Garmin Cirqa lands at $199.99 with strong early HR accuracy

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Garmin’s Cirqa smart band has officially launched, arriving as a screen-free fitness tracker priced at $199.99 / £179.99 / AU$299.99. In an early workout test at the launch event, it came surprisingly close to a Polar H10 chest strap, a widely used electrical monitor often treated as a benchmark for heart-rate accuracy.

The band pairs a fabric strap with a plastic puck and comes in French Grey, Black, Captain Blue, and Mauve. It looks similar to devices such as Whoop, Polar Loop, or a thicker Google Fitbit Air. Inside is Garmin’s Elevate V4 heart rate sensor, the same generation used in some Garmin watches; the company said the newer Elevate V5 was too large for the device.

Cirqa includes several familiar Garmin metrics and features, including Health Status, Body Battery, Training Readiness, pulse ox, women’s health tracking, and stress tracking. Garmin rates battery life at 10 days. There’s no onboard GPS, but it can use a connected phone’s GPS.

Unlike many screenless trackers, Cirqa has a physical button on the chassis. Users can press it to start or stop a workout, though Garmin also supports automatic activity tracking and says recognition improves over time. Workouts can also be edited later in the Garmin Connect app.

Garmin Connect+ and coaching features

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Garmin is selling Cirqa as subscription-free at the base level, but some extras now sit behind Garmin Connect+. Most notably, Garmin Coach requires the premium tier on this device — the first time Garmin has put that feature behind the Connect+ paywall.

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At the launch, Chrissy Wheeler, Garmin’s EMEA Senior Product Manager for Fitness, said premium features include coaching, the company’s nutrition app, and Active Intelligence and AI insights. She positioned Cirqa as a fit for people who want less screen time while still collecting health and recovery data, as well as athletes who already track workouts elsewhere but want 24/7 metrics like Body Battery.

Early heart-rate test against Polar H10

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For a short HIIT workout at the event, TechRadar tested Cirqa against the Polar H10, a chest-worn electrical heart-rate monitor. The Polar H10 recorded an average of 155 bpm, while the Garmin Cirqa recorded 153 bpm. According to the source, the graphs also tracked very closely.

That puts the difference at just 2 bpm, well within a normal margin of error for this kind of comparison. Based on that first test, TechRadar said it was satisfied with Cirqa’s accuracy, while noting that more testing is still needed.

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