Garmin’s Forerunner 955 assessment: Still king for runners and cyclists

If you are in any respect conversant in Garmin’s wearables, you understand that GPS-equipped operating watches have all the time been the corporate’s main power. Garmin’s health watches have been a staple amongst athletes as a consequence of their options that are not discovered on Fitbits and Apple Watches. The Forerunner collection remains to be the place the corporate introduces a few of its most modern monitoring and coaching options.

The Forerunner 955 continues that custom. It sits atop the Forerunner collection as essentially the most feature-packed watch within the bunch, and this yr it features some trendy touches like a touchscreen and day by day train readiness assessments (à la Fitbit’s Daily Readiness function, however free to customers), whereas introducing new options not current on some other Garmin watch. That contains the higher-end Fenix collection of watches, from which the Forerunner 955 can be beginning to steal some cues, like solar-charging choices and multi-band GPS.

We skilled with the Forerunner 955 for a couple of weeks to see how its latest options enhance on a platform we already love and to find out simply how afraid Garmin must be about Apple or Fitbit catching up.

A brand new touchscreen, photo voltaic choice, and multi-band GPS

The Forerunner 955 has the same design to the 945 earlier than it, however that is the primary Forerunner to include a touchscreen show you possibly can disable manually or mechanically throughout actions. It’s additionally the primary Forerunner to function a photo voltaic charging choice for a $100 premium, and it is the primary with multi-band GPS help. Multi-band GPS supplies extra correct location monitoring that’s extra dependable in difficult environments. The function was beforehand reserved for Garmin’s highest-end trackers.

The 955’s face grew a tenth of an inch, widening the show to 1.3 mm and permitting for a brand new digitized second hand going across the edges of the display. The solar-charging model provides a neat reflective rim across the watch face the place it soaks in daylight for a bump in battery life. Altogether, this makes for a barely larger watch than its predecessor, but it surely does not bulge off your arm like Garmin’s Fenix or Epix watches may.

Under the hood, we nonetheless have sensors for coronary heart price, blood oxygen monitoring, GPS, and 32GB of storage for music. The Forerunner is rated for 5ATM water resistance, and it could possibly function from -4º F to 140º F.

Same OS, new touch-based interactions

Garmin hasn’t tweaked the aesthetics or mechanics of the OS a lot, as a substitute specializing in refining and creating new monitoring options. I don’t have any qualms with the UI—they get the job performed—but it surely was good to see the introduction of interactive watch faces on the platform. It’s not a lot, however the default face has a carousel of quick-view stats you possibly can faucet by way of that embody VO₂ max, coronary heart price variability (HRV), coaching load, and exercise minutes.

Garmin’s inexperience with touchscreen interfaces is obvious on the Forerunner 955. It’s not instantly intuitive what every icon is telling you, and it will be useful when you may long-press every of them to see extra info, very similar to how watch face problems on the Apple Watch work. Hopefully, this form of touch-optimized interface growth will come quickly.

New Training Readiness scores and assessments

Garmin’s robust swimsuit continues to be its free, in-depth well being metrics and coaching evaluation. The firm is leagues forward of its rivals in offering coaching enchancment options and sport-specific assessments (notably operating, but additionally biking and swimming to barely lesser extents).

With the 955, Garmin additional refined these metrics for accuracy whereas including two extra mainstream options: Training Readiness and Morning Report. Training Readiness makes use of your sleep rating historical past, coronary heart price variability, stress historical past (primarily based on HRV), restoration time since your final exercise, and Garmin’s Acute Training Load function to evaluate how prepared you might be to train day-after-day.