New Beta rolling out now for Garmin Forerunner 255 & 955
A new Beta is rolling out now for the Garmin Forerunner 255 and 955 watches. It comes with a few improvements including scrolling via touch, but no Jet Lag feature.
This is the start of the next quarterly round of firmware updates for these timepieces. The Fenix 7 and Epix 2 have already received their new software a few days ago in the form of the Alpha version 11.15. That one comes with much more significant updates such as a Jet Lag Advisor and support for the Connect IQ System 6.
The Jet Lag feature, in particular, piqued our interest. You are meant to manually enter the start and end times of your journey. The watch on your wrist and Garmin Connect will then help you to adjust to airplane flight effects and different time zones. Garmin will let you know how much jet lag you can expect, along with how to acclimate and deal with the symptoms. Definitely sounds like a useful feature, especially for those who travel often.
Beta update 14.06 – what has changed?
Well that is not coming to the Forerunner 255 and 955 just yet. Perhaps Garmin wants to test out the feature a bit more before rolling out to other timepieces. But word is Jet Lag will come to the Forerunners in the weeks ahead.
For now we are getting a Beta update that goes under the number 14.06. It comes with various improvements and fixes including:
- Improvements to altimeter values
- Improvements to graphs including scrolling via touch
- Improvements to alarms and timers
- Improved organisation of glances
- Various fixes in activities
- Various fixes for watch-faces
In addition to this, the Forerunner 255 also gets improvements to the basic pairing process.
Arguably, the most interesting of the lot is the mention of scrolling graphs via touch. This should upgrade the user experience a bit. Only 5% of Forerunners have received the firmware refresh so far and we are not amongst these. Our watch is still running on 13.22. But we imagine this is something where you press on the graph and move along the axis to get detailed readings of individual points.
The fixes for watch-faces might also be useful. Some watch-faces for the Forerunner 255 and 955 can crash and freeze up. Particularly those with lots of data. Hopefully this update will help to address this issue.
No mention of a lactate threshold fix
No word yet of a fix to lactate threshold not being recognised. This is the point above which increased blood acidification occurs in your body. Put more simply, it is at this point that endurance performance rapidly declines. Garmin watches have the ability to automatically determine this value.
However, a number of users have noticed that their watch would find a new threshold but not save it. It asks you to save but the new values are not applied in Garmin Connect. This has been a problem for a few months now for some users. There’s a long thread on the Garmin forum discussing the issue.
If you have not done so already, you’ll need to join the Beta program to install the 14.06 update. This is a one time procedure which ensures all firmware releases are delivered to your watch via Garmin Connect. As mentioned, this is a gradual rollout so may take a while to reach your watch.
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