Along with usual green lights you see for optical heart rate, there’s a red light for the new PulseOx sensor. Turn the 945 over and you see the main design difference with the 935, which is the updated heart rate monitor.
Wareable verdict: Garmin Forerunner 245 Music review It’s not a touchscreen, but the standard five-button set up you find on almost all Garmin running watches makes it easy to navigate the menus and control the device during training sessions.
The 945 has the same 1.2-inch, 240x240 screen as the 935, Fenix 5 Plus and Marq Athlete watches – Garmin doesn’t vary a lot when it comes to screens on its watches. Spot the difference: Forerunner 945 (left) and Forerunner 935 (right) That lack of weight plus its slim build – the 945 is 13.7mm thick, which is slightly more slender than the 935’s 13.9mm – make it an incredibly comfortable watch to wear at all times. It's lot lighter in fact the 945 is 50g compared to 86g for the Fenix 5 Plus and 94g for the Marq Athlete. The 945 has a plastic body, which makes it smaller than the more expensive Fenix 5 Plus and Marq Athlete watches. If you’re familiar with the Forerunner 935, there are no surprises here – the 945 is almost exactly the same with dark grey buttons instead of silver.
The Forerunner 945 costs $599.99, or $749.99 for the Tri Bundle, which includes two heart rate chest strap monitors. The 945 also has a pulse oximeter sensor to track how well you’re adapting at altitude, and will monitor your acclimation to hot conditions. The new training load analysis displays how much time you’ve spent working in different aerobic and anaerobic zones over the past four weeks, and suggests how you might tinker with your training balance to be more productive. Those smart features are all very well, but it’s probably the updated training analysis offered by the 945 that will most excite its core audience. You get music storage and the ability to sync with streaming services like Spotify, NFC payments through Garmin Pay, and navigation features with colour maps and on-the-go routing. The 935 came out in 2017 and Garmin has come a long way since then, especially in terms of the smart features if offers on its watches, all of which are on the 945. That means the 945 actually has one or two tricks up its sleeve that the pricier Fenix 5 Plus range doesn’t.Ĭompare the best: Forerunner 945 vs Fenix 5 Garmin has more or less repeated that approach here, but this time it's taken the features of the Marq Athlete luxury sports watch and put them into the slimmer, lighter Forerunner 945.
Its predecessor, the Forerunner 935, took the features of the Fenix 5 watch and popped them into a lighter, plastic frame.
The Garmin Forerunner 945 is a GPS sports watch for those who don't mess around, offering in-depth training analysis and tracking to triathletes and runners aiming to excel at their next events.