Suunto has announced today that they’re now allowing anyone to create apps on their watches, even without opening up a partnership account with the company. This allows anybody to download the also newly-available SuuntoPlus Editor extension for Visual Studio, enabling developers to write, test, and publish apps directly to their own watches. Then, if they want to make that available in the larger SuuntoPlus App Store, they can do that.

As a casual reminder, Suunto was actually the first watchmaker to have on-watch apps – all the way back in 2012. They beat the others by years – Garmin (2014), Pebble (2014), and Apple (2015), though obviously they haven’t quite reached the same popularity as any of those. Part of that is because while Suunto got an early start on apps back in the 2012 range, they subsequently put the whole concept on ice later in the decade, basically killing off their first App Store. Of course, in 2022, they re-launched with select partners, but it never quite had the same ‘anyone can join in’ camp that the first edition had. This changes that.

Oh, also, Suunto has announced a few new apps for everyone (non-developers alike), including a critical gap in their lineup: The Beer Mile App. More on that in a second.

Visual Studio Code Extension

First up, Suunto is releasing their StudioPlus Editor extension for Visual Studio. This is nearly identical to what Suunto themselves is using internally, saying it’s “95% the same” as how they develop apps for their platform. Up until now, in order to gain access to this, you had to be a full Suunto partner. That wasn’t necessarily a huge/high bar, but it was a bar nonetheless. It meant that, practically speaking, hobbyist developers weren’t likely to bother to jump through the hoops (whereas a company with a sensor would).

And as we’ve seen on countless watch app stores, it’s often these hobbyist apps that end up being some of the most popular ones.

Here are the pieces that you can now do without any partner account at all, and then the other steps if you want to escalate; they’ve made those more streamlined and easier:

In any case, Suunto is now on the Visual Studio marketplace, where you can grab the extension, which includes the simulator feature as well.

Once you’ve got that installed, you’ll be able to create apps, test apps, including simulating with test data, and more.

And again, none of this requires a partner account. So that means you’d be limited to publishing it to your own watch, but couldn’t publish it to a friend’s watch (or on the internet).

But, Suunto says if you want to take that next step, they’ve streamlined the process and have a full landing page to apply to publish it to the App Store. This, in turn, gets access to the Suunto Cloud API as well.

From there, you can upload your app into the SuuntoPlus App Store.

All of this seems pretty straightforward and shows Suunto is trying to increase the appeal of developing for their platform. Or at the minimum, aiming to make it more appealing for hobbyists to dabble in creating apps.

Some New Apps:

Now, in addition to the developer-focused items, they’ve also highlighted a few new apps they’ve just published. They are:

Tennis Pro: Can track scoring/points within a Tennis Game:

Beer Mile: There’s perhaps nothing better than listening to a Finnish person explain the concept and strategy of how a beer mile works, in the most factually direct way possible, without so much as a smirk or laugh. Well done. You can watch that at 12:01 in the Suunto video.

Hex Hunter: This is the gamification of going places (over long periods of time), via the GPS on your Suunto watch.

In any case, I’m still back on the beer mile explanation. Also, knowing Janne and the Finnish Suunto crew, I would definitely not challenge him to a Beer Mile. He will almost certainly win. Strongly.

Wrap-Up:

It’s cool to see Suunto expanding out access like this. Specifically, the ability to do things without signing up for yet another account or service. We saw them do the same thing a few months back with their Suunto RoutePlanner site, available to anyone (non-Suunto users alike) to create routes for export to any device on the planet. No account required, just works, complete with heat map access and more.

As for the Suunto app pieces, making it easier for hobbyists to create apps is a huge step towards increasing apps. It may sound trivial, but the difference between someone just casually downloading this and toying around (and creating something super cool), versus having it gate kept between walls is huge. Even if those walls weren’t all that tall to begin with, it’s the thought of the walls that keeps people away. Now that the barrier is mostly gone.

Cool stuff, and as I said recently, most of the changes we’ve seen at Suunto in the last year or so are pretty good for consumers. With that, thanks for reading!

Before Strava, there was Suunto. Both in terms of which company started business, but also, more notably, which company sued Garmin first. While Strava suing Garmin back in October got all the headlines, the reality is that Suunto actually sued Garmin nearly two weeks prior, though mostly unnoticed.

Specifically, in September, Suunto and their parent company, Dongguan Liesheng, sued Garmin over 5 different patent infringement allegations, and did so in a court district in Texas known specifically for being fast-moving and generally favoring the company filing the case. This was quite different than the Strava lawsuit in almost every way. The Suunto lawsuit was much more akin to typical patent-troll filing behavior. That was odd for a number of reasons, the most notable being that Suunto and Garmin generally got along just fine, including Suunto licensing numerous things from Garmin during a nearly two-decade-long span. A timeframe that, by all accounts, ended amicably as the two companies (and their ownerships) drifted in different directions.

While Suunto initiated the first salvo back in September, Garmin seemed set on delivering the final 218-page WWF-style salvo back in late December, in a counter-claim of five other patents. As you’ll see, some of the patents in question are incredibly complex, dealing with internal antenna structures. It’s one of the reasons I hadn’t really covered it previously; I prefer to talk about lawsuits I can dive into from a technical standpoint. But Garmin’s response is just too juicy to ignore at this point, the level of sass is something I haven’t seen from Olathe in..well…ever. But also notably, an understanding that this isn’t really the Suunto they know and love driving this, but rather their new parent company’s lawyers.

So, let’s dive into it.

The Initial Patents:

First up, Suunto’s initial suit, filed back in September, centers on five specific patents. As one might expect of any company in this space for decades, Suunto has many patents. In fact, they even have a super nifty website listing all of them (I’d love to see Suunto actually link to the patents for each one, but hey…it’s still a fun list). In any case, the patents are as follows:

Patent 1: 7,489,241: This patent focuses on golf shot tracking, using an accelerometer (detecting the hit of the club against the ball)

Patent 2: 8,021,306: This patent is around determining respiration rate via an optical HR sensor.

Patent 3: 11,018,432: This is about slot mode antennas and antenna design in wearable devices. Slot mode antennas are basically antennas designed to become integrated as part of another object, such as the bezel/etc…and are usually flexible in some capacity.

Patent 4: 7,271,774: This is also about placing antennas in a wrist-worn device.

Patent 5: 10,734,731: This is further about antenna design in a wrist-worn device

As you can see, three out of the five are about antenna design, with one about physiological metrics, and then the last one about golf shot tracking. These are somewhat all over the map, but that’s OK, variety is the spice of life.

In Suunto’s 56-page filing, things are honestly pretty vanilla. While we often see grandiose lawyer fun in filings, including extravagant claims about a company’s importance in the universe, Suunto’s is pretty mellow. The vast majority of the filing is simply listing off the 9,328 different Garmin watch models that encompass these features, as required by the courts to establish which models are allegedly infringing.

At the end of which, it asks the court to order Garmin to stop infringing on said patents, and to get some money in gift cards as a result. It’s not as vocal as Strava’s, which had an assortment of rhetoric and wants. Again, super-duper vanilla.

As I said above, looking at these five patents myself, with 3 out of 5 of them requiring intimate internal knowledge of wire placement, those aren’t ones I could decide one way or another. And the other two, golf-club and respiration rate, are frankly more of a he-said-she-said type thing. So I don’t know who is right or wrong per se, but instead, I can tell you what actually matters here: Size.

Before we go too far though, I do want to point out one thing – which is that this entire post is less about Suunto and their products (or how I view their products), and more about a legal circus. As I’ll get into later on, I think Suunto is making some of the best products they’ve ever made, and some of the most competitive products they’ve ever made. I would *strongly* separate out Suunto’s product/engineering development teams from Dongguan Liesheng’s legal teams. Got it? Good.

Garmin’s Blistering Response:

After Suunto’s filing, things were mostly quiet, as they usually are. The court’s case notes basically are just various legal teams trading confirmations of assignment things, but nothing of note for a few months. That’s normal. Instead, we have to fast forward to a few days after Christmas, on December 29th, when Garmin delivers an astonishing 218-page smack-down.

I can only imagine Garmin’s lawyers went to the company Christmas party some weekend in December, got a bit tipsy, and then proceeded to sit down at 2AM and write their best Suunto smack-down jokes they could. It’s brutal. Just to set the stage for what’s to come, here’s one line from deep in the filing:

“Like everything else, Suunto predictably looked to copy Garmin’s GPS technology as it fell behind in the marketplace.”

Which is a good time to point out that if you’re reading this post in a few years, Garmin’s response may seem a bit strong. But you have to put things in context. This comes at a timeframe where they just got done feeling broadsided by Strava’s lawsuit festival, and then Suunto’s starting in on the action too. From Garmin’s perspective, this starts to look a little bit like the beginning of a trend. Keeping in mind that Garmin themselves haven’t sued any company over patent bits in well over a decade. Their general stance here has been to ignore starting patent battles, but equally, they rarely lose the ones against them (almost never).

So, where do we begin?

Garmin’s document is essentially divided up into about a dozen different ‘defenses’. Some of this stuff is just procedural, but some of it is very real technical talk. However, the very first defense is that Suunto literally sued the wrong company. I’m not kidding. Garmin, of course, has a bunch of corporate entities, and basically, Suunto’s lawyers picked the wrong one.

This won’t likely have any meaningful impact on the case, but it’s a bit of a way to embarrass Suunto’s legal team. Though admittedly, Garmin has almost as many shell companies as they have Instinct models.

So now the document basically goes in a few different directions:

1) They mount defenses against the five patents Suunto says Garmin is infringing
2) They initiate a countersuit against Suunto for five different patents

But more interesting than all that, Garmin starts to separate out Suunto from Dongguan Liesheng. The way they do this is pretty notable, because it’s Garmin saying, “Look, you want this to be about Suunto, but we’re actually going to sue you about every other Dongguan Liesheng device you have in the US”.

However, they give a brief nod on page 2 to the lower-level employees at Suunto first, seemingly saying, “this isn’t about you, we know”:

“Suunto and Garmin cooperated and competed constructively for years. Suunto was a long-time purchaser of Garmin’s wireless and wellness technology. But since Dongguan Liesheng bought Suunto, moved production and design to China, laid off many of Suunto’s employees, and filed this baseless lawsuit, that cooperation has ended.”

And indeed that’s true. Suunto had long licensed technology from Firstbeat, which Garmin acquired years earlier. But also, even before that, Suunto was a big part of ANT+ too (which Garmin owned). Long-time engineers at these two companies know each other on a first-name basis. Heck, upwards of 15 years ago I sat down having nightly beers with them all at the same table.

From there, the games begin. For example, in relation to Dongguan Liesheng’s products, instead of talking about mostly offending Suunto products (which they do later), they include screenshots of offending Dongguan Liesheng products. These are, of course, still mixed in with Suunto ones, but the emphasis here is on pointing out the breach of things.

As we start to get into some of the patents, things get spicy quickly. They point out that Suunto’s ‘306 patent (the one about respiration rate via HR) is actually something Suunto licensed from Garmin starting back in 2003. They then call out a provision (pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. § 102(f)), which basically states you can’t patent something you learned from someone else. And given that Suunto’s ‘306 patent literally references Garmin’s own patent as prior art, Garmin is doing a bit of a double-take here:

Now, to be clear, you can (and should) absolutely list prior art in your patent application. That in and of itself isn’t an issue (and is part of almost every filing). But Garmin’s defense here is so short and blunt that they seem almost baffled at why they’d have to defend it. Again, I’m not going to try to figure out which side is right here. Because while Garmin lays out a pretty straightforward case, patent battles are rarely straightforward. Still, it seems like Dongguan Liesheng’s lawyers just aren’t familiar with the decades-long intertwined history that Suunto/Garmin/FirstBeat actually have.

After that, Garmin tries to pull an argument that even if Suunto were to succeed on the ‘241 & ‘306 patent, it’d be limited to infringements after 2022, due to assignment of rights from the American sports acquisition. I’m not a lawyer, but this claim seems pretty shaky to me.

In fact, there are a few things that are a bit weird, or simply incorrect. For example, Garmin does a bunch of weird date and company fails here, that almost seems like AI mistakes:

“Suunto is a Finnish brand that sells fitness watches. Suunto launched it’s first GPS product in 2003, some 12 years after Garmin launched it’s first GPS product and also after Garmin’s first fitness watch”.

In reality, Suunto launched its first GPS-integrated watch product in 2003/2004 (Suunto X9), and Garmin launched their first in 2003 (Forerunner 201), but that’s actually all ignoring the fact that Garmin got their dates/companies/etc all mixed up here.

Same goes for this section talking about Connect IQ (during a general grandstanding moment). This is incorrect, because Suunto actually beat Garmin to an App Store, with the Suunto App Zone in 2012 (versus Garmin’s 2014). Suunto later did a different App Store in 2022, but Suunto definitely beat Garmin here on timelines, no matter how you slice it.

And that ignores the comments about Garmin pay and Suunto contactless payments, because the Suunto watch they are referring to here is the Suunto 7, which is really a WearOS watch…and thus, if we want to get really picky here, WearOS actually had contactless payments before Garmin did, in February 2017 versus Garmin’s November 2017. Just sayin’…

So, on to the patents. When it comes to the golf patent, things are relatively straightforward there. First, Garmin says:

“Suunto’s ’774 and ’241 Patents both describe obsolete functionality not used in any Garmin products. It is difficult to have meaningful patents for Suunto as it is consistently behind its competitors, such as Garmin.”

Ouch.

But, nonetheless, they carry on and explain why the ‘241 golf patent wouldn’t apply here anyway:

“Garmin Ltd. denies at least that any of the ’241 Patent Garmin Accused Products “determine[e] a GPS position of the user when the strike event is detected” or “record[] at least the GPS position of the user within a wearable wristop computer after the determination of the GPS position of the user is completed,” as required by the ’241 Patent. GPS functionality in the ’241 Patent Garmin Accused Products operates independently of shot detection.”

Basically, Garmin is saying that the patent itself requires the usage of GPS to trigger a shot event, and then Garmin says that it’s not leveraging GPS for anything to do with the shot. At this point, we have no way to independently validate that code (that’ll come later), but frankly, it kinda makes sense. There’s no reason to use a GPS coordinate when detecting an accelerometer/gyroscope event like a golf swing.

Now, I’m going to skip past the Firstbeat things. Mostly because Garmin’s response here is part-flabbergast at Suunto’s gall, but also part “fine, if you want to play this game, we’re going to play it so much harder”, which is the counter-suit part.

“Even a cursory review of Suunto’s infringement allegations against Garmin shows they are without merit. It is difficult to have meaningful patents as a company that is consistently behind its competitors. Suunto’s ’306 Patent was copied from Firstbeat technology that Suunto once licensed.”

In Garmin’s response, they outline five additional patents that they are countersuing for. Effectively saying, “If you sue us, we’re going to sue you for these five patents”.

Patent 1: 10,271,299: This is focused on GPS antenna design (meant to reply to the ‘432 and ‘731 patents, as it pre-dates those)

Patent 2: 10,276,925: More GPS antenna design

Patent 3: 10,856,794: Firstbeat recovery time and other metrics

Patent 4: 11,318,351: More Firstbeat metrics, indulging training, recovery data

Patent 5: 11,956,874: The Flashlight

So let’s talk about antenna design. Or at least, let’s talk about how much Garmin really wants to talk about antenna design. Holy moly. You can tell some Garmin engineers got really fired up about this one. The amount of work they put into this initial filing illustrates they aren’t playing around.

As part of the filing, they spent about 25 pages alone on photographs, diagrams, x-ray scans, and an assortment of text, illustrating that Garmin believes Suunto straight-up duplicated antenna design from Garmin’s products and patents.

Page after page of illustration, diagram, x-rays, and more:

And more:

Now again, the nuances here matter a ton. But it’s clear that in this section, Garmin made its point.

That’s because shortly after Garmin’s WWF-style response, Suunto filed an update to their lawsuit, basically saying ‘Uhh… never mind’ about the antenna design patent infringement. Both Garmin and Suunto came to an agreement there, and as part of that specific patent (out of five), Suunto has agreed to step back into the bushes,  Homer Simpson style.

So let’s get to the funnest part here: The Flashlight.

The Inspector Gadget Flashlight:

As part of Garmin’s countersuit, they decided to flash Suunto. Or rather, pull out the flashlight patent. As you probably know, the Suunto Vertical 2 includes an LED flashlight. From a hardware standpoint, it’s roughly akin to what we saw Garmin implement starting with the Fenix series in 6X, and then now continuing into numerous other watch lines (Forerunner, Venu, Instinct, etc…).

However, Garmin actually has a patent on that from 2024, though they haven’t selected to practically sue anyone else. For example, back in August, we saw Amazfit introduce it into its T-Rex 3 Pro watch, with a relatively similar design.

In any event, Garmin decided to pull out the flashlight patent on Suunto as part of the countersuit, saying:

“Suunto’s products are typically two or three years behind Garmin’s products. When Garmin launches a feature, such as solar technology, optical heart rate monitoring, mobile payments, and online activity sharing, to name a few, Suunto invariably follows with a copy. As one recent example, Garmin’s fēnix 7X product launched in 2022, and included an integrated flashlight, which was met with universally rave reviews. Three years later, Suunto duplicated Garmin’s work to provide the exact same design as Garmin, resulting in infringement of Garmin’s U.S. Patent No. 11,956,874 (“the ’874 Patent”)”

But this is where things get a bit interesting when it comes to patents. You see, just about any company can apply for a patent on something, and often get it. In the grand scheme of patent life, that’s kinda cheap and easy. But what really matters is defending the patent down the road in a lawsuit (in other words, getting it invalidated).

Having a patent (as Garmin does), scares other companies into not duplicating the feature. It acts as a deterrent, even if it’s on sketchy grounds. That’s because the cost to litigate a patent is so high. So in Garmin’s case, finding a way to get a patent for this has likely limited other companies from duplicating the feature.

The problem is, I’m not really convinced Garmin should have ever had this patent. And the reason is actually simple: Inspector Gadget.

Or rather, more specifically, Penny. Despite common reference to Inspector Gadget, it’s actually his niece who had the smartwatch with a flashlight. This flashlight mode in her smartwatch debuted on September 19th, 1983, in an episode titled “The Boat”, at roughly the 12min 49sec marker, which you can find in full here.

This is actually super important for a number of reasons. In the patent world, things seen on TV and in movies are absolutely considered prior art. If the idea existed prior to a patent, the idea is no longer patentable (at least without adding more conditions). And, to be clear, there may be other watches with flashlights that precede Inspector Gadget. And to be clear, her watch is definitely a smartwatch by even today’s standards. It can stream communications wirelessly, it has a touchscreen, it has TV on it, video streaming, various app-like features, and more.

But there were also real-world watches after that. In the early 2010’s, Victorinox launched Swiss Army Night Vision edition, which included a flashlight in an analog watch.

Beyond these two simple examples, there are countless others in TV and movies. Various James Bond films in the 1960s had flashlights in watches, as did Batman movies later on (including multiple lights), Spy Kids in 2001 also had multi-colored LEDs in smartwatches, and more.

However, again, patents are complex beasts, and Garmin appears to be hanging their hat on a few specific nuances in their patent beyond ‘Flashlight in watch’. 21 claims to be precise. They include all of the following:

– Must have two light-emitting elements (aka two LEDs, as Garmin, Suunto, Amazfit does…Penny is questionable/unclear)
– They must exist in the sidewall of the watch between the 10:00 and 2:00 position (as Garmin, Penny, and Victornox does, as well as Suunto/Amazfit)
– It must be a smartwatch (as Penny, Garmin, Suunto, Amazfit do)
– It must be between 10:00 and 2:00 (as all do)
– It must have a touchscreen (as all the smartwatches do, including Penny)
– It must have a button that can be assigned to operate it (as all smartwatches do, but Penny is unclear in this episode)

From there, it goes into the user interface, and basically boils down to:

– It must have a user-selectable color (as Garmin/Suunto/Amazfit do)
– It must have user-selectable intensity (as Garmin/Suunto/Amazfit do)

In fact, in reading through all 21 claims and subclaims, the singular difference to Inspector Gadget’s implementation is the usage of potentially different colors, as well as potentially two LEDs. Starting off with colors, this would almost certainly fail the ‘obviousness’ test, since countless flashlights allowed for different colors, and in fact, in other Inspector Gadget episodes, he has other wearable devices that have multi-colored flashlights. In Garmin’s claims, each light only emits a single color, not multi-color LEDs

Next is the two-light configuration. Garmin specifically narrowed it down to two lights. Not one, not “at least two”, but precisely two. We don’t know from the animation if that light panel was considered a single light. It looks like it, but that’d be a hard thing to prove. Further, that ignores another three decades of TV and movies with flashlights in smartwatches (same applies to colors).

In fact, reading through this, the hole in the fence here is either using a single mutli-color LED, or using 3 LEDs, or just a single LED of a single color.

(As a side note, Garmin also has a secondary patent around the flashlight, though not mentioned here, which covers the cadence triggering of the light, as Suunto doesn’t leverage such a mode. That patent seems *far* more defendable, as it’s hyper-specific to that feature.)

But I don’t think this really matters. As I said above, the whole point of this patent is to be used as a baseball bat in scenarios just like this. Garmin likely knows this patent isn’t really defensible in a true court battle with a company that has enough money (e.g., Apple, Samsung, Google, etc…). Such a company would easily find other examples in TV or movies to nullify the remaining claims.

Here however, Garmin is able to wield this flashlight just like a sword, as a defensive move. And sure, perhaps some smaller player that doesn’t bother to follow Garmin’s legal patterns might proactively ask for licensing on it, but that’d be a waste. For example, if I were in COROS’s shoes, I’d have no real legal concerns about putting a flashlight in their watches. Garmin simply hasn’t shown any offensive patent posture, and atop that, they’d be unlikely to waste their time trying to use this patent as a sword, when there are countless others they could more efficiently use instead.

Wrap-Up:

As I alluded to at the beginning, I disagree with Garmin about one major thing here. They said that Suunto’s products have deteriorated since the Dongguan Liesheng acquisition. In fact, looking at their products from a consumer and reviewer standpoint, their products have unquestionably gotten better, adding more features, and have become more competitive. Especially in price. That’s factually not debatable. We can, however, have a solid discussion about moving manufacturing to China, shifting most staffing to China, potentially about data privacy, and anything else from that salad bowl. But in terms of the end-state products Suunto is currently making? They are the best and most competitive smartwatches Suunto has ever made. Period.

However, Dongguan Liesheng’s lawsuit via Suunto appears comically misguided and naive. It illustrates an entity (be it a legal team or otherwise) that did little research into how strong a patent position Garmin has relative to Suunto, and more critically, how deep in the hole Suunto would really be when it comes to a patent battle with Garmin. Suunto effectively walked into battle with a purse-sized cache of old, and perhaps non-functional weapons. Whereas Garmin showed up with a few 747s’ worth, brand-new and straight off the factory floor. Whether or not Suunto is right about the four remaining patents is largely irrelevant because Garmin can simply show other Suunto-infringing patents all day long.

This ultimately gets to why most of these companies don’t sue each other: It’s a mutually assured destruction scenario. Virtually all of the tech companies (well beyond health/fitness) are infringing on patents from one another. Many of those patents are probably flimsy at best, but they are issued, and that’s what matters.

My guess is that over the coming weeks (maybe months if they really want to spend money), we’ll see Suunto continue to file updates to the case as they did, probably ultimately giving up entirely. Just my hunch.

With that – thanks for reading!

After a bunch of initial flirting and minimal integrations, Peloton and Garmin have finally enabled the syncing of your Peloton workouts to the Garmin Connect platform. This means that your completed Peloton workouts will now show up natively in Garmin Connect, as well as onwards to your watch, counting for Garmin metrics including Training Status, Recovery Time, and Training Load.

Previously, the integration was from Garmin to Peloton, which pushed your Garmin activity over to Peloton. While that might have been useful for some people, the far more interesting scenario for most was the opposite: Pushing Peloton into Garmin, allowing you to skip dual-starting a workout on your Garmin watch. Previously, if you didn’t concurrently start a workout, Garmin would mostly ignore that from a training standpoint. That’s now solved.

How to set up:

Setup is pretty easy, and can be done from within the Peloton app, under Settings > Connected Apps & Devices. From there, you’ll see the Garmin Connect option:

After clicking, it’ll redirect you to Connect to Garmin Connect:

This is the piece that previously would have enabled syncing from Garmin to Peloton, including Historical Data (if you toggled it, it’s off by default), and then a new option that syncs from Peloton to Garmin.

At that point, you’ll be back in the Peloton app to confirm everything and re-explain it to you:

From here, you’re fully set up and ready to roll. It doesn’t matter whether you complete a workout on an app or Peloton equipment (e.g., Peloton Bike, Treadmill, etc…). The sync is set up on the back end at the Peloton platform level.

So, let’s go do a workout.

The Workout & Sync:

Garmin says the feature covers all Peloton workout types, and will include all of the data from the Peloton workout that you have connected (e.g., if you have a heart rate sensor connected, that data will come over, same goes for cadence sensor, power if on a Peloton Bike, etc…).

In my case, I’ve got a race tomorrow, so I just went with an easier 20-minute Matt Wilpers Recovery Ride, which has a few little sprints in there to loosen things up. Nothing crazy. I did this workout fully from the Peloton app, with *no* Garmin watch/device workout started, just to see the changes occur.

I used an Apple Watch as a Bluetooth heart rate monitor for the Peloton app, but was on a regular bike smart trainer. Because the Peloton app in cycling mode can only connect to heart rate sensors and  cadence sensors (and not 3rd party power meters), no power data comes through here. But if I were on a Peloton Bike (any model), then power data would come through. Likewise, on a Peloton Treadmill, you’ll get the full data there, though the Peloton App can actually connect to treadmills via Bluetooth FTMS.

Once the workout is completed, it’ll automatically push and sync to Garmin Connect:

You can see the workout details here:

The following values were populated from this workout to the Garmin Connect file:

– Distance (as I specified in the Peloton App afterwards)
– Total Time
– Average Speed
– Average Heart Rate
– Full Heart Rate Data
– Time in Zone Data (HR)
– Training Effect (Including Aerobic and Anaerobic scores)
– Training Effect Primary Benefit (e.g., Recovery, etc…)
– Full Cadence Data (if cadence sensor paired, or on Peloton Bike)
– Full Power Data (if on Peloton Bike)
– Exercise Load (this is used for Acute Load, etc…)
– Total Calories
– Intensity Minutes (and classifications within that)

It’s also then pushed onwards to your watch. In fact, technically speaking, this is the most critical part for updating all of the metrics below, because in the Garmin world, these metrics are calculated not by Garmin Connect, but by your ‘Primary Training Devices’ (as configured in Garmin Connect Mobile under Settings > Device Priority). So, from a technical level, it does have to sync quickly to your watch and back, in order for the below metrics to update. Normally, that happens in the seconds afterwards, but just a minor FYI.

Here are the values on the watch and Garmin Connect app before starting the Peloton-only workout:

Training Readiness (before): 70
Acute Load (Training Load – before):  569
Recovery Time (before): None
Training Status (before): Productive
Endurance Score (before): 7,246
Active Calories: 4

With that, here are the values afterwards:

Training Readiness (after): 61 (-9pts)
Acute Load (Training Load – after):  629 (+60pts)
Recovery Time (after): 11 hours (+11hrs)
Training Status (after): Productive (same)
Endurance Score (after): 7,263 (+23pts)
Active Calories: 237

Everything above looks good to me, except the only oddity here was that total calories appears to be ignored. The activity itself specified 262 total calories, but after my ride, it was showing 237 calories from ‘Active’ calories. So there’s still a little deviation there that needs to be fixed (since I suspect this deviation would be higher in a longer workout with more intensity).

Still, overall, it’s exactly what people have been asking for, finally delivered!

Wrap-Up:

It’s kinda funny, this is something that Garmin folks (both Garmin execs and Garmin users alike), have been hoping for since last decade. While the two companies do have minor areas of competitive overlap, they are *far* better as partners than pretending to compete with each other. This finally makes life easy for Garmin+Peloton.

Certainly, there were some neat 3rd party options to sync data between the two platforms, but none of them were super awesome from a security standpoint, since they required sharing along your actual username/password. So this improves the security posture for both sides of the equation.

With that, go forth and link; it’s quick and easy!

Thanks for reading!

GoPro has just announced a staggering list of details around what’s to come this year, in terms of camera types, camera capabilities, and more. But first, a tiny bit of notable backstory.

Over the last 9 months, GoPro has slowly started to play offense in the action camera space, at least when it comes to communications. For the last number of years, as Insta360 and DJI have continued to eat up market share from the company, GoPro has largely taken a mostly passive defensive position. That strategy simply wasn’t working compared to the ways both DJI and Insta360 often played the ‘game’ of marketing and communications.

Last summer, we saw GoPro start to shift their thinking with the GoPro Max 2 camera launch, focused on passive-aggressively attacking portions of DJI’s OSMO 360 camera specs, by ‘leaking’ (or previewing) features GoPro did better in their own then still unannounced Max 2 camera (such as replaceable lenses). Of course, competing with Insta360’s much stronger Insta360 X5 camera was a different position altogether. Point being though, GoPro was finally acting like an aggressive competitor, instead of a passive bystander.

Today, they did it again, this time announcing their GP3 processor, and outlining some of the specs. At first glance, this might seem kinda trivial, but in reality, it’s likely to be the biggest shift GoPro has made in years. And I’m actually not entirely talking technically, but likely product announcement/scheduling too. Up until this past fall, the company has released a new action camera iteration every single September. The singular time they didn’t do so, back in the Hero Session days, it almost sunk the company.

Thus, when they announced this past September, they were skipping releasing a Hero 14 in September 2025, it signaled either the ship sinking, or a more substantial shift. Instead, they released the GoPro Hero 4K LIT, a camera that received largely lukewarm reviews (mainly because not even that LED flashlight could save GoPro’s poor low-light quality footage). However, the GoPro Max 2 hardware did receive generally quite good reviews (at least from impartial reviewers, which are tough to find in the action cam space). The software…less so.

When GoPro launched the Max 2 and the GoPro Hero 4K LIT, they noted they weren’t going to release a Hero 14, here’s what they said then:

“Not this year. MAX2 has had the full attention of GoPro this year. Many of us have been wondering what a non-yearly cadence for the HERO flagship camera might look like. This year, we’ll get to see. It is notable, however, that MAX2 represents a lot of the same or similar capabilities as the recent generation HERO Black models now, with greater flexibility and better stabilization. As a more durable and easier to use 360 camera, MAX2 represents a version of Hero “14” that is effectively a recent HERO Black edition camera with a second lens… and all the benefits that come with it. You concede a few edge modes, but gain some incredible 360 capabilities. If you were a HERO13 user waiting for HERO14 but don’t have a 360 camera, MAX2 might be a great addition.”

I’m still not entirely convinced that a non-yearly cycle will work when competing against DJI and Insta360. Though GoPro no longer has to compete with DJI in the US (due to DJI’s FCC ban, which covers all wireless-enabled products).

In any case, let’s talk about the just-announced GP3.

The GP3 Processor:

(Above image released from GoPro, using the GP3 processor)

GoPro issued a press release today to ‘debut’ the custom GP3 processor. GoPro has been using its existing GP2 processor since September 2021 with its Hero 10. At the time, it was a pretty substantial upgrade. But these days, the imaging pipeline struggles in certain areas, especially low light. Though equally, I’d argue that when it comes to typical daytime action cam scenarios, GoPro tends to beat both Insta360 and DJI. Whereas at night, GoPro is literally in the dark.

GoPro packed a lot into this press release, with quite a bit less filler than most companies stick in there. I’m going to include some quotes here:

“GoPro, Inc. today announced the upcoming launch of GP3, its most powerful custom imaging processor to date. Exclusive to GoPro, GP3 is a 5-nanometer System-on-a-Chip (SoC) that delivers more than 2X the pixel processing power and superior AI-driven image quality and low-light performance over its predecessor, GP2. GP3’s power efficiency and thermal performance are expected to significantly outperform the competition, resulting in industry-leading runtimes in the most demanding environmental conditions. These advancements position GP3 to usher in a new era of professional-level image quality, low-light performance, resolution and frame rates for small form-factor camera markets, including action cameras, 360 cameras, vlogging cameras, and ultra-premium, compact cinema-grade cameras.”

So the key things out of this first paragraph are as follows:

– The GP3 is running a 5NM SoC: That puts it in the same nanometer classification as Insta360 and DJI are using on their latest action cam chipsets. However, as always, that’s only one (kinda small) piece of the larger imaging pipeline puzzle.

– They say it’s 2X the pixel processing power: That likely ensures it can cover 8K capabilities, which Insta360 and DJI have added to their latest cameras. Though in the case of both, they will both admit it’s mostly on resolution spec, rather than something you can really use in any action scenarios (since it’s limited to 30FPS, and heavily limited in features). Whether or not GoPro would introduce a sports-usable 8K option remains to be seen.

– They mention low light performance: In fact, they do more than mention; they include a few shots on both Instagram and the press release. However, these shots all appear either heavily edited or at least somewhat out of context. So I wouldn’t put too much weight into these. But at least they’re acknowledging the elephant in the room. And to be fair, they do look pretty.

– They’re gonna make a lot of cameras: They talk about “small form-factor camera markets, including action cameras, 360 cameras, vlogging cameras, and ultra-premium, compact cinema-grade cameras.” – more on this in a second.

Ok, let’s move on to the paragraph where they dive into some more specifics:

“At the heart of GoPro’s innovative GP3 processor is a specialized AI Neural Processor Unit (NPU) that enables next-generation video pixel processing and market-leading low-light image performance. GP3 also features dedicated cores for scene recognition and subject detection, allowing GoPro cameras to understand their environment in real-time and adjust camera settings automatically. And with its 5-nanometer architecture and exceedingly efficient power-profile, GP3 is expected to enable market-leading resolutions and frame rates with runtimes and thermal performance that significantly outperform the competition.”

This time we’ve got a few more buzzwords, but also some real details in here. The challenge is separating fact from buzzwords, which will simply take time with cameras equipped with GP3.

However, if we look at both DJI and Insta360, they’ve started to leverage AI NPUs in their cameras for various scene detection and scene adjustment features. In some cases, that’s worked well, and in others, less so. There have been many videos on YouTube about how DJI (more so than Insta360) may be leaning a bit too heavily on the low-light AI processing, causing some scenes to just look wonky/artificial. Of course, inversely, both DJI and Insta360 at least have usable low-light, unlike GoPro.

However, this line is notable: “enable market-leading resolutions and frame rates with runtimes”. In order to be “market leading” in resolutions and frame rates, they’d have to go beyond the 8K/30 offered by DJI and Insta360, which means they’d be either doing 8K/60 or doing 8K/30 for longer. Further, the thermal bits is even more interesting, so both of their competitors (like GoPro too), struggle in their highest resolutions in static airflow conditions (e.g., in a still room).

Finally, we get to some more interesting tidbits on specs and timelines:

“We expect our new, exclusive GP3 processor to lead in every performance area—image quality, resolution, frame rates, low-light performance and power and thermal efficiency,” said Pablo Lema, GoPro’s Senior Vice President of Product Management.”

So, to begin, they’re saying they can beat DJI and Insta360 in every spec possible. Which again, this essentially means likely doing 8K/60, and then critically, not sucking at low-light. Also, not catching fire due to thermal limits.

The next piece, though, is timelines and products, so let’s dive into the next section.

Plans Going Forward:

(Above image released from GoPro, using the GP3 processor)

Here is where things start to become a bit clearer. As you’ll remember, back at the beginning, GoPro said this is for a whole host of product categories. Today, they’ve basically got three camera types: main action cam, mini action cam, and 360 cam. Sure, they’ve dabbled in some other stuff, but those are the current generation products.

Here’s what they said about what’s coming:

“Launching in our new products in Q2, GP3 provides a scalable, proprietary foundation we can leverage to power GoPro cameras across existing and future product categories. Our markets demand the very best performance, and we believe this sets the stage for GP3 to serve as a growth catalyst for GoPro.”

“GP3’s bleeding-edge, cinema-grade performance will enable GoPro to enter the ultra-premium end of the imaging market this year, serving the needs of a new, higher-end market segment that can grow GoPro’s business and brand,” said Nicholas Woodman, GoPro’s founder and CEO. “We’re excited for GP3 to empower GoPro as both an innovator and disrupter as we look to grow our business through market-leading technology and performance.”

So again, distilling that down:

– First products launch in Q2 2026: Assuming this means April to June 2026. This is a shift from the past September launch timeframe for their products. And I actually think it’s a wise shift. I’ve never understood why GoPro was trying to launch new action cameras to the Northern Hemisphere market in the fall, instead of trying to launch them ahead of the popular summer vacation time period, when people are largely using these things. We’ve seen both DJI and Insta360 start to shift their action camera launches to other timeframes as well.

– GoPro to enter the ultra-premium imaging market: If there’s anything that GoPro’s CEO (Nick Woodman) has talked about for longer than I can remember, it’s the idea of trying to target more the cinema realm/business. I’ve always enjoyed listening to the GoPro earnings calls over the years, because Nick tends to reveal a bit more than most CEOs do, at least if you listen. And this is one of the threads that he’s highlighted for many, many, many years – the idea of making a super premium camera that isn’t really heavily bound by price. We’ve seen some of their competitors toy around in this space, Sony a few years back, but none really had the sticking power of a GoPro. GoPros are indeed used across TV and movie production everywhere, often in small roles (no PUN intended), but they exist and are easily spotted. This would be leaning more into that.

– The product categories: Again, remember back at the beginning of the release, they talked a bunch of categories, saying “small form-factor camera markets, including action cameras, 360 cameras, vlogging cameras, and ultra-premium, compact cinema-grade cameras”. We know what small form factor cameras look like (e.g., a Hero 4K/LIT), we know what regular action cams look like (e.g., Hero 13/14), we know what 360 cameras look like (e.g., Max 2), but that still leaves a “vlogging camera” and an “ultra premium compact cinema-grade camera”. For vlogging, they’d seemingly be trying to compete with a DJI Pocket 3 (and upcoming Pocket 4), which is a very tall order. The Pocket 3 is a fantastic camera that I use as my main A-roll camera for YouTube. At the same time, Insta360 also tested their Pocket 3/4 competitor a few weeks back, too.

All of which means there’s a boatload to come. Hopefully, by GoPro shifting their camera release from last September to this spring, that means they’ve taken the time to deliver a solid set of products, rather than a rushed one. Only time will tell, but things definitely seem to be on the path towards interesting.

With Insta360 also holding back on releasing an Ace Pro 3 last year (seemingly saving it for the future), there could be a strong battle that benefits consumers this year. And as always, I’ll be there for it. Oh, and if I may make one itty-bitty-tiny request to GoPro (or Insta360)? Can you please implement DJI’s NAS sync feature, which they added a couple of months ago? If we’re talking professional workflow, it’s astoundingly useful. That is all. Give me that on every camera and drone I have, and I’ll be a happy camper.

With that – thanks for reading!

Last summer, in late August, Google was the first smartwatch company to announce satellite SOS features. At the time, it was a massive deal, as it allowed consumers to send emergency messages directly from their smartwatches to emergency response centers, even outside of cellular range. Well, at least as long as they were in the US.

Of course, as (unfortunate for Google) luck would have it, within two weeks both Garmin and Apple announced similar services, albeit with greater service areas and features, and ultimately beating Google to actually ship said watches/features to consumers. But today, Google is starting to turn the tide a bit in that realm.

They’ve announced that their satellite SOS piece for Pixel Watch 4 is now rolling out beyond just the continental United States, specifically now available in the following regions:

United States: Expanding to Alaska and Hawaii
Canada: Adding the whole of Maple Syrup land
Europe: Adding all of these countries: DK, DE, UK, ES, IE, FI, FR, IT, NL, NO, SE, BE, AT, SK, PL, HU, RO, PT, CH, CZ, SI, LV, LT, EE

As with before, this is still run by Garmin’s Emergency Response center (aka Garmin Response), the same one you’d talk to on a Garmin device. That’s good, because it means there’s no ‘learning curve’ on the part of Google for these added regions. It’s something Garmin has been doing for 15 years (fun tidbit, they just published this 2025 SOS recap last week).

Speaking of good news, there are a few other features coming to the Pixel Watch 4 as well:

Left behind phone reminders, phone lock on disconnect and mobile trusted location via Watch: Pixel Watch works proactively to secure your phone, with instant alerts if you accidentally leave it behind and an automatic lock on your phone the moment you move out of range. Plus, a connected watch and phone now offer faster identity checks for smooth, secure access. [Phone lock and Left Behind on Pixel Watch 2+, Trusted locations Pixel Watch 3 & 4]
Express Pay: Pay even more conveniently by just turning and tapping your Pixel Watch to a retail terminal without opening the Wallet app–or compromising security. [Available on Pixel Watch 2+]
Find Hub on Pixel Watch: Find your misplaced devices and essentials in seconds, right from your wrist with Find Hub on Pixel Watch.
One-handed gestures: Our intuitive one-handed gestures will be expanding to Pixel Watch 3 [Already on Pixel Watch 4]
Earthquake alerts: The new standalone earthquake alerts notify users of nearby earthquakes in real-time, providing seconds of warning before the shaking starts. [Available on Pixel Watch 2+]

Finally, I don’t tend to cover phone stuff unless it intersects with sports/fitness stuff, but it’s worthwhile noting that this is all part of Google’s larger March 2026 ‘Pixel Drop’ where an assortment of Pixel products (phones, watches, etc…) are getting new features. In addition, there’s also a slate of Android feature updates being announced. I didn’t see anything else in the list that intersected with the sports/fitness realm, but you can dig into those here if that’s up your alley.

In any case, back to watches, I’d have to assume the next step here is expansion beyond emergency SOS features (e.g., to regular satellite texting and location updating like Apple has, or some other variant like Garmin has). I had confirmed last year with the Google Pixel Watch team that there wasn’t anything technical from a hardware standpoint that limits them here, but really more of the software side. That of course, makes sense, because the hardware layer doesn’t really care if you’re sending out a message that you’ve been attacked by a bear, or that instead, you’re just texting a friend that you ran out of Haribo. Same-same to the watch NTN hardware, just different bears.

I’d have to imagine just a feature expansion would happen no later than a Pixel Watch 5 launch (presumably late summer 2026 or early fall 2026), though equally, I think there’s a strong case to be made to do that as part of Google I/O (May 19/20th, 2026), or something else aside from new hardware launches. Either way, looking forward to that happening at some point.

With that, thanks for reading!

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Remember last summer when it was found that COROS had a slate of pretty severe security vulnerabilities? Initially, these vulnerabilities were ignored by COROS, but following a wee bit of newly applied internet assistance, the company quickly started to focus its efforts on actually fixing them. That’s a good thing, because the vulnerabilities were about as bad as you can get from a security standpoint (short of the watch combusting on your wrist if you missed the prescribed target during an interval).

Of course, you might also remember this was a vast effort affecting every one of their products, at numerous layers. This was not just one minor security bug, but at least half a dozen major architectural changes. Even for a major company, these types of changes wouldn’t be easy to make, nor fast to make. They impacted how the watches talked to the app, and they also affected every single device the company made.

In any event, the security researcher (Moritz Abrell) who found these vulnerabilities recently gave a talk at a security conference about the entire process (both technical and non-technical). This is pretty common in the security realm to do such a presentation, often once the dust settles (or sometimes, to create the dust storm if a company isn’t responding).

If you’re into computers, geekery, or just general security tidbits, the presentation shared above is worth a watch. And of course, you can find more on his site here. And finally, COROS has a dedicated page that outlines which watches were impacted and which firmware updates fixed which issues.

With that, thanks for reading!

Now two years after Favero started their Pro lineup of power meters, they’ve completed the cleat type rollout, by announcing their Assioma Pro RL power meter pedal, with Look-compatible cleats. This follows the PRO MX (off-road SPD) in 2024, then the PRO RS (road Shimano SPD-SL) in 2025, and now the PRO RL (Look-compatible) here in 2026.

All three pedals share an identical power meter spindle internally, and you can swap pedal body types between the different spindles. Meaning, you can move the internal spindle pretty easily from an RL/RS pedal body for road usage in the summer, to being an SPD pedal for winter off-road usage. As always with pedal spindle swaps, the procedure is not really designed for daily switching, but for infrequent switching.

In any event, both my wife and I have been riding the PRO RL pedals over the last while, on rides upwards of five hours, though realistically, it’s the exact same spindle as I’ve been riding for 2+ years on the MX and RS units. In other words, it’s just a different external pedal body. You can even buy that new body if you want to, for 95EUR (for the pair, for any pedal body cleat type actually).

Lastly, these pedals are media loaners from Favero. I’ll go out shortly and buy my own for long-term usage purposes, as I’ve continued to do with Favero power meters. As always, I don’t accept advertising from any company I review, and no company sees my reviews before you do. So, if you found this review useful, consider becoming a DCR Supporter, which gets you an ad-free site, plus the behind-the-scenes video series between both myself (and my wife) on everything that happens in the DCR Sports Tech Cave/universe.

What’s new:

Now again, this is the exact same internal spindle as the two previous PRO series power meter pedals from 2024/2025 (just with a new cleat type). Thus, it’s best to compare this to the older Favero Assioma pedals from a long time ago, since that’s what anyone looking to upgrade is coming from.

With that in mind, the key differences to the existing Favero Assioma Duo pedals are:

– Added SPD cleat type (previous was LOOK KEO and SPD-SL)
– Got rid of battery/communications/charging pod entirely. Everything is inside the spindle now
– Added Platform Center Offset (PCO) within the cycling dynamics suite of metrics (previously they couldn’t get that specific item, while already having other cycling dynamics metrics).
– Increased battery life to 160 hours (with new firmware update last month), from previously 50 hours with Favero Assioma Duo
– Includes dual USB-C cabled connectors for the charging cable (though the actual charging port to plug into the wall is still unfortunately USB-A)

Next, is the spindle design. This spindle design changed from the Favero Assioma Duo to the MX/RS/RL pedals, and the spindle is the core component of any power meter pedal, whether Garmin, Look, or Favero. Up until the Garmin Vector/Rally pedals, companies would build power meter pedals that couldn’t be swapped between pedal cleat types. Garmin changed that, and then Favero and Look followed suit in their more recent models (such as this one here). This is super useful to consumers because you can just swap pedal types if you want to move between different applications. Further, in other realms, it also means that in case the pedal body breaks (e.g., bad impact, especially off-road on rocks), usually the spindle is just fine. It’s exceptionally rare to manage to break a spindle.

Here’s the spindle inside the Favero PRO series:

When Favero announced the MX spindle, they talked a lot about how they moved the battery and communication components deeper into the spindle itself to protect it. Further, by staying with rechargeable batteries, it reduced coin-cell connection dropouts (we saw Garmin switch to rechargeable as well back in September 2025 with the Rally x10 series). But probably the biggest advancement for Favero was frankly the battery increase last month (Feb 2026 via firmware update) more than doubling the battery from 50-60 hours up to a claim of 160 hours. Up till then, Garmin was substantially higher than them, at roughly 90 hours on the newer rechargeable model. Plus, Garmin previously had all three pedal types (SPD/SPD-SL/Look), versus just the two for Favero.

But between the change to the battery via firmware, and now completing the lineup to Look, it basically extinguishes almost all scenarios in which Garmin beats Favero. And of course, the big one that Favero beats Garmin on is simply price. Garmin is nearly double the price of Favero. There are only two minor technical areas where Garmin beats Favero.  One is having secure Bluetooth connections (as required by upcoming EU regulations), which Favero somewhat oddly doesn’t comply with. I suspect Favero is taking the position that power meter data isn’t PII. And the other being the display of Force (vs Torque), which Garmin added in the x10 units. Frankly, not sure either is super compelling for most cyclists.

In any case, let’s look at the actual Favero Pro RL specs:

– Claimed accuracy: +/- 1% (0-3,000w)
– Temperature Compensation: Yes – active temperature compensation
– Auto-Zero Capability: Yes
– Manual Zero-Offset Capability: Yes
– Connectivity: ANT+ (unlimited concurrent connections), and Bluetooth Smart (three concurrent connections)
– Cadence Transmitted: Yes (10-250rpm)
– Left/right Balance Transmitted: Yes
– Cycling Dynamics (or similar): Yes, full suite
– Oval/Q Chainring Compatible: Yes
– Weight per pedal: 130.0 g (per pedal)
– Battery type: Rechargeable
– Battery life: Claimed 160 hours
– Battery quick charge: 15 hours in 15 minutes
– Water Resistance: IP67
– Operating Temp Range: -10°C to +55°C
– Max Cyclist Weight: 120kg
– Q-Factor: +53mm
– Stack Height: 10.5mm
– Cleat Contact Surface: 755 mm2

I’ll cover the comparison bits to Garmin a bit later in the review.

Last but not least, let’s talk pricing. Here’s the official chart of what pricing should be. Note that this is identical to the Favero Assioma Pro RS series, just with Look-compatible pedal bodies instead:

Got all that? Good.

In The Box:

Above is the box, and below is what’s inside the box:

Of course, this is what you’re really looking for:

In a nutshell, you’ve got:

1) The power meter pedals (Pro RL)
2) Look-compatible cleats (Favero branded though)
3) The mounting hardware (to mount cleats to your shoes)
4) Dual USB-C charging cable (though the charging block connector portion is USB-A)
5) Two charging clips (USB-C inside)
6) Grease application tool
7) Some paper stuff you probably won’t read

Here’s a closer look at the pedals:

And these are indeed made in Italy at Favero’s factory there.

Here you can see how you’d access the spindle for swapping of pedal bodies:

Meanwhile, the charging cable is the same as on the Pro RS series, which has an internal USB-C connection for each connector, though oddly still has USB-A at the charging end.

The nice part, though, about this dual-cable (aside from charging two pedals at once), is that it’s super long, so you can easily reach from a nearby outlet, around your bike’s wheels/etc, to the pedals.

Install & Setup:

(Above: Favero Assioma Pro RS, MX, and RL pedals)

Getting the pedals installed is silly easy, just as in the past. It’ll take about 3 minutes, including the time it takes to download the free Favero app, which is required to activate the pedals. Without that activation, they won’t transmit power. Depending on when you buy these pedals, it may take a few more minutes for the most recent firmware update to download to the pedals (which unlocks all the big battery gains).

In my case, I decided to mount them on the bike first, and then did the app piece. The reason for that is that the calibration portion at the end of the activation steps requires it be on the bike. So, to install them, you’ll grab a pedal wrench first, and then remove any pedals you’ve got on your bike already.

After that, you’ll add the spacer ring to each pedal spindle. This is to ensure that the spindle doesn’t clip your chain/chainstay, as well as to ensure no portion of the pedal is touching any carbon cranks’ sidewall.

Then, of course, grab that pedal wrench again to install the pedals onto your bike. As always, give it a fair bit of force to ensure proper accuracy.

With that set, you’ll attach the charging cable to each pedal. This is required to wake up the pedal from the factory sleep state. After that, crack open the Favero app, where you’ll search for nearby pedals to pair to:

Then walk through the quick wizard on installing it, as well as updating the firmware.

Probably the most important setting in here to ensure you’ve got correct is the crank length. This is etched/printed on the inside of your crank arm, right near where you attach the pedals. The most common crank length on bikes is 172.5mm, though most athletes who have custom-ordered a bike probably have something different. Here I’ve set mine to 175mm, my wife’s is 165mm.

With all that set, you’re good to go. Note that I typically will do a few hard sprints on the bike (on a trainer) to ensure the pedals are fully settled, before doing another zero offset (aka calibration). Technically, that’s different than a static weighted calibration, but most bike computers just call it calibration.

Daily Ride Usage:

Both my wife and I have been riding the Pro RL (Look) pedals for a bit now, on all of our road rides. And of course prior to that, I’ve been riding both the Pro RS & Pro MX pedals for gravel/MTB/road riding for two years without issue. And again, that’s the exact same spindle, just a different pedal body on the outside.

When it comes to daily usage, the Pro RL, like its siblings, pairs up to any bike computer or watch that supports ANT+ or Bluetooth Smart power meters (which is all of them). I’ve tested this with bike computers, including Garmin, Wahoo, Hammerhead, COROS, and watches from Apple, Garmin, Suunto, Amazfit, and more. I’ve had no issues with the display of data.

To add the pedals to your bike computer, you’ll search for the sensor (power meter):

The Favero pedals can pair over both ANT+ & Bluetooth Smart. For basic power data, it won’t matter to you. Your bike computer will know which is best and pair appropriately. Generally speaking, you’ll use ANT+ for power meter data because it has more data in it. The standard Bluetooth Smart power meter profile doesn’t have all the additional data ANT+ does, such as lacking pedal smoothness, torque effectiveness, and cycling dynamics (Platform Center Offset, Power Phase, and Seated/Standing Time). This means you won’t get that data when pairing over Bluetooth Smart on watches from Polar, Suunto, Apple, and others.

(Above: My Favero ANT+ ID for this set is 10371, which is also showing as a Bluetooth power meter listed as AssiomaPRO10371L)

Of mild interest here to geeks is that Garmin introduced Secure Bluetooth pairing to their power meter pedals last fall, as well as secure Bluetooth connection pairing on their bike computers/watches in the last year. However, no other power meter company has introduced that (despite the upcoming EU regulation requiring it). But more notable here is that as part of that shift, Garmin has added Secure Bluetooth cycling dynamics support, but has *NOT* made that available to 3rd parties as they did for ANT+. This means that once Favero implements a secure Bluetooth connection, it’ll likely lose support for Cycling Dynamics as part of that. This is unfortunate, and I really hope Garmin rethinks its stance on this. To me, this would arguably lessen the value-prop of buying a Garmin/Garmin (GPS/power meter pedals) combo, versus saving money by buying a Wahoo/Favero combo.

In any case, once paired up to your bike computer, you can (and should) validate that your crank length is correct. This should flow down from what you set in the Favero app, but you should always double-check. Mismatches in crank length between two recording devices (e.g., a watch and bike computer) will lead to an assortment of bad-bad.

You can also validate that the various Cycling Dynamics settings are configured here as well, specifically paying attention to the ‘Torque Effectiveness and Pedal Smoothing’ setting, which, for whatever bizarre reason, Garmin defaults to ‘Off’, rather than showing. One of these days I’ll remember to ask why they simply don’t set that to enabled to record, but, they don’t.

Again, you can configure whatever data fields you want, but in terms of the data the Favero Pro RL pedals will transmit, it’s the following:

– [ANT+/Bluetooth] Total power (combined left/right)
– [ANT+/Bluetooth] Power Balance (left/right split)
– [ANT+/Bluetooth] Cadence (RPM)
– [ANT+] Torque Effectiveness
– [ANT+] Pedal Smoothness
– [ANT+] Platform Center Offset (Cycling Dynamics)
– [ANT+] Seated/Standing Time (Cycling Dynamics)
– [ANT+] Power Phase (Cycling Dynamics)

Now, technically speaking, it’s transmitting torque and cadence, and your bike computer figures out power. But that’s just a minor technicality.

With all that sorted, once you start pedaling, you’ll get your cycling data on any data pages you’ve configured. For example, the following shows my power in the center chart, and then the left/right power balance lower down.

This can also include the Cycling Dynamics data page as well, if you have it added. For the most part, the main appeal of cycling dynamics is probably PCO, which can be used in bike-fitting scenarios, as well as for cleat placement. Here, we can see there’s probably some room for adjusting my cleats very slightly. Though I’ll also likely be too lazy to do anything about it.

Plus any other data pages you want, using any of the power data fields you want. For example, your bike computer will do calculations for things like 3-second or 3-second-smoothed power. The pedals themselves are just transmitting the instantaneous data, and then the bike computer does any extra math from there.

And then at the end of the ride, you’ll get any summary data. If you were on Garmin, you’d see stuff like this too in Garmin Connect:

And the same goes for the Cycling Dynamics data, assuming you’re paired on ANT+:

At the end of the day, you’ve got the underlying data to fulfill any data fields you’d want to use for training/racing. Of course, the most common are power and cadence, though some people do find value in the Cycling Dynamics pieces, or the left/right balance pieces. I don’t tend to find value in either, and think that the left/right balances are mostly limited in appeal to those recovering from injury. In many ways, the same largely applies to Cycling Dynamics – at nearly a decade later, nobody has really come up with a practical way to utilize that to get faster (and most people that try to change their pedal style forcefully, end up losing power gains). Just pedal your bike, it’ll work out.

Power Meter Accuracy:

In this section I’ll take a look at how the power meter compares to various other sources. This includes three different bike setups. I’ve got my road bike, my triathlon bike, and my wife’s bike.

That said, since it’s the exact same spindle as the Favero Assioma Pro MX and Pro RS that I’ve been using now for nearly 2 years, and comparing against countless power meters, trainers, smart bikes, and more (as a reference device no less), there are really very few surprises here. Instead, my focus was on validating that nothing weird popped up (since that does happen from time to time in other products that seemingly should be the same). You can see my accuracy testing in both of those reviews, or frankly, any other trainer/smart bike, or power meter review since.

First up, here’s a trainer ride I did this..well…ending 12 minutes ago. This is compared to a SRAM crankset with spider-based power meter, and a Wahoo KICKR CORE 2 (with a mechanical cassette):

It’s definitely interesting (and frankly, unusual) to see that drift from the KICKR CORE 2 today. Might be related to some temperature shifts, though, it only dropped about 2°C during the workout. Equally, I shifted throughout the workout to a lower ring in the cassette, to try and get a lower speed, which usually increases accuracy of trainers by reducing flywheel speed, though today apparently not. Reminds me to just get out the Tacx NEO 3M and not deal with having to think about it.

In any case, the SRAM & Favero units remained close throughout, though you’ll see slight variation second to second.

Next, we’ve got a 5-hour ride my wife did (block time was 6 hours 30 minutes, but that included a long cafe stop…as one does on Spanish rides). This was a pretty chill ride, so nothing super-crazy power-meter-wise here, but more just a validation that nothing wonky came up:

Note the brief moment after a cafe stop when the bike computer didn’t reconnect to one of the power meters. She noticed it immediately and then manually forced the connection to reconnect. I’ve seen this on both Garmin & Wahoo bike computers, where when a connection times out for a long time, the automatic search to resume that connection doesn’t always happen instantly (I suspect they do this for background battery savings, otherwise it’s searching for every sensor in your library constantly).

In any case, looking at a random snippet, looks spot-on:

As always, you’re going to see slight variations second-by-second in these sorts of things, though I’m not seeing much of a difference here:

Next, here’s another one of her rides, this time a 2hr trainer ride. This is compared SRAM RED power meter, and a Wahoo KICKR CORE 2 (this one with a Zwift Cog on it).

Zooming in on one of the intervals, you can see pretty close alignment. I tend to see the SRAM a tiny bit higher at this point, but not massively so.

Meanwhile, over on cadence, everyone is identical:

There’s nothing here that concerns me from the Favero side, and everything continues to line up nicely as I’ve seen from all my existing RS and MX pedals.

(Note: All of the charts in these accuracy portions were created using the DCR Analyzer tool. It allows you to compare power meters/trainers, heart rate, cadence, speed/pace, running power, GPS tracks, and plenty more. You can use it as well for your own gadget comparisons, more details here.)

Power Meter Pedal Comparison:

When it comes to power meter pedals, the main options today are:

– Favero (SPD, SPD-SL, Look)
– Garmin (SPD, SPD-SL, Look)
– Look (SPD, Look)
– SRM (SPD, SPD-SL, Flat)
– Wahoo (Speedplay)

A few other companies also make pedals, including Magene, though the accuracy of these units is still in question (granted, I see that’s also the case for Look’s pedals too, though admittedly I haven’t revisited them recently).

In terms of comparison, Favero made a chart showing the difference, and having checked through every line, I don’t have any accuracy concerns on this chart, save the extra bits I’m going to talk about after I show you this chart:

All of the above is correct, though, in fairness/completeness, I’d note the following:

– Inside/Outside spindle strain gauges: This hasn’t had any real-world impact for any brands over the last decade, in terms of spindle vulnerability/protection; thus, I wouldn’t overthink this.
– Garmin has Secure Bluetooth connections: This was introduced on the Rally x10 series last fall. Just like inside/outside strain gauges, this really isn’t something people have asked/cared about, to be honest (aside from EU regulators). Nobody else has this for power meter data at this time, aside from Garmin.
– Bluetooth channels: Since it’s missing from the chart above, Garmin has three concurrent BT channels, the same as Favero.
– Shows direct force measurements: Garmin added direct force measurement display in the Rally x10 series of pedals, but again, it’s not something that anyone is doing much with. But hey, it’s there if you want it.

Realistically, the biggest single item here not shown is just price. Garmin’s power meter pedals are priced at $1,200-$1,300 per pair (depending on cleat type), whereas Favero’s are $789USD per pair. The factors like pedal body spares are also notable, at $100/set for Favero, or $400/set for Garmin. Garmin does have a bundle where they sell road+offroad kit of your choice of Look or SPD-SL road pedal plus the XC off-road pedal bodies for $1,450 (so you can move back and forth). But again, you’d be within about $130 of buying two full sets of Favero power meter pedals, with no spindle swapping required. Spend that spindle-swapping time eating ice cream or doing other calorie-burning activities.

As I alluded to earlier, there are probably scenarios – specific countries, where having Garmin’s support teams/policies local to the country may make more sense. I’m thinking of scenarios like Brazil or others that have super-high import taxes that can often cause inbound shipments to get all dorked up (even when companies try to do all the paperwork correctly). So that may be something to consider.

Wrap-Up:

At the end of the day, Favero completing their cleat choice lineup is a good thing for consumers. It gives them more options, and more critically, keeps the pricing low for those that want highly accurate Look cleat-based power meter pedals. As I’ve said repeatedly over the past few years, while I think that Garmin and Favero make equally accurate and reliable power meter pedal units, when it comes to equipping my fleet of bikes (for both myself and my wife), I continue to spend my own money on the Favero Pro series units, due to one single factor: Price.

I can nearly buy two Favero power meter pedal sets for the price of a single Garmin set. This means I can equip both a gravel bike and a road bike with power meter pedals that I don’t have to move around/change spindles, for almost the price of a single Garmin set. And with the latest battery firmware update, that increases the battery substantially on Favero. And again, durability/accuracy is the same on both in all my testing. I will note that I think there are support reasons in certain countries where Garmin is probably easier/faster than Favero (because Garmin has local support centers vs Favero only in Italy), but Favero has made good progress there in recent years.

But back to Favero alone, all of my Pro series sets have been rock-solid over the past few years. I’ve beaten the crap out of them, especially the Pro MX series ones, but also road ones too (Pro RS). I can reliably use them for power meter accuracy testing of other power meters (e.g., cranksets), as well as indoor smart trainers. That’s really the key metric to consider: Can I use these as an accurate baseline for testing? And the answer to that is a clear yes.

With that, thanks for reading!

TrainingPeaks Virtual has expanded with a major new feature that lets you import in a GPX route and ride virtually any route/road/path on the planet. As long as you have a route you’ve already ridden, or create a GPX route from any number of major platforms (Strava, Garmin, Komoot, etc…), then you’re good to go! The feature, as the title implies, is called GPXplore.

This feature lets you ride the route elevation and curves, while also attempting to blend some of the satellite imagery as a basemap which TrainingPeaks Virtual will then blend with 3D graphics to simulate the gist of the landscape around you. Give or take an extra snow-capped mountain. Still, the key thing here is enabling TrainingPeaks athletes and coaches to easily get ridable routes into an indoor training platform that connects with their smart trainers to simulate. That’s the core goal, and that’s achieved here.

After a few harder days of running, I had an easy trainer ride scheduled for today, thus perfect to give this a whirl. So let’s dive into it.

Getting a Route In:

While this part isn’t hard, it’s also a little bit messy (at least at scale). You’ll need to first create the route somewhere else (e.g., on some other platform), before importing it into your TrainingPeaks account. You’ll need a GPX file, so that can be from an existing route you’ve ridden (e.g., exported from Garmin Connect, or Wahoo, Hammerhead, etc…), or a route you’ve created (e.g., Strava, Komoot, etc…). It doesn’t really matter a ton where you create the route, as long as it’s created and you’ve got a file.

In an ideal world, TrainingPeaks would just be able to be a destination for routes from Strava, Komoot, etc… but there’s all assortment of business complexities there (mostly on the part of the others), making this more cumbersome than it needs to be.

Once you’ve got a file, you’ll need to import the file into TrainingPeaks (the website, not the TrainingPeaks Virtual app). This piece is honestly a little bit clunky compared to just importing it into the app, but such is life. Log in, and on the left side you’ll see routes:

From there, just choose the file you want to import:

It only takes a second, and then it’s imported in. It would be a nice touch if they just auto-filled the title in, based on the GPX file name (currently you have to manually title it).

Next, you’ll open up TrainingPeaks Virtual (the game app), and then navigate to ‘Events’, and from there choose ‘Add New’. First, I’d argue this should just be on the main home dashboard as a thing you can do. Zwift learned this lesson a few years ago with structured workouts and such, to just put the things people want on the homepage (especially newly/just-created things). After all, the entire point of TrainingPeaks buying this platform was for deeper integration. Now that the integration is there, don’t hide it by making people create one-off events. Just make it an easy-button.

Anyways, go and create an event, and then you’ll see the option for ‘My Routes’ at the bottom:

Again, I’d argue that if I select a route name, it should just automatically populate that as the title. I know these sound like little nitpicking things (and they are minor), but it’s all about fast workflow for time-crunched athletes. Minimizing friction. The good thing is that George and the TPV crew are incredibly quick at implementing suggestions (by far the fastest in the industry).

Note that if you scroll down, you can select a Biome, which drives the environment around you.

Also, if you scroll down in these settings, there’s options like how many bots are riding with you, requiring a code, etc… I had initally not even noticed there was a scroll bar, let alone all the other options.

In any case, from there it creates an event at a given time, and then you can copy that out to friends. Look, I get it, this feature was based on creating routes for events, rather than the individual athlete. But I’d argue (again) that the whole purpose of TP buying this platform (IndieVelo) was for the individual athlete. I just want to ride the route right now, not schedule it for the future with more clicks. Again, reduce friction, reduce clicks, increase time to ride.

And don’t even get me started on how this event doesn’t show up under my events. I have to enter a code to see my own event that I just created, otherwise this section is just blank. But why?

If I tap on it, I can see the event details, including the route, profile, etc… all of which looks good to me.

Of course, once you tap ‘Let’s Ride’, you need to wait till the start of the event (the soonest you can create it is 5 minutes in advance). I’ve brought up these concerns to TrainingPeaks, and it sounds like they’re already on the case, aiming to simplify/streamline this shortly.

Basically, what I want is:

1) Import GPX into TrainingPeaks (web)
2) Option to tap ‘Ride Now’ on TrainingPeaks Virtual Home Dashboard
3) Instantly start riding the route

Speaking of which, let’s look at how it works once you start riding.

Riding the Route:

With that sorted, you’ll be placed in the starting pen until the event begins. Even on a private event (as mine was, with just me), by deafult you’ll be joined by 29 other simulated riders (bots). You can change this in the settings.

I thought it was mildly interesting to see how TPV overlaid a starting pen loop atop the streets here. You can see the satellite imagery below it, and this is normally a quiet four-way intersection.

In any case, off we went. The route that TPV creates is basically an identical route to your GPX file, from an elevation/gradient/road turn standpoint. What isn’t identical, however, is what surrounds the road, as well as the road surface itself (as I’ll see later). So, for example, here on the quiet street around my home, this is what it looks like in the game vs real life:

As much as I’d love for the mountains to magically surround the island like a James Bond movie (and be snow-capped), that’s definitely not the case either.

Still, the ups/downs of the road are real, which made it fun to fly down a hill at 75KPH that normally has a turn you can’t do above 50KPH for fear of ending up with the sheep.

There do appear to be some bugs to work out with portions of the routes that overlap, these result in fences for riders to…ummm…navigate. This seems to occur any time the route doubles back on itself.

Likewise, there are moments when the cyclists appear to be using non-UCI-compliant bikes, pushing so hard that they simply melt into the pavement.

Still, in terms of the overall ups/downs of a course, it captures it well. Having ridden this route more times than I could possibly count, it does a good job there.

However, the surrounding terrain is mostly incorrect. About the closest it got was one point where I dipped down close to the water on a U-Turn, and it showed the gist of it:

Here’s it in real life:

Still, it’s hard to replicate everything on earth. In many ways, this is akin to RGT’s Magic Roads concept, where you could basically just generate a route based on a GPX file. Which is, in turn, equivalent to what Tacx has had for literally like 15 years (see my review from 2011 of this concept). And there are, of course, countless other small apps that do this too.

Nonetheless, having it in a larger/more mainstream app is beneficial to lots of people, and in the case of TrainingPeaks itself, this is a super common scenario. Many times over the last few years, my wife (who, like me, has been using TP for nearly 20 years) wants to ride a given upcoming race route (e.g., Ironman XYZ or Challenge XYZ), just to understand the general ups/downs. In the past, we’ve either tried to find the route on Rouvy or Fulgaz, or on occasion, messed around with the Tacx app. All of which provide a bit more scenic detail (full videos in the case of Rouvy/Fulgaz), but in many cases you might not really care about the scenery, and you just want the elevation profile. This solves that.

Anyways, cool stuff, and I’m looking forward to seeing the TrainingPeaks Virtual team make some minor tweaks here to streamline this process. Knowing their history in making such tweaks, I suspect it’ll be done by tomorrow at lunch. Maybe even breakfast.

With that – thanks for reading!