If you see me walking down the street and I start to cry, it’s probably because I’m doing a walk test for Tom’s Guide, and I’ve lost count. As you’ll know if you follow Tom’s Guide’s fitness desk, one of the first things we do when a new device drops is take it for a walk with another fitness tracker to see how well it does the basics.
This week, everyone is talking about the new Garmin Cirqa, Garmin’s $199 screenless fitness tracker, which looks set to take on the likes of Fitbit Air and Whoop 5.0. It’s a subscription-free tracker with comprehensive workout and sleep insights, up to 10 days of battery, haptic feedback, and a single physical button. You can read our early verdict on the Garmin Cirqa here.
To find out more, I strapped it to my wrist alongside the Apple Watch 11, which isn’t screenless, but is one of the most popular smartwatches on the market. I’ve had the Series 11 on my wrist since it was released last September. The newest iteration of Apple’s most popular smartwatch has hypertension alerts and a sleep score to help you gain a deeper understanding of your overall health.
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.
The Apple Watch Series 11 is considered the best smartwatch on the market for most people. It's an extension of your iPhone on your wrist, with plenty of health tools loaded on board.
But which was more accurate over 5,000 steps? Read on to find out more.
I walked 5,000 steps with the Garmin Cirqa and the Apple Watch 11 — here are the results
If you’ve read one of my articles before, you’ll know that manually counting anything more than around 50 steps is out of my remit, so I rely on a trusty $5 clicker tool from Amazon.
I manually click every time I take a step. For this test, I wore the Apple Watch 11 on my left wrist and the Garmin Cirqa on my right. Both watches count your steps 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. It does, however, make a difference if you’re pushing a stroller — no, Apple, I promise I haven’t done a 45-minute elliptical workout while trying to get my toddler to sleep.
As with all of the best Apple Watches, the Apple Watch 11 doesn’t tell you the number of steps you’ve taken during a specific workout; instead, you see an overall number of steps throughout the day. Probably because steps aren’t actually that useful a metric, but annoying for me when writing these articles. For this comparison, I downloaded a third-party Pedometer+ app onto my Apple Watch 11.
When I got home, I downloaded all the data.
Manual recording: |
5,500 steps |
Garmin Cirqa: |
4,605 steps |
Apple Watch 11: |
5,148 steps |
As you can see, the Apple Watch got slightly closer to my actual step count than the Garmin Cirqa; however, I will caveat this slightly. I had a major problem with the device in that it didn’t recognise 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 Apple Watch 11.
I’ll continue my testing and my step counting before I make my verdict. Watch this space!
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