If you’ve followed the Tom’s Guide fitness team for a while, you’ll know that one of the first things we do when a new device drops is take it for a walk test. Sure, most of the best fitness trackers on the market are designed to do much more than just count your steps, but how well they handle the basics is often a good place to start.
Next on my list was the long-awaited Garmin Cirqa, which was announced this week and launches on July 24 for $199. It’s Garmin’s new screenless tracker, designed to track your health and fitness stats without distractions or a monthly subscription.
The obvious device to compare it to was the Fitbit Air, Google’s $99 screenless tracker, which launched earlier this year. They both track everything you’d expect: your steps, calories, heart rate, menstrual cycle, skin temperature, and sleep. Both have haptic alerts to wake you up, and tons of data to help you live a healthier lifestyle. Check out the main similarities and differences between the Garmin Cirqa and Fitbit Air here.
With no screen, buttons, or alerts to distract you — plus nearly a week of battery — the Fitbit Air is as easy-going as it is affordable. It’s also one of the best fitness trackers of the year.
The Garmin Cirqa goes on sale on July 24 for $199; it comes in two sizes and four color options. It's water-resistant to 5 ATM, and has a 10-day battery life.
As a control, I manually counted my steps using a $5 clicker tool from Amazon — the kind a bouncer would use to count people into a club in my twenties. Every time I took a step, I clicked, and when I got home, I checked my stats on the respective apps. One key difference was that I was able to use the button on the right-hand side of the Garmin Cirqa to start the activity, whereas I logged into the Google Health app to manually start my walk, but more on that below.
I walked 5,000 steps with the Garmin Cirqa and Fitbit Air, and the winner is clear
As mentioned above, for each step I took, I clicked. I wore the Garmin Cirqa and the Fitbit Air on the same wrist. Both record steps in the same way: using an internal accelerometer, which measures the swing of your arm.
Each swing counts for two steps, and it doesn’t matter whether you wear your watch on your dominant or non-dominant hand. It doesn’t matter if you walk with your hands in your pockets or holding a cup of coffee; the accelerometer should still measure your body’s movement.
Here are the results:
Manual counter |
5,500 steps |
Garmin Cirqa |
4,605 steps |
Fitbit Air |
5,552 steps |
As you can see, the results are pretty clear: the Fitbit Air was pretty much spot on when it came to counting my steps.
That said, before we write the Garmin Cirqa off completely, I had a major problem with the device in that it didn’t recognize the activity as a walk at all. Instead, when I synced the Cirqa to Garmin Connect, I just got a "45-minute workout," with no distance or steps included.
I’ve only been wearing the device for 48 hours, and Garmin has stressed it gets smarter the more it gets to know you. Instead, I had to look at my overall steps throughout the day and use the numbers from there. I wonder if the results would have been different if the walk had been recorded as a walk, or if I’d been wearing the tracker for months, as I have with the Fitbit Air.
Either way, only overcounting by two steps is very impressive from the Fitbit Air. I’ll continue testing both alongside one another to help you decide which is the best screenless fitness tracker for you. Watch this space!
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