Garmin Forerunner 255/266/955/965 Get Slate of New Features in Beta

Last night Garmin dropped a new beta firmware for the Forerunner 955 and 955 Solar adding a slate of new features coming from the recently released Fenix 7 Pro & Epix Pro series. That feature set includes Hill Score, Endurance Score, weather radar overlays, and dozens of new sport profiles. In addition, the Forerunner 255 series also got a less expansive beta firmware adding a few new things too.

Now, before we get too techy – I do want to briefly point out that as of this very second as part of Amazon Prime Day (full sports tech list here), Amazon has the Forerunner 955 Solar for $90 off to $511USD, basically matching the non-Solar pricing. That’s a hot deal if there was one. Likewise, the existing Epix non-Pro is down to $599 ($300 off!) and $699 for the Sapphire edition. And the Fenix 7X solar is $599 too. Insane deals, and all those units also get these updates shortly.

Now obviously, the fact that the Forerunner camp got the update first will upset the existing Garmin Fenix 7 & Epix owners as the beta hasn’t dropped there yet. As usual, both consumers of either the Team Forerunner or Team Fenix/Epix camp get upset in the comments section when the opposite camp gets dibs on new features first. Nonetheless, Garmin has already promised the Fenix 7 & Epix owners are getting those features in an upcoming beta firmware update. As it happened this week, the Forerunner side dropped first, for all I know, Fenix/Epix could drop in 12 minutes. Or tomorrow. Or next week. Point is, it’s coming – hang tight!

Oh – and Garmin has confirmed that the Garmin Forerunner 265 & Forerunner 965 beta’s with basically the same feature sets as below will roll out in the next few days, with them targeting early next week.

What’s New:

With that, let’s dive into what’s new for the Forerunner 955 and Forerunner 955 Solar:

Adds muscle maps to HIIT, Cardio, and Pilates activities.
Adds the Endurance Score glance.
Adds the Hill Score glance.
Adds map types and map data field options.
Adds weather maps to the Weather glance.
Adds a Workouts app to the Activities & Apps list.
Adds new activities for team sports, racket sports, and more.
Adds notification watch face data field ability to display name or number
Adds support for new Di2 cassettes

When it comes to the new sport modes that were added, they are as follows:

Team Sports: American Football, Field Hockey, Ice Hockey, Soccer/Football, Lacrosse, Rugby, Ultimate Disc, Cricket, Softball, Baseball, Basketball, Volleyball

Cycling: BMX

Racquet Sports: Table Tennis, Squash, Racquetball, Badminton, Platform tennis

Motorsports: Overland, Snowmobile, ATV, Motorcycle, Motocross, Drive

Winter Sports: Ice Skating

Other: Archery, Boxing, Mixed Martial Arts

In addition, there’s a smattering of bug fixes too for the Forerunner 955/955 Solar:

Fixes Pace Pro screen freeze
Fixes flashlight not retaining last brightness level
Fixes some issues with Spotify
Fixes popularity map theme not being displayed
Fixes issues with glance folders
Various fixes for maps
Various other fixes
GPS Firmware Update
Sensor Hub Firmware Update

Meanwhile, the Forerunner 255 series gets the following:

Adds muscle maps to HIIT, Cardio, and Pilates activities.
Adds map types and map data field options.
Adds a Workouts app to the Activities & Apps list.
Adds new activities for team sports, racket sports, and more.
Adds notification watch face data field ability to display name or number
Fixes Pace Pro screen freeze
Fixes flashlight not retaining last brightness level
Fixes some issues with Spotify
Fixes popularity map theme not being displayed
Fixes issues with glance folders
Various other fixes
GPS Firmware Update
Sensor Hub Firmware Update

For the FR255/265, it’ll get all the new sport profiles except Overland, BMX, Snowmobile, ATV, Motorcycle, and Motorcross.

Garmin has confirmed the Forerunner 265 and Forerunner 965 beta will arrive in the coming days, likely early next week.

Got all that? Good, let’s get to installing it.

Installing it:

As always, remember this is part of the beta program. This means you shouldn’t install it on your watch and go do an Ironman race this weekend. It could and may do bad things during training/life, including but not limited to causing your pet goldfish to die. That said, this particular release is actually classified as a ‘Release Candidate’, so it should be relatively stable.

Nonetheless, if you don’t value your pet goldfish all that much, then you can hit up the sign-up page to enroll your device to receive beta updates. You can do that by going to Connect.Garmin.com and then in the upper right corner find your device and click on it.

Then click to ‘Enroll’ in the beta. In my case, This unit is already enrolled:

Then, on your device, go to: Main menu > Settings > System > Software Update > Check For Updates:

You can then click back into that menu again to see the offer to install it:

After that, you’re good to go. It’ll take a minute or two to install.

And from there you can go and dig into features like the new Hill Score and Endurance Score metrics Unfortunately, as I saw with my Garmin Epix Pro & Fenix 7 Pro reviews, Unified Training Status is still in a weird state for Hill Score and Endurance Score. My Hill Score shows blank, and my Endurance score is far below what my Epix Pro on my wrist shows. But at least the synced-in Endurance Score is showing a 3-month graph now, even if it’s oddly low/wrong. On the Hill Score side, I guess the summer is the best time to start putting in this mountain climbs. But that’s a next week thing…

Also, you’ll notice an entirely new feature that hasn’t quite yet arrived on the Fenix 7/Epix series, which is the new ‘Workouts’ app, that’s basically a shortcut to structured workouts:

And of course, you’ve got bits like the new Weather overlays, seen within the Weather widget:

Beyond that, if you want to learn about all the new Epix Pro & Fenix 7 Pro features that just arrived to the Forerunner 955 series, you can actually watch my Epix Pro beginners guide I uploaded last week – as it walks through each of those features (and there are handy YouTube chapters to quickly navigate to them):

With that – thanks for reading (or watching)!