Garmin Vivoactive

On Tuesday, the first day I set up my Garmin Vivoactive ($249), I assumed I'd be recharging it come Friday afternoon. I had plans for this mighty little wristwatch activity tracker, after all. I would use its built-in GPS to record outdoor runs, let it monitor my tossing and turning each night while I slept, and feel its vibrations every time it received a notification from my smartphone. It also vibrated every so often to remind me to move. Between all those functions, plus checking the weather on the watch frequently and asking it to locate my phone, I was downright amazed, come Monday morning, when the Garmin Vivoactive still had 40 percent of its battery power remaining.

I'm impressed. I could nitpick that it doesn't have an optical heart rate monitor (HRM), like the  Fitbit Surge and the Basis Peak, our Editors' Choices. But at least you can pair it with a compatible chest strap HRM if you really want heart rate. In every other respect, the Vivoactive matches those two devices, and in a few places exceeds them. For example, Garmin has its own app store, Connect IQ, where you can install other apps and widgets to put even more functionality onto your wrist. If you're a runner, cyclist, or golfer looking for a smartwatch that works for your activity, as well as counts your steps and has a ton of features, you may very well prefer this smartwatch-sportwatch hybrid to other brands of activity trackers. 

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Specs and Design
The Garmin Vivoactive is so lightweight and its screen is so sharp that the first time I picked it up, I thought it was a dummy prototype with a sticker instead of a working color touch screen. The 1.13-by-0.80-inch display (a memory-in-pixel, reflective LCD) is always on, making the Vivoactive a perpetual wristwatch. Without the wrist straps, the device itself measures 1.72 by 1.52 by 0.32 (HWD) inches and weighs just 0.63 ounces. With the bands, it's only 1.34 ounces. Trust me when I say it's thin and light—thinner by far than any comparable activity tracker with smartwatch features.

When you buy a Garmin Vivoactive, you have a few options. First, you can buy the tracker on its own or pair it with a Garmin chest strap heart rate monitor for a bundled price of $299. Second, it comes in black or white, and that color is for both the casing and the included wrist straps. Because the bands are swappable, you can play with different colors in both leather (black or white; $29.99) and silicone (black, white, slate, red, blue, berry, or purple; $14.99). The silicone bands are contoured on the inner edge, which makes them a little more breathable than if they had a smooth surface. Instead of a spring hinge, the Vivoactive's straps are secured in place with tiny screws, and you get a tiny screwdriver with your purchase, too. The buckle is a classic watch closure, and at the tail end of the silicone straps is a ridge that prevents it from flapping around. Talk about attention to detail.

Swiping left and right on the touch screen and tapping it lets you navigate the menus, but you'll also use one physical button on the right side of the Vivoactive to access functionality. A nearly identical button on the left lights up the screen and powers down the device when held. The battery life is so remarkable, however, I doubt you'll have many occasions to shut it off.

In typical use, the battery can last up to three weeks. Three! Even the Fitbit line of products, which have excellent battery life on average, typically last no more than 10 days. If you're training for an ultramarathon, know that in GPS mode, the Vivoactive will only last 10 hours. An included magnetic USB charging cradle pulls the Vivoactive into place securely.

You can sync your Vivoactive with the Garmin Connect mobile app for Android or iOS, and you can also sync with a Windows or Mac computer. The mobile sync is wireless, but the computer sync requires that you download the Garmin Express desktop app and use the charging cable plugged into a USB slot, a minor inconvenience.

Sight, Sound, and Touch
I love how much you can customize the watch face, a feature I also appreciate in the Fitbit Surge. You can set a highlight color for the Vivoactive so that the hour shows up in, say, pink or light green, while the minutes display in white. Want to reverse the display so it's black on white? You can. Setting the alarm, which vibrates and rings, was easy enough for me to figure out through intuition, as was enabling activity-tracking when I was ready to record a run or walk.

The Garmin Connect IQ app store lets you customize the watch even more by adding screens and features you care about. I added one that shows my daily step counts over the course of a week, and whether I hit my goal each day. I also added a stopwatch and a heart rate variability (HRV) test, which requires a connected HRM. The Connect IQ store is in its infancy, with only a handful of apps available, some shoddy proofreading in the descriptions, and sometimes mixed messages as to whether an app installed successfully. I saw a message that said, "Successfully sent to your device. If you don't see it on your device right away, sync your device," just above a pop-up reading, "Sync failed."

Vibration is one feature of smartwatches that I really love. It makes sense to use tactile feedback with a device that's on your skin. When a notification comes to your Vivoactive from a Bluetooth-connected Android or iOS device, the watch vibrates and displays the alert. It's not just for caller ID, which is all the Fitbit Surge supports, or text messages (Basis Peak does both incoming texts and phone calls), but any notification you have enabled, from stock prices to to-do reminders.

Swiping through the main menus, you'll find music controls for your phone, a weather report based on your current location, and more, including a screen that says "VIRB," which is for controlling a connected Virb Elite action camera if you have one.

My favorite screen appears when you swipe once left to right (though you can reorder the screens to your liking). It shows how many steps you've walked, the distance of those steps in miles or kilometers, how many calories you've burned so far for the day, and an arc filled in to indicate the percent of how close you are to reaching your step-count goal. The goal can be one you create, or it can be generated dynamically based on your history. I like seeing these key fitness metrics in one place, rather than scrolling through multiple screens to read each one individually, which is how most activity trackers work.

Pounding Pavement
I ran with the Garmin Vivoactive on my wrist a few times and loved that it vibrated to mark every mile. The GPS kicks in the moment you select an outdoor activity from the menu. In addition to running, the Vivoactive supports bicycling, swimming, golfing, and walking, as well as indoor exercises using treadmills and stationary bikes.

After I set out, I glanced down at my wrist to see my distance, speed, and time, and when I swiped down, even more details appeared, such as pace. In both bright sunlight and cloudy conditions, I had no problem seeing the screen.

Pausing for red lights takes little more than a tap of the finger on one of the buttons, and resuming is the same. Tying the pause/resume function to a physical button rather than the touch screen makes sense because you can still use them when you're wearing gloves. Garmin, a company that has been a leader in sports watches for years, clearly thinks about these details.

At the end of an activity, all your stats sync with your Garmin account, visible in the Garmin Connect mobile app. A map of each run showed up, with mile markers included. I also like that the mobile app will highlight your personal records, such as your longest or fastest run.

Swimming, Cycling, Golfing
As mentioned, you can track swimming while wearing the Garmin Vivoactive, as it has a water resistance rating of 5ATM, meaning it can stand submersion to 50 meters. Many activity trackers are water-resistant enough to use while swimming, but a lot of them, such as the Misfit Flash, only measure motion, or how much jostling you do in the pool. If you tag the activity as swimming, the device will make a more intelligent guess about how many calories you burned, but that's it. The Vivoactive, on the other hand, captures your lengths, distance, pace, stroke count/rate, on top of calories burned. It's similar to the TomTom Multisport tracker, which is designed for triathletes.

Let's say the bicycle is more your speed than the lap lanes. Garmin is pretty good about supporting additional devices, and the Vivoactive can pair with compatible speed and cadence sensors.

What about golf? Well, get a load of this. You can upload nearby golf course maps right to the watch. With this information, the device can measure not only each shot's distance (it calculates exact yardage for shots from anywhere on course), but also yardage to the front, middle, and back of the green, as well as yardage for layups and doglegs.

I didn't test the golfing or bicycling functions for this review, but the features are based on existing implementations in other Garmin devices. In other words, it's tried and tested stuff, and I wouldn't anticipate these features to have too many growing pains.

Mobile App and Syncing
I paired my Garmin Vivoactive with the Garmin Connect mobile app on an iPhone running iOS 8.2. It's the same app you can use with other Garmin trackers, such as the Vivosmart (a highly underappreciated bangle, in my opinion), the Vivofit, and even more high-end sports watches by Garmin like the Forerunner 620 and the Fenix 3.

The app is pretty good, but maybe not as well-designed as Fitbit's, which is my favorite app for daily fitness and health tracking. Fitbit's app has a clear and cheery design, with spritely colors and the ability to integrate with dozens and dozens of other services. Garmin Connect is efficient and simple, but it lacks some character.

The Connect IQ app store is fairly new as of this writing. You reach it right from the Garmin Connect mobile app, but I think it's better to see and manage from the Garmin Express desktop app. Inside you'll find widgets and apps that you can install wirelessly onto your Vivoactive. For example, there's a step graph widget that shows your daily steps over the course of a week, and whether you hit your goal each day (Fitbit's app includes a graph of the same data as a stock feature). Another one I liked was the Sunrise Sunset indicator. It uses your GPS location to show sunrise and sunset times. It's not as well-stocked or developed as, say, the Pebble smartwatch app store, but it's a start.

A Lot to Love
If you want a hybrid smartwatch-activity tracker that can handle a truly active lifestyle, get the Garmin Vivoactive. The one big feature that's missing is an optical HRM that can take your heart rate through your wrist, the way the Basis Peak and the Fitbit Surge can. Of course, you can pair a Garmin Vivoactive with a classic chest strap, and with a few extra apps from the Connect IQ store, you can record resting heart rate and HRV, too. Once you realize all the other things it can do, from helping you improve your golf score to keeping track of your bicycle rides and swims, the Vivoactive becomes all the more attractive and appealing. There's a lot to love and explore in the Garmin Vivoactive.