Garmin CIRQA, EU iPhone Features, Amazfit Cheetah 2 Pro: Weekly Roundup

Three stories worth your attention this week: Garmin is building something strange with CIRQA, EU athletes are getting iPhone features the rest of us can't touch, and Amazfit just shipped its most serious running watch in years.

The CIRQA leaks are getting weirder. Changes inside the Garmin Connect app now suggest the band is not wrist-worn, which immediately raises the question of where it actually goes. Phone-side workout controls and screenless device setup flows are showing up in the code, pointing toward something more like a Whoop or even a finger ring than a Fenix or Forerunner. Garmin has never shipped a non-wrist optical PPG tracker at scale, so this would be a real departure.

If you are a Garmin user in the EU, iOS 26.5 is about to close a gap that has annoyed athletes for years. Reply-from-wrist and Live Activities are coming to Garmin devices, features Apple Watch has held exclusively. Regulatory pressure from Brussels is doing what Garmin's own software team apparently could not. UK and US accounts get nothing for now, which makes this a genuinely fragmented rollout.

The Amazfit Cheetah 2 Pro is the brand's first real swing at the premium running market since the original Cheetah landed three years ago. Titanium case, sapphire crystal, and a price tag roughly fifty percent higher than its predecessor put it in direct range of the Garmin Forerunner 965 and Polar Vantage V3. Testing against Stryd as a power reference will tell you fast whether the running dynamics data holds up where it counts.

Busy week. CIRQA stays the most intriguing unknown in wearables right now.