Garmin Vivoactive review: The fitness wearable to buy

The Garmin Vivoactive arrived on a Wednesday. Battery fully charged, I strapped it to my wrist and waited for the inevitable. Initially I glanced at it every few hours, expecting the battery meter to have suddenly jumped downwards – each time, it had barely moved. The weekend came and went. It wasn’t until Monday morning, five days later, that it had reached 10%.

I’m a fairly active person. During those five days it tracked four 20km cycle rides to work with its built-in GPS, recorded more than 50,000 steps, buzzed my wrist with notifications, and recorded roughly 40 hours of sleep. It also did a pretty good job of being a watch.

By the standards of a normal, “dumb” watch, five days’ battery life isn’t much of a feat. Survey the wearable competition, though, and the Vivoactive’s battery life distances most other devices on the market.

Android Wear smartwatches occasionally dare to tickle the two-day mark. The Apple Watch might, now and again, break the 24-hour barrier. The Basis Peak is the longest-lasting wearable I’ve tested yet, and that only lasts for a similar length of time – almost a full week – and lacks GPS tracking. And of course there’s the Pebble Steel, which is capable of lasting a full week but is useless for fitness purposes.

The Vivoactive is the first fitness wearable I’ve used with stamina worthy of the name.

The concept

While other manufacturers have been tentatively dipping their toes in the fitness-wearable waters, Garmin has years of experience behind it, and it shows. Its portfolio encompasses watches designed for a multitude of disciplines, from sub-£100 step-tracking fitness bands to £400 multi-discipline monsters capable of pleasing the most data-hungry of triathletes.

The Vivoactive is Garmin’s attempt to create a do-it-all fitness wearable with mass-market appeal. It throws in basic smartwatch functions, such as notification and app support, spliced with some of the more advanced activity- and exercise-tracking features borrowed from its other devices.

In stark contrast to other GPS-equipped Garmin watches I’ve used over the years, the Vivoactive is light and compact. It isn’t especially stylish, but compared to other wearables on the market, the Vivoactive is a featherweight. At only 36g, it’s 18g lighter than the Basis Peak, and since it’s a mere 8.1mm thick, it rarely catches on a shirt or coat sleeve, something that regularly aggravates me when wearing bulkier devices such as the Basis Peak or Microsoft Band.

It’s the most comfortable fitness wearable I’ve tested by a distance. The light weight combined with the soft, stretchy, textured rubber strap means that most of the time you forget you’re wearing it – it holds firm without any need to fasten the strap tightly. Even if the strap somehow comes undone, a pronounced lip of rubber at the end prevents it slipping through the latch.

In a week of testing, the only reason I felt the need to remove the Vivoactive was to clean it now and again; just like the Basis Peak, the textured inner of the watch strap has a habit of picking up grime.

Features

At £168, the Vivoactive is around the same price as the Basis Peak and the Microsoft Band. But while there are broad similarities, Garmin has approached the Vivoactive with a very different set of priorities.

Where those rivals are packed with an enviable roster of health-tracking sensors, the Vivoactive is a much simpler affair. There’s no built-in heart-rate sensor, no array of hi-tech-sounding perspiration and galvanic skin-response sensors. The Vivoactive’s capabilities tread a minimalist path: there’s a GPS radio and an accelerometer for step tracking, and it’s water-resistant to a depth of 50 metres. That, as they say, is it.

Garmin hasn’t been tempted to go hi-tech elsewhere, either. With a resolution of 205 x 148, the Vivoactive’s 1.3in colour LCD touchscreen is not the last word in pixel density or image clarity. It is, however, perfectly suited to its role. This is because Garmin has employed a transflective display – just like that of the Sony SmartWatch 3 – which allows the screen to remain legible without needing to turn the backlight on, thus both saving battery life and improving legibility in bright outdoor conditions.

The Vivoactive’s trump card is that – in addition to supporting Bluetooth LE for syncing with and delivering notifications from a phone – it supports ANT+, the wireless standard for super-accurate, third-party exercise sensors such as heart-rate chest straps and cycling speed or cadence sensors. Currently, the only thing lacking is support for ANT+ power sensors, but it’s possible this capability may be added in the future.

This reliance on external sensors might not sound like a plus point, and for some it will be an instant turn-off, but for anyone with even a passing interest in accuracy, the gulf between the optical heart-rate sensors in other wearables and a basic £20 ANT+ heart-rate strap is huge.

If you’re keen to get an accurate view of your heart rate during exercise, which is key for working in precalculated heart-rate zones, then ANT+ is a huge asset, and if you’re a keen cyclist or runner, the ability to get cadence information is another major plus.

Connect IQ and Garmin Connect

Another new addition here is the appearance of Connect IQ, Garmin’s open platform for third-party apps. This allows developers to produce a wide variety of add-ons for compatible devices, including customised watch faces, widgets that pull in data such as weather forecasts, and other, more self-contained apps. One of the most appealing opportunities here is the ability to create customised data fields for the workout screens – a topic I’ll return to later.

Meanwhile, Garmin’s Connect app is the hub for all your activities. It’s here that, via Bluetooth, you sync your step, exercise and sleep data, download apps and upload new firmware, and it’s available for both Android and iOS.

All your data is uploaded into the cloud, so you can study your recent activities and keep track of your achievements via the app or from any browser. One nice touch is that you can link up your Garmin Connect account to Strava and have your runs and rides imported automatically – that done, there’s no need for any manual faffing whatsoever. Just sync data to your phone, and it gets ferried over automatically.

It’s also via the Garmin Connect app that you can peruse available Connect IQ apps, widgets and watch faces, and download them to the Vivoactive, or remove the apps and features you don’t need. If you don’t want the golf-tracking or notification widgets, you can remove them.

Using the Vivoactive

Using the Vivoactive is straightforward. Your steps and sleep are both tracked automatically, but there are manually activated modes for running, cycling, swimming, golf and walking. Bear in mind, though, that GPS tracking is only enabled for running, cycling and golf.

The touchscreen allows you to flick through the installed widgets simply by swiping left or right from the clock face, so it’s easy enough to quickly check the weather, upcoming calendar appointments, keep track of how many steps you’ve taken or simply run through your recent notifications.

Pressing the action button on the watch’s right-hand edge brings up a scrollable page of apps, and this is where all the activity-tracking functions reside, as well as all the apps you’ve downloaded from Connect IQ.

Starting an activity is a simple case of bringing up the app list, selecting the desired activity and hitting the action button. Locating GPS satellites is normally pretty quick – syncing the Vivoactive to the mobile app updates the satellite location cache, so most of the time it should already know roughly what to look for. I never had to wait longer than around 45 seconds for it to lock on; more often than not it was near-instantaneous.

Once locked-on, you’re faced with a scrollable list of information, such as speed, pace and time elapsed. Thankfully, there’s no need to physically scroll. That would be tricky while running or cycling. Instead, tapping the screen flicks through all the available data fields page by page.

As ever, the strength of the Garmin approach is customisability: you can rearrange the data fields in activity screens and replace existing fields with the data you want. This is rather fiddly – you need to delve into the menus, and the series of long taps and flicks to achieve the desired layout is tiresome – but since it isn’t something you’ll need to do regularly, it’s not a huge problem.

There’s little need to settle for the standard activity pages, however. Within seconds of perusing the Connect IQ Store, I found several alternative data fields, which allowed me to squeeze much more data onto a single page than the standard offerings.

For instance, 367 BikeField squeezes seven onscreen rather than the usual three, allowing you to quickly view average speed, current speed, current heart rate, average heart rate and more at a glance. This is the kind of customisability that sets the Vivoactive apart from its peers. If something isn’t quite right for you and the way you exercise, chances are some like-minded person will come along and fix it.

Notifications

Notifications from your phone are delivered via Bluetooth, and text messages, emails and social media updates all arrive at your wrist with a buzz of haptic feedback. Unlike the Basis Peak, these messages don’t disappear the moment you tap them. You can swipe right from the watch face and scroll through these messages any time you like.

The low-resolution display means there isn’t a huge amount of space to display texts and emails – around 18 words fit onscreen at a time – but it’s still far better than the Basis Peak or Microsoft Band in this regard. The only restriction is that there’s a character limit: longer emails and texts are cut off, so you need to pull out your phone to read them in full.

There’s also no way to manually remove or dismiss messages from the queue. The Vivoactive stores the last 17 notifications; older ones are simply bumped off the end.

Another moan is that there’s very little granularity to the notification system. The Vivoactive either buzzes for all your notifications, which can quickly prove distracting, or you can choose only to be notified of phone calls or to turn alerts off completely.

Helpfully, these alerts can be tailored to whether you’re currently taking part in an activity or not; if you don’t want to be disturbed mid-ride or run, for instance. And, should you not want any notifications to be downloaded at all, it’s also possible to remove the Notifications widget via the Garmin Connect app.

Battery life

One of the Vivoactive’s greatest charms is its battery life. Garmin’s claims of three-week battery life for non-GPS usage are unrealistic in my experience, but this is a watch that can genuinely last a week – that is, if you can resist using the GPS.

Garmin claims ten hours of GPS tracking, which is far better than the four hours the Microsoft Band manages, and my testing showed that claim to be right on the money. On average, the Vivoactive consumed around 10-11% of its battery capacity per hour with GPS enabled and an ANT+ heart-rate strap attached.

For most people, that will be more than long enough to induce complete exhaustion without draining the battery. For the handful of ultra-marathon runners who can run for longer, it is theoretically possible to attach the magnetic USB charging cradle while you’re wearing it and attach it to an external USB battery. If this capability appeals to you, well, you’re clearly insane.

Charging from empty takes around two hours, but I often found myself topping up the battery in 15- or 20-minute bursts here and there rather than leaving it on to charge for extended periods. With such great battery life, there’s very little need to panic until you start getting down into single figures.

Bugs and bugbears

All things told, I like the Vivoactive, but there are some fundamental problems. One aggravation is a tendency for the touchscreen to feel laggy and occasionally unresponsive. Greasy, sweaty fingers can interfere with smooth operation and, regardless, the Vivoactive’s hardware isn’t especially powerful, so it never feels as slick and smooth as the Microsoft Band.

Uninstalling widgets can help here, and swapping back to the standard watch face makes a difference, too. Since my preference is for a more informative third-party watch face that showed calorie graphs, step data and distance travelled all on one screen, I have a feeling that the demands of pulling in all the data can take its toll.

Currently, the selection of apps and widgets is pretty limited too, and quality is variable. The music control installed by default, for instance, is poor. It lets you play, pause or skip tracks, but it only works with the default music player, rather than Spotify or other third-party apps, and it doesn’t tell you which track is currently playing.

The weather app also feels a bit pointless, especially since in most circumstances I want a more detailed overview. And there’s currently no killer app on Connect IQ, – unless you’re a data geek like me, in which case 367 BikeField is pretty darned exciting.

My final moan concerns sleep tracking. It’s the most basic implementation I’ve seen so far. While the Basis Peak tracks light, REM and deep sleep states, providing detailed graphs of those stats, and the Microsoft Band monitors light and deep sleep, the Vivoactive simply shows whether you’re asleep or not, with a graph detailing your movement levels throughout the night.

This may improve. Since all this sleep data is processed server-side once it’s uploaded, there is the chance that Garmin will improve the algorithm that analyses the data, but with no integrated heart-rate sensor to work with, the Vivoactive is never going to challenge its more sensor-rich competitors.

Verdict

The Garmin Vivoactive isn’t a sleek, sexy do-it-all wearable: it’s a GPS-enabled fitness watch with a smattering of semi-smart features.

For me, though, it’s almost perfect. I’d take the accuracy of external ANT+ sensors over the poorly implemented optical technology in today’s crop of smartwatches any day. And the combination of GPS tracking, effective step tracking and the handful of smart features work well enough to keep me happy.

I’m also resolutely upbeat about Connect IQ. Even in its current fledgling state, the selection of watch faces and customised data fields has made the Vivoactive far more desirable than it would otherwise have been. Given time, and a suitably enthusiastic community to back it up, it could prove a major asset for the Vivoactive.

Factor in the great battery life and a display that’s perfectly suited to outdoor use, and it’s fair to say I’m sold. Where other fitness wearables, for me, have fallen well short (the Basis Peak’s lack of GPS; the Microsoft Band’s middling battery life), the Vivoactive is the first I’d deem to be worthy of a permanent place on my wrist.