Forerunner 955 vs 965 in 2024

Every AOD, whether watch, smartphone or tablet, will always consume a lot of power. A sports watch, such as the 965, is not equipped with the maximum battery to keep it light and is not designed to operate all day with an active AOD.
Therefore, it is of course important that the gesture function and the tap work reliably. It does for me and also for all my friends.

So if it does not work with your 965 it's either a software incompatibility or the sensor of the watch doesn't work well. I would contact the Garmin support. 

it is designed to opparate 24/7 with AOD. 

24/7 yes, but only about 5 days instead of 3 weeks

Can anyone comment on the 965 for golf? Thinking about gifting a 965 to someone and main uses would be running and golf. Was going to go 955 solar because I have one and it works great for golf but wonder if 965 would be better option. Thinking with golf AOD would be a must. 

It does wake it up. Sometimes. 50% of the time it doesn't so I have to start to do break dance with my hand. And during the night, sometimes it's the opposite problem. When I go to tsleep before the DND, sleep mode time, sometimes I see the watch face is woken up even though I wasn't do any intentional gestures, just some movement in the bed. It's just so stupid. With MIP display I could see the watch face almost all the time, and when it wasn't good enough I clicked the light button.

I've found that the delay in reacting to a gesture is noticable with CIQ watchfaces, compared to instant with the built in watchfaces. Some CIQ faces are slower than others. With the built in ones, the watch is usually active by the time I'm looking at it.

this is getting offtopic IMHO. There's nothing wrong with the CIQ watchfaces I use. I've used them on my previous watch as well. The only problem is that on an AMOLED watch you don't see anything (or much if you have AOD) as opposed to a MIP watch where you basically see everything all the time. The rest is the "same ***": not very good gesture detection.

The following is just pure technical speculation, but still: The 965/955/Fenix 7/Epix 2 CPU doesn't have a huge RAM memory, and the memory on the chip is divided into blocks which can individually be powered off to save battery. That's why it's quite possible that while the watch is idle, some of the software may occasionally be shut down and cleared from memory, and those memory blocks are then powered off.

Now, when a wrist gesture is detected by the watch, it may have to a) power on additional memory blocks, b) start the CIQ interpreter, and c) let the CIQ watchface to initialize itself. Depending on how the CIQ watchface has been implemented, the last stage may take different amounts of time. Compared to that, a native watchface running directly in machine code just requires a) and c), and c) is probably much quicker.

This is just speculation, but it would explain why CIQ watchfaces can be slower to respond to wrist gestures than native ones on amoled watches. On MIP watches, the watchface code has to be running all the time because it's constantly updated (just as on amoled watches with AOD).

I'm not saying that this is not a problem, and think that Garmin definitely should look into this (if they are not already). But if a CIQ watchface has worked on a MIP watch, it doesn't mean that it couldn't require changes/optimization to work well on an amoled watch.

Why don't you sell/exchange it to/with someone who owns the 955. I bet you both will be happy. Unfortunately I don't know any sport watch, that is used as such (!) with a battery lasting for 3 weeks