For all the Garmin fans out there who have been utterly ruthless about leaks, today is your day: Garmin has launched the Cirqa Smart Band for $199.99. After months of speculation, it’s finally official, and I've spent the last few hours wearing one. Here's everything we know so far about Garmin's first screenless smart band, along with my first impressions.
My first impressions of the Garmin Cirqa Smart BandThe Cirqa is Garmin's entry into the increasingly crowded arena of screenless smart band fitness trackers. On paper, it looks like a middle ground between the Fitbit Air ($99.99) and Whoop (which famously has tiered subscription-based pricing; Whoop charges $239/year for its medium-tier subscription, including a Whoop 5.0 device). My colleague Beth Skwarecki compares those two bands here, and I look forward to seeing how she thinks the Cirqa fits into the market.The pitch, in Garmin's words, is that its band "reduces distraction while still delivering full-day health and fitness tracking." You get 24/7 monitoring of heart rate, stress, Body Battery, Pulse Ox, and skin temperature, all viewable after the fact in the Garmin Connect app. The Cirqa automatically detects and classifies your workouts, and allegedly gets better at that classification over time as you go into the Garmin Connect app and confirm or correct what it thinks you were doing.
