r/Garmin

So I had a pretty bad crash, finally kind of recovered and started to wear the watch again. Any tricks to make these scratches on the screen less visible? Watch is a Fenix 7 Solar.

Today I biked my 3rd fastest 40k. I did not pause my watch at any point during the ride. Garmin has told me that essentially my best efforts won't update until I beat my best effort ever. So my question is, why even show more than just the PR, if they don't update?

Is there something simple that I am missing? This is a very small issue and more of just an annoyance, but I am a bit of a nerd about my numbers and wish the list reflected my actual best efforts.

Really frustrating. One of the reasons I got this was to be able to leave my notepad at home. Now there's no real reason to track my workouts in the app at all.

Got a few scratches on my FR970 after 18 days of very very light use (literally just being worn around the house and at work). Reached out to Garmin Support and they're willing to do a full, free of cost, exchange with a new watch. Amazing.
This is my second watch now and certainly won't be my last.

Hello everyone, I'm sure there's a ton of write ups out there already on the Cirqa but figured I'd throw my 2 cents in after spending about a month with it.

How the tracker looks with while wearing my watch

I purchased this with two intentions:

1. To replace my Oura ring so I could get rid of the subscription (not that it's expensive, but I'd like to simplify my daily tracking).
2. To wear my mechanical watches while still tracking my metrics.

I went ahead and used my Oura ring along with the Cirqa and swapped out to my Fenix 7X for workouts like I usually would when I was using my Vivosmart before. While I liked the Vivosmart, I felt like it was outdated and just didn't track everything that I wanted for sleep and recovery. (I use a CPAP so tracking SPO2 and breathing variations is nice).

Another gripe with the Vivosmart is that it just felt like a watch still. Although it was small, I feel like it still clashed when I wore a mechanical watch. I just wanted something that was similar to a Whoop or new Google Fitbit air but within the Garmin ecosystem to help my training metrics. Not that I'm an incredible athlete, I'm a very average/subpar runner, but it's nice to see everything working together to show me how my sleep affected my Body Battery, how much my workouts are taxing my system, and how my recovery and training metrics are looking.

I've been using my Oura ring for over a year now and honestly, it's great. But after transitioning from my Apple Watch to Garmin and realizing how nice it would be to just keep everything under one ecosystem I found myself wanting to make the move over to Garmin completely and I think I'm almost there, but there's some things that I'm left wishing Garmin had that Oura just does so much better. Which is why, for now, I may continue using both until I'm fully satisfied with the Cirqa.

BUT, anyway, onto the review.

Unboxing

Nothing special here, the usual Garmin packaging with manual, charger, and device. Not that I'm looking for much else here. Honestly, it was fine. I'm a Millennial so of course I'm keeping this box. I appreciate that it's small so I can toss it in the garage to look for down the road if I decide to sell it. Do people still prefer things be sold with their boxes when they're secondhand? Anyway,

First Impressions

Not bad. The fabric is comfortable, the black doesn't clash in my opinion, and contrary to what some other people say, the form factor is not big at all. Maybe a little bigger than my Vivosmart but I wouldn't say it looks like I'm wearing a hospital bracelet as some people have mentioned.

A few concerns that I noticed, the one button they added to track workouts, silence alarms, turn off alarms, etc. seems like it would be easy to press accidentally. The plastic part of the strap that you grab on to in order to remove the band from your arm is a little long, it catches on clothes/other items sometimes which is annoying, and the device itself actually sticks out a little past the band which isn't terrible but doesn't look as good as I feel it could've looked.

The button issue was an easy fix, I learned that you can swap the band to orient the tracker how you want, so currently watch is worn on my right arm due to having tattoos on my left arm and the button is facing up my arm as opposed to facing down so if the tracker slips a little and my wrist goes up, I won't accidentally push it. I have still accidentally pushed it a few times here and there when forgetting there's a physical button but it's more of a slight annoyance than anything.

The watch itself wears light and honestly I forget it's there sometimes. The large band was surprisingly small. I don't have a large wrist by any means and was considering getting a small/medium but glad I went with the Large/XL. As it is, when I fully take off the band it feels like I have to close my hand to get it on/off. A little hard to explain but best way I can describe it is as if you're taking off one of those bracelets that expands a little bit but you have to do that weird cone shape with your fingers to slide it on/off. So that was a little surprising. Haven't tested on the bicep yet, I gotta buy the arm strap to test it out, I feel like it'll do well there. Kind of disappointed it didn't come with at least one wrist and one arm strap of the same size. For the price, I feel that it should've been included.

Setup

A little on the annoying side if I'm being honest. Idk what it is with Garmin but lately, I've been having some issues with my Fenix 7 and now the Cirqa. Mostly syncing issues. I use Runna and sync my workouts, my Fenix has had some hiccups with syncing to the point where I have to unpair/pair again and sometimes that doesn't fix it.

The Cirqa had a small issue. Connected fine, updated fine, but lagged when trying to sync. It almost looked like the device wasn't connected for some reason and there was no status circle to sync. I had to force close the app and reopen it then wait a few seconds for the tracker to show that it was connected. I've had to do this on occasion, I'd say at least once or twice a week. Probably no fault of the tracker itself and more of a UI issue with Garmin's app.

After this little hiccup, it ran fine. I'm able to leave it on and swap to my Fenix 7X for workouts without issue. I have the Cirqa set as primary wearable and the Fenix as primary fitness tracker. The Cirqa doesn't have a physical button to turn it off so you have to rely on the app to turn it off if you want to go that route but turning it back on is kind of annoying. Theres no notification that it's back on, I often found myself starting a workout not realizing it was on again so I've opted to just leave it on and put it in my gym bag, leave it at home, or in my car when I'm going for a run or workout.

Sleep Tracking

This is mainly why I bought it. I wanted a Garmin device that wasn't this massive chunky watch that would track my sleep, sync with my Body Battery, and just play nice with the Garmin ecosystem. I kind of got what I wanted but kind of didn't. It's much more comfortable, I'll give it that.

When I was using my Fenix 7 I would do the sleep time trick where I would set the sleep schedule for 1 minute during the day because my sleep is so bad. I don't go to bed at the same time every night. I loved having a button that I could push to turn sleep mode on and off.

The Cirqa doesn't have this option. And frankly, it was a missed opportunity. I have to set my sleep schedule beforehand and hope I hit the marks. The first week was terrible. Missed sleep windows, the device didn't measure my sleep, I'd have to manually input, meanwhile the Oura ring tracked it all without a problem and adjusted.

Naps? Don't even bother. This device will not catch them. This is probably the primary reason that I will still keep my Oura ring until Garmin can do something similar. The sleep schedule is obsolete in my opinion.

I've resorted to adjusting my sleep schedule every night before I go to bed and adjusting when I wake up to end the sleep if my sleep is completely off. Otherwise, within an hour of bed and within an hour of waking up usually tracks my sleep fine. But, that's assuming sleep goes to plan.

Oura completely blows Cirqa out of the water in this sense. I'm not sure what it is, but if Garmin can get close to what Oura does then the Cirqa would be pretty close to being the one band to rule them all.

Aside from that, it tracks time in bed fine, tracks movement fine, sleep stages are pretty on track with what I see on Oura, and my Body Battery seems pretty accurate. The recovery metrics also appear to be pretty close to what Oura shows so that's a good sign.

Oh, one plus, the alarm function works great. I tend to use a vibrating alarm to not disturb my wife and while sometimes the phone works, this has done an absolutely amazing job at waking me up. So big kudos to that.

Fitness Tracking

While I didn't initially get it for this reason I have used it on occasion to track certain things such as walks, jogs, weightlifting, etc. and it's been fine. Metrics are pretty similar to what I would see on my Fenix but I haven't pushed it by doing a long run or anything like that. For what it is, it works fine and I didn't notice any major issues. Just remember, for workouts requiring a GPS such as a run or walk you need to have your phone with you. I was used to this with my Vivosmart so this wasn't a big deal. My Fenix does the heavy lifting here.

Notifications

Pretty much none. There's a few things you can turn on here like battery alerts, alarms, etc. But that's fine. I don't want it to tell me when I'm getting a call or getting a message. No complaints here. I have all alerts off except for low battery.

Battery Life

This is probably the one area where I was a little surprised, and not in a good way. I've averaged maybe 5ish days of battery life, sometimes 7, with normal wear. I don't really use it to track workouts and primarily use it for daily and sleep tracking. I do have the additional sleep tracking features turned on, which obviously uses some additional battery.

I find it very hard to believe that they couldn't squeeze more battery life out of a SCREENLESS wearable that tracks everything my 265s used to track, yet this somehow gets less than half the battery life of the 265s whilst not having a power hungry display? I'm not sure what happened there but this was very disappointing to see.

Wearability

Looks decent enough. I was double wristing for a little bit after getting into mechanical watches and while I know it's a little silly to care what other people think I did find myself not liking the way two watches looked. Tried with my Apple watch at first, and went away from that because I wanted to get away from having a computer on my wrist. Tried with the Vivosmart 5, didn't like that it didn't track everything I wanted at night. Tried with the 265s, and this was as close to perfect as I got but still didn't like having two watches on my wrist. Finally, the Cirqa. Pretty close to what I was looking for. Sure, I probably wouldn't wear it on my wrist for a formal event but for everything else, I feel like it looks fine. Maybe I could get away with an arm strap to really not have it showing but I haven't gotten any weird looks or questions. And honestly, for a formal event I would just not wear the tracker to begin with. I'll survive a few hours without knowing what my Body Battery is at the company luncheon. I attached some pictures to show you what it looks like on my wrist while wearing my Seiko SSK. Doesn't look terrible.

Overall

I'm happy with the purchase. I feel like Garmin needs to make some improvements in sleep tracking and their app/UI but if they can tweak it to get to something similar to what Oura does then it would be a game changer. I'll likely use the Oura ring for the remainder of my subscription and hope Garmin figures out the sleep tracking along the way but I'm not holding my breath, I feel like it's been this way since sleep tracking was introduced. But time will tell.

TLDR;

Overall, I’m happy with the Cirqa. It’s comfortable, doesn’t look weird next to a mechanical watch, and gives me most of the Garmin data I wanted without having to wear a second watch. The metrics seem pretty close to what I get from Oura, and it works well enough for basic workout tracking when I don’t use my Fenix. My biggest complaint is sleep tracking. Having to rely on a sleep schedule is annoying, especially if you don’t go to bed at the same time every night, and nap detection is basically nonexistent. Oura is still way better in that department. Battery life has also been disappointing at around 5–7 days considering there’s no screen. If Garmin can improve the sleep tracking and clean up some of the syncing/app issues, I’d probably ditch Oura completely. For now, I’ll keep using both, but the Cirqa is pretty close to being exactly what I wanted.

Scale

• Comfort/Wearability: 4.5/5 — Light, comfortable, you forget it’s there, and it accomplishes the main goal of not looking like you're wearing two watches.
• Daily/Recovery Tracking: 4/5 — Metrics seem to line up reasonably well with Oura.
• Sleep Tracking: 3/5 — Probably its biggest weakness. Metrics are good when it actually detects your sleep, but the schedule dependence and poor nap detection really hurt it.
• Fitness Tracking: 4/5 — Does what you expect and metrics seem similar to the Fenix, although I haven't really stress-tested it with long runs or demanding workouts.
• Battery Life: 3/5 — 5–7 days isn't terrible in isolation, but it's disappointing for a screenless tracker.
• Garmin Integration: 4.5/5 — This is basically the reason to buy it. Cirqa for everyday tracking and Fenix for workouts, with everything feeding into Garmin.
• Overall: 4/5