Garmin Forerunner 955 with touch display & solar option leaked by retailer
A US retailer has listed the Garmin Forerunner 955 on its website. The device will pack better health reports and training tips, along with access to maps with improved satellite-based navigation.
The Forerunner 945 is amongst the most popular Garmin watches. It is no wonder there is so much interest and anticipation around its launch. This is expected in early June, alongside the Forerunner 255.
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There has been lots of speculation to date, but little in terms of actual specs. We’ve stumbled across a retailer listing today which reveals a lot about the upcoming device. It turns out, the watch will come with some interesting new features.
Garmin Forerunner 955 – what is known
The device that is described is “Whitestone” in colour. We’re not sure what other colour iterations will be available, presumably black will also be an option. The price that is listed is $499.
Smaller but thicker, full colour display
The width, height and depth is specified as 1.8 x 1.8 x 0.6 inches. That works out to 45.7 x 45.7 x 15.2 mm. Which makes the device slightly smaller in diameter but a fraction thicker than the Forerunner 945 which comes in at 47 x 47 x 13.7mm.
The weight is only 53 grams which indicates that you still get the same fibre-reinforced polymer body and bezel. The memory capacity of the watch is listed at 32 GB, so twice the memory that can be found in the standard Fenix 7 Edition.
As before, you’ll get a full-colour display, but with the difference that this will be a touch-enabled. So you’ll be able to tap and swipe to navigate around the display, in combination with the five physical buttons (three on the left, two on the right). This is an important upgrade which makes the 955 the only Forerunner in recent times with a touch display.
The retailer Beach Camera has now removed the listing. However, there’s a Reddit thread where you can view images of the device.
The Forerunner 955 looks exactly the same as its predecessor, but with a blue tint around the top right button. Between the buttons on the right Garmin has engraved the word “Forerunner”. Other than that there doesn’t seem to be any difference in the looks department.
15 days between charges, solar option
The time between charges will be up to 15 days in smartwatch mode, 42 hours in GPS mode and up to 80 hours in UltraTrac mode. Garmin has therefore managed to slightly improve on the excellent battery life of the predecessor. The charging pin appears to be exactly the same as before.
The retailer listing is for the regular model. However one of the accompanying images shows a “Solar Intensity” screen, which means there will also be a solar version of the watch. Unfortunately, no details have been posted on that iteration apart from that one pic.
Excellent mapping combined with improved satellite-based support.
The watch is described as having excellent full-colour, built-in mapping capabilities. This is made all the easier thanks to the newly acquired touch screen functionality.
Just like on Epix 2 and Fenix 7, you have access to multiple global navigation satellite systems at multiple frequencies. This means higher accuracy in areas where GNSS signals are weak such as heavily built-up areas.
Better health reports and training tips
There’s no mention of the rumoured running power functionality. But there are some other interesting upgrades.
One of these is a Training Readiness Score. This is calculated by combining info on sleep quality, recovery, training load, HRV and more. One glance at the metric and you’ll know if you should head out to train that day or take it easy.
If you’d rather make the decision yourself, the watch spits out HRV Status each morning. This is based on technology developed by Garmin’s Firstbeat Analytics team. On other watches you could only see your HRV on demand via the Health Snapshot. Which is not nearly as useful. With this newly acquired ability, the 955 will be right up there with Polar as far as training readiness stats.
There’s also a race widget. This provides training tips, personalized daily suggested workouts and completion time predictions based on course details, weather and performance.
The listing mentions more than 30 activity profiles. This includes cycling, triathlon, pool and open-water swimming, track running and more. For races and brick workouts, you can switch sports with a single button press.
Safety features
Finally, the Forerunner 955 has the ability to sense if an accident has occurred. Assistance and incident detection automatically sends messages with your location to your designated contacts. This works via your smartphone as there is no LTE functionality in the 955. The incident feature is enabled by default for selected activity profiles.
The new features should trickle to other watches
Of course, you’ll still get everything from the Forerunner 945 such as built-in storage for music and NFC for payments. We are also expecting some Fenix 7 functionality such as Health Snapshot, Realtime Stamina, Vo2Max (Trail Run) and more. These are not explicitly listed on the retailer page but it is reasonable to expect them.
Users of Epix 2 and Fenix 7 should also get the new features that are coming to the Forerunner 955. This is the way it worked out in the past. Considering these devices were launched only a few months ago, there’s no reason for them not to inherit the new functionality via upcoming software updates.
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If you go to that same website, and search Farmin 955, the Solar variant is there too along with some of the capacity specs. Also, zoom in on the photo of the back, and 955 is embossed indicating they could be real. Interesting no mention of the sensors.
Yes, I saw the 955 engraving. It must be the genuine thing! Thanks for the tip on the solar.
Slightly disappointed it doesn’t have a more compact form factor.
Integrating HRV with the training load stuff should have happened a generation ago. IF they get it right they can eat Whoop and Oura’s lunch. Still it’s a big job across the whole of the ecosystem and I think this is the big news from this release.
Otherwise it’s more evolution than revolution, I think that is fine given how strong the Forerunner featureset is.
From the pure consumer point of view it would be very good news if it continues with the same RRP as the 945 and they don’t charge a premium for multi-band GPS.
I wonder if we can expect mid-cycle updates – 755, 955LTE or even 955OLED? I think the latter will need to happen faster than we think as the battery life of most of these watches is more than the average consumer needs.
745 was the non-pro (sans maps) 945 small, I guess that could happen again a year out or so. Would love to see the maps trickle down to 755. If I knew I’d happily wait.
240×240 only? That hurts 🙁
Don’t care about OLED screen so that’s all good the 955 is not gonna have it. LTE with actual ability to talk on the watch would have been great. Other than that. Don’t really need that much more. The darn FR 945 is the perfect watch for sports. Everything is just thought out from a workout point of view.
I was hoping that the new 955 would sport the flashlight and the fact that the case is a bit thicker might still be an indicator that it comes equipped with one. Otherwise there would be no substantial hardware upgrade…Solar excluded obviously and that would be a major bummer!