Garmin Vivoactive 4

watch won't recharge after battery ran flat while away from home without charging cable. Tried seeking assistance through Garmin apps and web site. Both useless. Apps could locate watch (because it had a flat battery) and Garmin website wanted the watch serial number etc. before offering any assistance. Suggest looking at less troublesome brands Show details

Not up to scratch – Unfortunately this thing cannot chew gum and walk at the same time. I use it in the main as a golf app,which in fairness it states accurate distances, let's face it's working off gps on those occasions, but even as recently as today it states I've only done a tick over 9k in steps, and that's after walking 18 holes and over 10km in distance, the… Read more

minute you use it as a golf app it's ineffective for anything else. Is it too much to ask for it to record the same as a simple $10 step pedometer? Heart rate is generally inaccurate, it actually drops when I'm walking up hills, when I brought this to the attention of their staff , they gave some ridiculous reason that is because it was being worn on the wrist. Really, for the money you spend it shows no value . The 3 version was the same.

Unable to monitor pulse while exercising – Does not measure pulse while exercising ... can be out by 50 beats per minute using wrist based measurement ... drops out within minutes of connecting the much more acurate chest strap sensor ... unable to use this to monitor heart rate when exercising .... complete waste of money Show details

Expensive way to tell the time – Sleep recorder on this watch… some nights it works other nights. It claims you’re asleep when you’re still awake or five hours later The heart rate is that far from reality I was in hospital, and my heart rate was 160bpm+ And this watch claimed I was on 90Bpm their technical support “ you can’t compare our watch to a hospital grade machine” I was… Read more

on the stair machine, sweat dripping off, my head, rapid breathing, and this watch said my heart rate was 70Bpm The stair machine said my heart rate was 150bpm+

Customer service… do not bother emailing them. It will take them over a month to reply. Call them up logic complaint than you ring back the next day to find out the outcome. The outcome “ We will replace the watch at a cost.”

Excuse me…..

Fails after 3 yrs – This watch has always had issues with the music app Now its so bad you cant even select the play button, just appears faded The battery is lucky to survive 24hrs now as well Just not worth the price Show details

Collectively great! – FOREWORD I bought a Garmin Vivoactive 4 primarily to track my heart rate as I exercised to make sure I was getting the workout that I thought I was. They don’t claim to be the most accurate device, but when used consistently, it serves as a good indicator of how your body stats change over time. Shortly after buying the Vivoactive 4, I also… Read more

bought the Garmin Vivomove Style, so this review covers both of these devices in general, how they interact with one another, and how seamless the experience is as a user of two Garmin watches.

FIRST IMPRESSIONS

The Vivoactive 4 is quite standard as one would expect from an ordinary smartwatch. Full LCD screen display, reasonably easy to navigate to. Looks like it was made purely out of plastic (I think it’s aluminium, but I got the black one and I doubt the silver one would look much better). There are buttons on the side of the watch which actually makes it a lot more user friendly and easier to navigate through menus. The graphics look jagged given a small pixel density on a watch in their lower categories. It is quite light compared to any of my conventional watches I’ve owned previously, and is the first watch I could wear all day without wanting to rip it off once in a while. The silicone band is quite comfortable, although I did swap this for a Milanese loop with an even slimmer profile and is infinitely adjustable for ultimate comfort. More on this later.

The Vivomove Style is a watch that I SHOULD HAVE bought instead of the Vivoactive, however, in retrospect, I’m glad I ended up with both. It looks like a conventional watch with real analogue dials, looks great in a suit, and also is the only one in its series (besides the Luxe version) that supports Garmin Pay. In fact, out of most TRUE hybrid smartwatches in the market besides Fossil, the Vivomove Style is the only one that offers contactless payments. However, as great as this watch was, I was met with even greater disappointment. I am disappointed at how cumbersome it is to navigate through the menu (as it has no physical buttons). Double tapping on the screen to activate it is a hit a miss sometimes. I am disappointed in the way it looks – the same type of disappointment you get when you see a burger in the menu and find that the mess you actually received was nothing like the picture. I bought the Moss variant. The product picture shows a vibrant moss green with a polished looking silver watch face that looks like stainless steel polished in a circular pattern. What I ended up with was a watch band that has maybe half the colour saturation of what I saw on-screen (i.e. looks very faded out in real life), and the watch face was just a metallic silver in appearance similar to anodised aluminium. Certainly does not share the same lustre and sheen that’s promoted on their product page. The case is also aluminium, and in a way, it just looks like it was plastic painted with a metallic silver paint. The screen is made out of two different LCD segments, one on top and bottom. There is no display on the right hand side (opposite the Garmin logo), which was disappointing (I would have used it for Day/Date). This means that your watch face can support only two pieces of detailed information (more if you opt for summary icons instead). The watch feels even lighter than the Vivoactive, and is also something I can wear comfortably all day without the constant desire to take it off.

BOX CONTENTS

Both watches come with: - The watch installed with a silicone quick-release band - USB Charging cable (same type across these two models) - Instruction Manual of sorts - No charging plug, which makes sense as I have a ton of unused ones at home anyway. SETUP

Setup was quite intuitive and a similar process for both. Had no issues downloading the Garmin Connect app and follow the prompts to add a new watch (don’t use the phone’s onboard Bluetooth menu to pair with the watch – it’s not supposed to work like that). You’ll need to create a Garmin account and you basically set up a majority of the watch using this app. You can also link a credit card to set up Garmin Pay.

One minor annoyance with the Garmin Vivomove was that it goes to Do Not Disturb mode during your set sleeping hours. This idea is logical and I don’t have much issue with it, but for some reason, they decide to pair Do Not Disturb with how gestures (i.e. lift your wrist will turn on the screen) work. Took me a while to figure out the [unnecessary and unconfigurable] relationship so I turned off the automatic “Do Not Disturb during sleeping hours” feature. I put my phone on airplane mode when I sleep anyway, so nothing would come through regardless.

DEVICE PERFORMANCE

Battery life on both watches seem to be around the 4 x 24hr mark. Perhaps a little more on the Vivoactive, given a slightly larger form factor that probably includes a slightly larger battery. Body stats/data acquisition appears quite handy, although I would not recommend using the Pulse Ox feature as the readings vary wildly within the space of a minute with even the slightest shift in arm position. Best to get a proper one separately.

Garmin Pay is reliable. I do like the security design of these things – user inputs a PIN on the watch once. It won’t ask for a PIN again until you take off your watch. I’ve used both devices many, many times across different POS terminals and they all work without skipping a beat.

HOWEVER, in my experience, using these watches on the Opal system is a huge hit and miss, with around a 60% failure rate. It’s embarrassing being stuck and holding up an entire bus, and given the success with other POS terminals, I’m leaning the problem more towards the Opal system instead of Garmin.

Both watches integrate with the Garmin Connect quite well, in the way that I expected. I primarily wear my Vivoactive, but Monday to Friday during the daytime, I wear my Vivomove. The idea is that the Vivomove tracks all my activities, workout routine, etc and the Vivomove allows for the more basic features (i.e. pretty much just tracks my steps during office hours and allows me to see some other stats in real time such as heart rate, stress, etc).

Each day in between swapping watches, I find that I need to synchronise the watches 2-3 times. The first sync transfers data from the watch that you WERE wearing to Garmin Connect, then the 2nd and 3rd will eventually push the accumulated data out to the watch that you WANT to wear. Basically, it takes a few sync cycles to get both watches and Garmin Connect on the same page.

The only thing that doesn’t work is your body battery and sleep data across multiple watches. Supposedly, with one watch, Garmin will track how well you sleep, how much energy you regained during sleep, and how much of that energy you use during the day (don’t ask me how it calculates this). It would have been nice if this is part of the data transfer during syncing and allow your secondary watch to receive this data and continue contributing towards the changes throughout the day, which I expect is doable as both watches support this feature (and the mechanisms are the same across both anyway), so I suspect this was just a design oversight. Besides that, all other metrics appear to work.

I’ve never had an issue with the Vivoactive, and only one with the Vivomove so far in the past month. The hand alignment somehow went severely out of whack (no idea how this happened, but it was just a one-off and never happened again). This was an easy fix (the settings allow you to re-calibrate the hands back to the 12 o’clock position, but each press only makes a microscopic increment so I was there for a while doing that).

Vivoactive LIKES

- Very functional. Does everything besides sporting good looks - Menu is very accessible. Easy to get to apps like stopwatch, timer, find phone, etc. Menu is also customisable. - Watch face is very flexible given the whole face is a screen. - Had no performance issues with it so far. - Quick-release watch straps makes the watch easy to customise. - Compatible with many third party apps from Connect IQ, including one that allows Google Maps turn-by-turn navigation instructions to be pushed to your watch.

Vivoactive DISLIKES

- Still have not gotten GPS to work and lock onto a signal. Not sure how to use Tethered GPS to improve this either. - You can save locations on the watch but for some illogical reason, you can only do so through your watch when you’re AT the location. There is no way to manually set a location (say, on your phone) to save for future navigation. This means that you cannot pre-plan that bushwalk in advance. - Not the most fashionable watch (most of them aren’t). - Low pixel density; graphics look jagged, but legible.

Vivomove LIKES

- Fashionable, minimalistic design, with REAL analogue hands - It has most of the features of the Vivoactive* - Quick-release watch straps makes it easy to customise (it was never my intent to use that ugly Moss-green strap to begin with; I actually bought a dark brown, croc style leather with white stitching and chrome quick deployment buckle. Looks perfect. Also works well with a 20mm plain silver Milanese loop for an even more minimalistic design). - Supports Contactless-payments, a rare feature for watches of its class.

Vivomove DISLIKES

- Does not look as good as on the picture - Watches can fall out of alignment (but at least fixable by the user) - *Most features are cumbersome to access due to lack of physical buttons and limited display size - Watch could do with an extra display element near the 3 o’clock position

FINAL VERDICT

At a retail price of $499 for the Vivoactive and $429 for the Vivomove Style, both watches are at a similar price point. This price point is on the lower end for “full sized” watches, and offer most, if not all, of the essential features you’d need in a smart watch. You can certainly pay more and find watches that might have a better display, crispier graphics, more responsive interface, etc, but ultimately this is more than most people would need already.

The Vivoactive and Vivomove serves well to complement each other in my case, but if I was forced to choose one over the other, I’d have to go for the Vivoactive, as it is more “function oriented” than the Vivomove, which, to me, is more of a fashionable accessory that allows for basic activity tracking where presentation takes precedence. Between these two watches, and one $1000 smartwatch, well… so far, I’d have to stick with my dual-watch setup.

Both watches are easily customisable with widely available and inexpensive watch bands, which you can keep a collection of to personalise your style for the day. A magnetic Milanese loop is light weight, very slim in profile, and highly breathable, which can be very comfortable to wear during exercise, however during rigorous movement, the magnet can slip and gradually loosen the band. Also, I don’t recommend any Milanese loop besides plain silver. The different colours (e.g black) are just painted on, and wears out over time. In the space of about 2 weeks, a black band will start showing bits of bare silver and does not look good. Choose if you want a black watch or silver watch to match accordingly.

WHY WOULD YOU BUY THIS?

You’d go for the Vivoactive if you want a straightforward smartwatch with all the features at the tip of your fingers, and only demand functionality over form. You’d go for the Vivomove if you want the complete opposite of that. And, if there are different times of the day/week where you’re one or the other, wait for sales and buy both.

Do not buy – Can't found even one good thing in it. Doesn't look like a smart watch, because you can't barely do anything. You can't call, can't chech the message, all menu so so limited. Battery doesn't last so looong how they are saying. Screen quality is like 80's tv. I put my son's pic on my watch, and couldn't recognise is it my son it looks so bad.… Read more

Garmin pay doesn't work either if you have normal bank. It works only if you have something like Revolut or other crap. So so disappointed.

Should be call 'Garbage NotAcurate' – I purchased this on the 1st of May this year. The accuracy of most of its vital functions are that inaccurate and it's screen definition that bad I sold it on Facebook the next day. I literally live 459m above sea level on a mountain, the watch danced between +4m to -54m. It continually showed a heartbeat of 88bpm, seemingly frozen, while the… Read more

app on the phone seemed to track real time.

Again the Sp02 % seemingly frozen at 95% showed more accurately over a 24hr on the mobile app.

Then there's the terrible screen, it's does display and range of colours but only just. There's little distinguishable difference between say pink, yellow orange etc, they're all a very slightly different variation but even my kids younger eyes couldn't tell the difference between the colours either. Even worse is the screen definition or clarity if you will.

This is more a dumb watch. Whats the point if none of its functions are accurate, it makes the whole thing an unreliable gimmick. Then again it's almost impossible to clearly read it so you don't really know how bad you been duped.

The only positives I could see was the build quality and battery life being better than expected however after only 1 day of ownership that really remains unknown.