Garmin Launched It’s First Screenless Smart Band Today, and I Tried It Out
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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 Band
The 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.
Credit: Meredith Dietz
It comes in four colors: Black, “Captain” (navy) blue, French Gray, and Mauve. It has fabric straps in S/M and L/XL sizes. There’s a Velcro-style design to adjust sizing. The strap uses quick-release pin connectors rather than a traditional buckle, and threads through a small metal loop.
Physically, the sensor module is long—47mm, which happens to match the diameter of the Forerunner 970’s face. Whoop, by comparison, is similarly wide but noticeably shorter top to bottom. Garmin has a reputation for generally catering to bigger wrists, and the Cirqa upholds that pattern. I’d say the design lands closest to the Polar Loop, rather than the Fitbit Air or Whoop. And while this is a mere hours-long impression talking, the long sensor doesn’t seem like a drawback, and Garmin has made a strong case for the device at least in terms of lightweight comfort.
Credit: Meredith Dietz
Beth sent along some photos of the Fitbit Air, Whoop 5.0/MG, Polar Loop, and Amazfit Helio Strap, so you can get a sense of how the Cirqa stacks up visually.
Credit: Beth Skwarecki
Credit: Beth Skwarecki
No subscription (for now)
Garmin is leaning hard into “no subscription required” for this device at launch. I asked a rep directly about whether that could change down the line. With standard disclaimers about not speaking to any future roadmap, Garmin says it won’t suddenly wall off features that are free today. Any future paid tier would be additive, with new features available behind a subscription, rather than existing stuff pulled behind a paywall.
This tracks with how Garmin has generally behaved with Connect+ so far. Remember, a screen-free band means the Garmin Connect app is doing a lot of the heavy lifting. Things like deeper training insights, expanded badges/gamification, and so on would all live in the app. None of this is confirmed, but it’s a fairly predictable shape a future paywall would take, so I’ll be keeping an eye on it for you.
The Cirqa’s sensor is basically the Gen 4 “plus”
The optical sensor inside Cirqa is Garmin’s older Elevate Gen 4 hardware, not the Gen 5 sensor found in Garmin’s newer watches, and not the one in Garmin’s own Index Sleep Monitor, which launched last year for tracking heart rate, Pulse Ox, stress, breathing rate, and skin temperature (basically everything short of ECG support).
But wait—there’s more. Cirqa may not get a Gen 5 sensor, but it does add skin temperature to the older Gen 4 base, which functionally makes it something like a Gen 4-plus (my unofficial phrasing). The skin temperature reading is crucial for women’s health tracking and Garmin’s Natural Cycles partnership.
Still, to Garmin fans, an older sensor might feel like a disappointment given all the rumors and speculation over this smart band launch. Whether it results in disappointing data is something I’ll be testing over the next couple of weeks.
Credit: Meredith Dietz
The button on the Cirqa is exciting for smart band fans
Screen-free trackers typically give you nothing to physically interact with (Whoop and the Fitbit Air are both buttonless). This makes the Cirqa’s side button mildly exciting: Tapping a button is so much easier than going into an app or waiting for activity detection you later need to edit for accuracy.
Here’s everything I know about the button so far:
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One press starts (and later stops) whatever activity you’ve set as your “favorite” in Garmin Connect, with the module vibrating and an LED flashing green while it records.
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Alarm snooze (press) and stop (hold)
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Pairing mode (triple-press or ~6s hold)
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Optional HR broadcast toggle (3s hold, if enabled)
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Silence Find My Band
You can’t pause mid-activity from the button itself, but if you do press “stop,” the LED flashes red until you save, resume, or discard the activity in the app. How this is functionally different from pausing, I’ll let you know after my testing.
Is the Cirqa a good value?
The Cirqa is $199.99, with an optional armband accessory for $59.99 if you’d rather wear it above the elbow than on your wrist (useful for people who find wrist-based trackers get in the way of their workouts). Frankly, this premium price is consistent with Garmin’s brand these days. Garmin seems to be betting that its ecosystem (and, in the case of this smart band, its no-subscription promise) are worth charging a premium for right out the gate.
Here’s a cursory overview of where the Cirqa stands when judged against the competition:
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The Fitbit Air launched at $99.99, with an optional Google Health Premium subscription.
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The Amazfit Helio Strap is $99.99 as well, with no mandatory subscription.
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Polar’s Loop sits at $199, like the Cirqa.
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Whoop—aka the device everyone in this category is implicitly compared against—doesn’t sell hardware outright at all. Its cheapest tier, Whoop One, is $199 a year for the current Whoop 5.0 hardware, with Peak at $239 and the ECG-equipped Whoop MG only available on the $359-a-year Life tier.
Garmin’s pitch is that by buying Cirqa once for $199.99, you’ll match a full year of Whoop’s cheapest plan, with nothing more owed. And of course, Garmin’s advantage isn’t really the hardware. The assumption is that if you already live in that ecosystem—training load, HRV status, recovery, VO2 max, all the metrics Garmin fans feel they can’t live without—you’ll pay a premium to keep all that data unified, rather than start over somewhere cheaper. For the Cirqa specifically, a Garmin rep told me that feature-for-feature, the Cirqa is comparable to the Venu 4 smartwatch, which costs $549.99.
Ultimately, whether Garmin’s features are truly worth an extra hundred dollars depends on how deeply embedded you already are in Garmin’s world. For someone shopping this category cold, with no existing Garmin gear, it’s a much harder sell when there are competing devices selling for $99.99.
