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Yesterday, Garmin launched its own screenless fitness tracker, the CIRQA Smart Band. Garmin is pitching the tracker as subscription-free, but early hands-on coverage found that a very basic fitness tracking feature — the ability to see your heart rate in real time — is locked behind the $6.99 Garmin Connect+ subscription. Garmin’s committed to fixing that in the near future, however.
As spotted by NotebookCheck, Garmin will issue an update to the Garmin Connect Mobile app will let users see their live heart rate data during workouts, with or without a subscription. As it stands today, users not paying for Garmin Connect+ are only able to see their average heart rate for their current workout.
The Garmin Connect+ subscription is meant to provide extra features above and beyond basic wearable functionality, including nutritional recommendations, an advanced performance dashboard, and AI integration. Monitoring your heart rate in real time is perhaps the most basic fitness tracking feature of all, so gating it behind a paywall feels pointedly greedy on Garmin’s part.
Garmin confirmed that live heart rate monitoring would come to the subscription-free CIRQA experience to Ray Maker of the DC Rainmaker blog, who pointed out the lack of that functionality in hands-on coverage.
Garmin’s $199 CIRQA tracker faces stiff competition from the likes of Whoop, Amazfit, and Google’s Fitbit Air. Whoop’s trackers are essentially useless without a subscription, but both the Amazfit Helio Strap and the Fitbit Air provide real-time heart rate data without a subscription — and they’re both significantly less expensive than the CIRQA at $99 each.
We don’t know when heart rate data will make its way out from behind Garmin’s paywall. Maker says an update for Garmin Connect Mobile will enable the feature “in the coming days.”
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