Garmin Firmware – lots of updates to Fenix, Forerunner, Edge

Over the last couple of days, we’ve seen a lot of firmware updates to Garmin watches, nothing too major but worthy of a quick post nevertheless.

But first, this FCC filing could well be the Garmin Vector Air that we talked through the specs for here.

Back to the firmware…

• Edge 1030 (beta), Edge 530 (beta)  830 (beta) –  several minor fixes
• Vivoactive 4 – support for low HR and minor fixes
• 245M (beta) 245 (beta) 945 (beta) – battery improvements, low HR, abnormal HR, broadcast of speed and HR for Zwift, these are additions to the Swim2 functionalities added in the last release
• Edge Explore – minor fixes
• Fenix 6 series MARQ series    – added Swim 2 functionality, low HR alerts and other minor additions and fixes

Thoughts?:

The most interesting new feature there is clearly the SPEED & HR broadcasting over BLE (Bluetooth) for Zwift (& TR, etc). This follows the trend for power meters to broadcast over BLE for precisely the same reason…ZWIFT.

However, I suspect this year will also see some interesting developments around Zwift running, most notably the NPE Runn treadmill sensor which I am looking at over the next few weeks (10% discount code: the5krunner 😉 ).

I’m talking here about a better treadmill running ecosystem that can, perhaps, be flexible enough to cover all the existing footpods (eg STRYD, Garmin), smart treadmills, NPE Runn and Zwift Running itself with some of those sensors perhaps filling less obvious gaps in the offerings of others. I’ll leave that one hanging.

Garmin Venu Review & Specifications