again. And so after your epic adventure, that is fueled by precision fuel hydration. You probably need to look at your recovery time and that brings us to the next patent in the list here. So this is surrounding first-speed metrics, surrounding recovery time and recovery data. Now, I think the most interesting thing about this one is that when I was looking at the photos of these and what information they're actually kind of claiming here, it's like recovery time and all this recovery data. It's information that I would say like almost

26:38any major sports watch has nowadays. And I think what makes it interesting is that every other company like has this and it has had it for quite some time. But their garment's actually mentioning it in this counter suit. Exactly. And even more interesting here, garment starts to go down this kind of road of basically saying, hey, soon to you license this stuff from first-speed. And then once you stopped paying us for that license, the features are still there in your watches and DL's watches, right? And they seem to sort of stop short of like outright accusation, but they're building this little moat around the sand castle, if you will, of kind of being like, we're not so sure we believe what you have going on right here. Which, you know, talking to Sunto over the years, they've obviously shifted away from first-speed for reasons that are either garments or theirs driving that. And they were algorithm shifts. We saw some of those algorithm shifts over time. And then we also saw some things that didn't seem to shift algorithms.

27:39And garment again, here seems to be implying that Sunto isn't paying for that. But again, it's very fuzzy. So I don't want to go out and say like, hey, Sunto isn't paying first-speed and correctly here, but garment also says that licensing contract ceased a few years ago and yet some of the features are still there and being sold. And again, they continue to highlight the DL products on this, more so than the Sunto products. Only a few times in this entire first-speed section, do they really focus on the Sunto products versus all these other ones? Well, in terms of the specific Sunto product, though, I mean, the specific one that they're kind of going after is their last patent in this list, though, is the Flashlight. So basically to quote, garments Phoenix 7X product launched in 2022 and included an integrated flashlight, which was met universally with Ray reviews. I'd have to agree with that right there. And then the three years later, Sunto duplicated garments work to provide the exact same design as Garmin, resulting in infringement of Garmin's US Pat number 11 million, blah, blah, blah, blah.

28:39So we saw a mace fit come out with their Flashlight on their T-Rex, T-Rex 2.3 Pro, one of their watches. But we haven't necessarily heard anything on that front in terms of a lawsuit. So I don't know, is this again just kind of like saying, all right, well, if you want to play ball, I guess let's play ball. This is definitely a case of poke the bear and find out, right? Because Garmin's unofficial policy for the last 13 years give or take now, a 12, 13 years something like that, has been to not proactively sue any company from a patent standpoint. They basically just said, you know what, we're gonna let this play out in the market and go forth, right? And not yet ourselves distracted with patent stuff. Their last lawsuit was against Brighton back in 2012, 2014 era roughly. And since then, they haven't done that at all. Despite obviously having a gigantic patent portfolio, right? I mean, outside in the sports tech world, the only other company that would have a larger portfolio would be Apple or maybe Google,

29:42probably not so much sports tech related other areas. And maybe Samsung probably has a fair number of things in that pile as well. But Garmin's portfolio. I think a, I think a MazeFit's portfolio is pretty big. Yeah. Hahaha. Hahaha. Oh. Hahaha. Anyway, sorry. Garmin's portfolio. Garmin's portfolio. Okay. Anyways, Garmin's portfolio. Sorry. Yes. Garmin's portfolio is massive. As soon as it's big, right? Sinto has an entire page dedicated to it. It's a cool page. But we're talking something. I'm guessing Garmin's portfolio patents here is many, many thousands probably approaching the tens of thousands of patents. And again, the thing to understand about patents, it's about having that weapon, not necessarily using the weapon. So if you can secure a patent, that means you have a weapon. Whether or not that weapon is valid is besides the point entirely. And the flashlight is the best example of that, right? So Garmin managed to secure this patent back a couple years ago as part of their introduction into the Phoenix line up there.

30:42In that patent, basically covers having a flashlight in a wearable device. And again, it's the nuance of that in just a second. But what that does is it gives them a baseball bat. It gives them this baseball bat to go after companies that sue them frivolously or lawfully or not lawfully, but frivolously or correctly, and to use that to an act of counter suit like this. So in this case, as you mentioned, a Maze Fit has a flashlight in their watch and they're not being sued. But in this case, Sinto obviously decided to pick a fight in Garmin saying, oh, look at this baseball bat. I head over here. Let me go pick that up now. So the most interesting part of this, though, is that it doesn't seem to me that Garmin was necessarily the person that or the company that actually came up with the idea of a flashlight in a watch, which brings us to our throwback 80s cartoons. It does, right? So the thing to understand about patents is there's the idea of prior art. So basically that means that if something has existed, even in a book, in a movie, in some form

31:45that can be validated as public, then that effectively invalidates the ability for you to file a patent for it. Now, with that in mind, there's a lot of nuance to that. So looking at the flashlight in a watch, the first most obvious example I can find of that is of course the Spectra Gadget. And despite what many people think, it is actually not in Spectra Gadget himself that has the flashlight in the watch, but rather it is Penny, his niece, that has a sniffty little smart watch and it is clearly a smart watch and that is super important from a patent standpoint and a little bit here, because that watch does like video, it does calling, it does streaming of stuff, like it's a smart watch as you can possibly get. But in a scene, in an episode titled The Boat, at the 12 minute and 49 second marker, and we'll link this exact episode on YouTube because it's up there for you to watch. Penny basically presses the button on her watch and that flashlight comes out and it comes out in the exact same place as the flashlight on a garment watch, which is super important because that's between the 10 o'clock and the two o'clock position on a wearable device,

32:45which is part of Garmin's patent. And so that flashlight illuminates and so she is controlling that flashlight again, another important nuance, she has to press something on the screen to control the flashlight itself. And so those are all pieces basically establishing that hey, from a functional standpoint, a smart watch with a flashlight existed as of September 19th, 1983, when that episode first aired. So at this point, that's been established. Now there's been other flashlights and movies since then there's a bunch of them out there, whether it be James Bond had ones in there as well and other kind of spin-offs cartoons. And of course, plenty of other things we've made out of scene. And then when it comes to real life watches, there was one in early 2010s. Victor Knox launched a flashlight in a mechanical watch, but very similar design in terms of the flashlight is between the 10 o'clock and the two o'clock position. But again, showing that exists. Now when it comes to Garmin's pen, there's like six things that they identify

33:49that defines their special flashlight in a watch. Number one, and arguably the most important, it must have two, not one, two light emitting diodes. So two LEDs, that's what Garmin and Suunto and Amazfit have. But problematically, we're not sure if Penny has two light emitting diodes in her watch in the Spectra Gadget. She may, we can't tell from the cartoon, but this is probably the most important difference here between what we know in movies and this. But even that has some challenges we get into. Next, it must be between 10 o'clock and two o'clock position. Every single one of these watches has that. Answering the question, a lot of people often ask, why not put it on the sides of the watch? A lot of people ask about that. I think to answer that question is that people are left-handed and right-handed, so you'd have to have a flashlight on both sides for that particular idea. So I mean, having it in the 10 o'clock or between the 10 o'clock and two o'clock position makes it universal for both wrists. So that's pretty much it.

34:49Exactly. It must be a smart watch that is a defined characteristic here. It must have a touchscreen as well. As all these do, including Penny's watch actually has a touchscreen if you watch the full episode, you can see she's interacting with the touchscreen itself. A crazy concept, by the way, for 1983, just sort of like the set of the stage here. And it must also have a physical button on the watch as well. So it cannot be just a touchscreen. It has to be a physical button. I have not yet watched enough Inspector Gadget episodes to confirm whether her watch also has an additional physical button. But that's, I don't think here nor there because other watches in movies in the 1990s did have physical buttons with flashlights in them. So I think that covers that particular scenario. Super random thing before we get into the last two pieces of criteria here is like, it's absolutely amazing that we actually do have these things on our wrist at this point, right? It's like, you know, for 1983, like us watching Inspector Gadget and everyone else out there who's more of our generation, it's like watching these, you're just like looking at all this

35:50like cool technology. You're like, I mean, you know, you just dream as a kid, you know, like, oh, you know, this could totally maybe happen at some point, maybe, and maybe just pipe dreams. But it's like, we now have all this stuff, which is, I mean, I don't know, it's really, really amazing. But anyways, let's get to the two last criteria here. So one of them is that you must have a user-selectable color, so basically like green, red, white, and then also a user-selectable intensity in terms of like, how bright do this? Exactly. And so those are areas where we do not know with Inspector Gadget had a user-selectable color, but other devices in the 1990s did actually have color-changing flashlights and smart watches. So that would kind of negate that. And user-selectable intensity, again, pennies appear to be just one intensity level, but we know other devices in that era would have. So in many ways, this really seems to come down to the two LED aspects. And again, when you look at patents, patents are just a big list of if-then statements, qualifiers. It must have this, it must have this, it must have this.

36:51So the idea of getting a patent for just simply having a flashlight in a watch by itself isn't enough. This is where Garmin adds all these little criteria to get a patent. Now, could this patent be defeated? Yeah, I think pretty easily, to be honest. So if Apple came along and said, hey, that's a Q-Pan. We're going to go ahead and get that invalidated with PTO. I am pretty darn sure Apple's going to find more than enough cases and TV and movies over the last 50, 70 years to invalidate this patent. But the cost of that is incredibly high. Well, couldn't a company just do one LED? I mean, at that point, and just one color and one LED? I mean, it's not going to be as feature rich as Garmin's flashlight, but like, wouldn't that kind of solve the issue at that point, or put it at 9.30 instead of 10 o'clock? Yeah, 100%. There's a lot of options there. Or an LED, you know, I'm not an expert in LEDs. An LED that has multiple colors, the single LED.

37:51I'm not sure how that works precisely, but the point is, yeah, there's other options here to get around this. Or they do what Amazfit did. They just do it anyways and know because they've studied the history of Garmin legal over the last decade plus. And know that Garmin's not going to go after them over this issue. Probably even more so when they look at this particular patent and know that Garmin would likely lose a battle on this particular patent if they were provoked. Which, you know, if we go back to the Wahoo and Zwift case, that was ultimately a driving factor to why Wahoo settled with Zwift is because Zwift's lawyers were basically making the case to invalidate a large portion of the kicker's patent portfolio after the judge pretty much said, hey, I don't really think this patent should have been granted in the first place. And having your patent invalidated would have been way worse for Zwift and that, sorry, for Wahoo in that case. And the same would be true here of Garmin. Instead, they can just use it as a baseball bat because it costs so much to invalidate a patent.

38:53I just wonder, like, is this going to be, is the outcome of this going to be similar to the Strava versus Garmin lawsuit where Strava was just like, oh, nope, that just didn't happen. Like, we'll just go ahead and like adhere by your rules. And one kind of random thing I actually thought about with the Strava lawsuit is that part of that whole story was basically Garmin wanting to have their brand guidelines or basically their brand kind of listed on the Garmin results or the results in Strava that we're using essentially Garmin devices there. So what's kind of neat about that though is that everyone kind of won on that front where everyone's device is listed now, whether it's a Koro, Sunto, Garmin, whatever. So I don't know if we're like a super sports tech geek standpoint. We all kind of won so we can actually kind of like see what people are using like right here like right on their profile. So, but anyways, like, I wonder if this is just going to kind of like disappear into the ether, like, like, nothing ever happened. Yeah, I don't know, like, I guess it's going to be

39:55if Garmin wins on their side of things, like I think it could be certainly a bit spicy for Sunto. Yeah, I don't, I would expect here that, you know, I keep refreshing the case and nothing's changed as of a few minutes ago, but I would expect that we're going to see just more of these. So, you know, each of these line items, if you will, these different patents, whether it's going to agree to different pieces or eventually Sunto's lawyers, DL lawyers are going to say, never mind, we're just dropping the case entirely like they dropped effectively that case against the first those patents there. There's just, there is no universe where Sunto comes out on top long term here, even if they're legally correct, right? Even if they're right from a patent standpoint, which is looking pretty questionable, but even if they are, Garmin has just another pile of patents they can throw in that back at Sunto, you know, for every one patent that Sunto has, Garmin probably has 10, 20, 30, 50 patents. So, that's where it's so baffling to me that DL will go after Garmin in this, right?

40:57Like if you want to go after a different player, sure, but they would have to have known how deep Garmin's patent portfolio is and that Garmin would just counter sue all day long on this stuff. And so, I would expect at some point in the coming weeks or months, this, like you said, will just simply one day will just see a single entry just like the Strava one, where they're like, hey, case dropped, one sentence done, right? That's my guess. Well, I think, I mean, it's certainly important to protect your own ideas and your own IP, you know, from a company standpoint for sure, but at the same time too, it's like, you know, all of us, we definitely want to see like, we want more feature-rich watches, but at the same time like, you know, other people have come up with the ideas first, possibly too. Yeah, it's tough. And I would say there's, it was an interesting line in the lawsuit that Garmin made against Sunto, basically saying, you know, since DL's acquisition of Sunto, you know, we've seen Sunto on this downward trajectory, other products have gotten less competitive, et cetera.

41:58And I actually disagree very strongly with that. I would say Sunto has never been stronger. Now, that is setting aside, you know, what's happening behind the scenes, moving manufacturing to China, that's setting aside some employees. And that's really their role to effectively shifting to China. I'm not denying any of that. And you can have an entire subject conversation about that. But in terms of the end state quality of the product, in terms of features and competitiveness and pricing and all those three areas to the consumer, it is unquestionably a better product than it's ever been in that smartwatch segment. So I mean, Sunto is now competitive in some of these categories, for the first time. And I would say eight to nine years probably, like since the middle of last decade roughly, which, you know, that is undoubtedly part of investments that DL is making here. And it's not only better value, but it's also increasing their product portfolio to now,

42:58where they actually are in the headphone game and actually producing some, I mean, some very competitive headphones there too. Yeah. So I'd say, you know, regardless of what happens with this lawsuit, I'm hoping and expecting Sunto to keep on keeping on and keep on the juxtaposed that they're doing things on. And we're seeing good shifts there. We're seeing shifts even in the last couple of months with how they handle, you know, communications outbound on announcing new features, right? Some of the shifts they made in the December timeframe with some of the new features were basically they're actually announcing these things now. When they have these huge feature drops, as opposed to just like dropping them on a website and forgetting about them. So again, I think Sunto's doing really good things here from a product standpoint. I think their legal team just, you know, deals legal team in this case. I'm guessing Sunto doesn't have a actual legal team with their own that is able to mount this kind of defense these days. That team needs to, I don't know, go drink at the bar or just like Garmin's team apparently did. Well, we will keep you apprised of the situation,

44:01you know, whether it's gonna be on race, website or through another podcast episode or something like that. For the next episode, well, we are coming into, it's starting to warm up very quickly around the sports tech space in terms of new things. And I think by the time this podcast comes out, there's gonna be another video drop on both of our channels on something. And yeah, we'll just have to talk about what that something is on the next episode. Exactly. Keep it a fun. All right, well, if you like the podcast, you know, make sure to leave a review on Spotify or Apple or even drop a comment in our YouTube videos too, that definitely helps out the channel a lot. So yeah, anything else for you on the Spanish Island? No, no, the sun's coming out now. So it's time to, I don't know, do something in the sun. I'll figure it out. All right, sounds good. All right, see you guys in the next episode. Thanks for watching.