Garmin announces the Forerunner 745

Posted on September 16, 2020 in Cycling, News & Updates, Running, Swimming, Triathlon

Garmin announced the immediate availability of the Forerunner 745 today, the successor of the 735XT. The Forerunner 745 appears to be identical to the Forerunner 945 except for the missing maps. But the Forerunner 745 is slightly smaller with 1.72″ vs. the 1,85″ FR945 (43,8 vs. 47mm).

What’s New?

Looking at it’s predecessor the FR745 comes with a bunch of new features, which I think are worth the upgrade:

Recovery time now also takes in your daily activity, stress, and sleep
Support for Garmin Running Power (with accessory)
New LiveTrack so your Family&Friends can see where you are and what your route is.
Track Running Recognition
Improved HR sensor (the ELEVATE as seen on FR945)
Added PacePro and ClimbPro

Apart from all the new workout features, the new Forerunner 745 got some of the Vívoactive features too:
Stress, BodyBattery, contactless/NFC payments, Hydration reminders, Stored Music (via Spotify/Amazon, and others) and bluetooth headphone and Pulse Ox (huge battery drain!) and for your safety: Added Incident Detection.
What is new is that you can now trigger the Incident Assistance manually too.
Another feature from in ‘life’ tracking is the Menstrual Cycle track which will help women to maximise improvement potential and plan for upcoming races based on where they are in their cycle.

The new Forerunner 745 also gives a daily workout suggestion, taking in all the data mentioned above, your previous workouts, stress, etc. This is more than what the Edge 1030 Plus can do as that doesn’t know about your sleep.

Then there are some other smaller differences which are nice, but I think only a few would actually encounter.

Sony GPS chipset (supports GLONASS & Galileo)
Barometric Altimeter (for accuracy)
Training load
VO2 max takes in heat & altitude acclimation

Battery Life

The Battery life can be up to 16 hours, so enough for a full distance Triathlon, but you should check your settings to achieve this. Also it will drop significantly when you play music to only 6 hours. If you just wear it in ‘smart watch’ mode, it should last about 7 days. For your every day use and training it’s enough, it charges quite quickly – I usually have my watch charging during breakfast as it tracks sleep.

The looks

The Forerunner 745 comes in four different colours and is smaller than the 735XT, well, thinner mostly. Compares to the 945 it’s about as thick but as mentioned before slightly smaller in it’s display.

Firstly the four colours :