New Garmin Forerunner 205 and Forerunner 305 leaked

Garmin has been very successful with their Forerunner 201 and Forerunner 301 units, and they look like they are upgrading the line with the latest technology. Apparently the upgraded products will be announced at the CES 2006. The CES Website says, "The Forerunner 305 continuously monitors your heart rate, speed, distance, pace and calories burned so you can train smarter, more effectively." The CES Is January 5-8, 2006 in Vegas.

These were officially announced on January 3rd. See the Announcement

We have the Forerunner 201 here at the GPS Lodge, but have hesitated in upgrading to the Forerunner 301 because a lot of readers have complained about the poor heart rate monitor fit and reliability. We really want the HRM functionality, and have contemplated springing for the Forerunner 301 for a while now.

Garmin has been on a tear this year as a result of their huge R&D investment (see related article), and have joined forces with SiRF to use the SiRF StarIII chipset in several released and announced products including the Garmin Nuvi, and the yet to come Garmin Edge bike training computer/GPS. In the announcement for the Garmin EDGE, Garmin talked up the upgraded heart rate monitor fit and function versus the existing Forerunner line. We figured that it was only a matter of time before they reapplied the technology back to the Forerunner line.

Other features on the Forerunner 305 are heart rate monitor, speed, distance, pace, and calorie trackers, and a waterproof body. We'll be first in line for this thing come Spring. We hope that the new 305 line will include USB support, as the 201 has a serial port adapter, and man it's like going back to floppy disk drives and boosting from a DOS disk. So, PLEASE upgrade so I can easily use the thing with my laptop! It looks like they downsized the thing, so it won't be so huge on your wrist the first few time you use it. We got used to the size of the Forerunner 201 pretty fast, and don't mind anymore.

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