Details of a new Garmin heart rate monitor have leaked via the company's own online store. A device called the Garmin HRM-Pro Plus has been seen as part of a bundle together with the Garmin Forerunner 955 Solar, but the listing appears to have been swiftly removed.
The5krunner (which has proven to be a reliable source for early Garmin news) published a screengrab showing the bundle on sale for $729.98 on the company's US website. The bundle is no longer listed, but Advnture has also found a listing for the heart rate monitor by itself on Danish retailer Eventyr Sport, suggesting that it will be available to buy separately when it launches.
This wouldn't be the first time Garmin has accidentally published details of a product ahead of its launch. Details of the Garmin Venu 2 Plus (one of this year's best GPS watches) appeared prematurely on the company's support site a month before its launch, and a brief listing of an as-yet unreleased Garmin Forerunner 955 LTE bundle appeared on its Australian website in January this year.
What to expect
The screengrab of the HRM-Pro Plus bundle shows a complete listing, including a photo of the new heart rate monitor, which has a case with white accents rather than green of the HRM-Pro, the red of the HRM-Run, or the blue of the HRM-Swim.
According the the listing, the HRM-Pro Plus "provides accurate heart rate data, running dynamics plus pace and distance for indoor runs". The running dynamics and biometrics are no surprise; Garmin's existing heart rate monitors can track stats including vertical oscillation, ground contact time, stride length, and vertical ratio.
What's interesting is the mention of pace and distance for indoor runs. It's possible to estimate pace and distance using an accelerometer that detects your wrist movements, which is the method used by many cheap running watches that lack GPS. It will be interesting to see what the HRM-Pro Plus does that's different.
We might have to wait a while to find out, though. At the time of writing there's no sign of it on the FCC website, where all wireless communication devices must be registered before they can be sold in the US. Nor has it appeared in the database of the Singapore telecoms licensing system, which is usually a good source for smartwatches being sold internationally.
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