With the success of Whoop and Fitbit Air, screen-free fitness trackers are suddenly cool again. They’ve become so popular, in fact, that one of the biggest makers of GPS sports watches is now joining the category with the release of the Garmin Cirqa Smart Band.
That’s right, the guys that make some of the most popular sports watches just ditched the watch part with their newest release. It’s still got a case for housing all the electronics, but there’s no screen on it whatsoever, making it ideal for folks who want a break from the constant stream of backlit display panels everywhere you look.
The Garmin Cirqa Smart Band is a fitness tracker that sticks mostly to the basics, incorporating the necessary sensors for activity and physical monitoring, while eliminating other sensors that the outfit typically uses for navigation and other outdoor tasks. That means, it gets an accelerometer, an optical heart rate sensor, an SpO2 sensor, and a skin temperature sensor, but ditches the GPS, barometric altimeter, and gyroscope. They also didn’t put in ECG hardware or an EDA sensor, so it won’t quite go in-depth into the health metrics those are able to measure. However, it’s still quite the capable fitness tool.
For instance, it can track more than 80 different activities, with profiles for different types of running, gym workouts, low-impact exercises, cycling, swimming, and more. While there’s no GPS, it can use your phone’s GPS to extrapolate distance, time, pace, and cadence more accurately, while also capturing all sorts of training, planning, and analysis metrics. If you wear it full time, it can also track your sleep quality as well as record in-depth health metrics such as blood oxygen saturation for detecting any potential health issues.
The Garmin Cirqa Smart Band has a single side button on the case in the band, which is meant to serve as a shortcut for your favorite activity profile. Basically, you just press that every time you want it to load a profile and start monitoring it. Other than that, there’s no other way to interact with the device, requiring you to use the smartphone app for everything else. From the app, you can choose which activity profiles to use, review your training performance, check on your health and sleep ratings, and more. It offers, pretty much, the same kind of detailed metrics as Garmin’s sports watches, albeit minus the items that require specialty sensors to measure.
Because there’s no screen, it’s able to maintain a long battery life. According to the outfit, you can go as long as 10 days between charges, which is very convenient for people who don’t appreciate having to charge multiple gadgets every day. We do wish they distributed the electronics across the band, so there didn’t to be a chunky case in one section (it looks like a watch case is hidden under the band), but we guess it’s simpler to go this route. If you’re fine with the aesthetics. The band comes in four different colors and two sizes.
The Garmin Cirqa Smart Band is available now, priced at $199.99.
