Garmin Forerunner 255 review - no-frills smartwatch with premium functionality

Most of the sports and health tracking of Garmin's top-of-the-range watches but at a much more affordable price

Garmin Forerunner 255 on a table
(Image credit: Simon Smythe)
Cycling Weekly Verdict

The Garmin Forerunner 255 can do everything a cycling head unit can do and a lot more since it can live on your wrist analysing your heart rate and sleep, keeping track of your health as well as your riding and training. But there's no danger of it replacing your cycling head unit since - unlike the more expensive GPS smartwatches - it doesn't have mapping capability. However, if you're already in the Garmin ecosystem with your bike computer and just want to add health monitoring without spending a fortune, the Forerunner 255 has the majority of it covered. Since it's a mid-range GPS watch, the other thing it lacks is an AMOLED touchscreen. If you want mapping and a brighter, crisper display it might be worth spending a bit more.

Reasons to buy
  • +

    Effective heart rate monitor

  • +

    Accurate GPS

  • +

    Most of Garmin's premium sport and health functionalities

  • +

    Lightweight

  • +

    Reasonably priced

Reasons to avoid
  • -

    Mapping not supported

  • -

    No Training Readiness score

  • -

    MIP display can look a little dull

You can trust Cycling Weekly. Our team of experts put in hard miles testing cycling tech and will always share honest, unbiased advice to help you choose. Find out more about how we test.

The updates the Garmin Forerunner 255 received were huge when it launched in 2022, putting it up there in functionality terms virtually on a level with the best smartwatches for cycling, including its big brother the Forerunner 955 as well as the Fenix 7 and Epix 2.

Most obviously it still lacks mapping, but it does use the same multi-band GPS for activity tracking as the more expensive Garmin watches and it has the same wrist-based heart-rate monitor, enabling the same health monitoring that includes sleep monitoring, heart rate variability, training stress and VO2max estimates.

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