Garmin Vivomart HR Review

A while ago I mentioned I had a review of a recent bit of technology planned, but then I didn't actually post anything. Well, it has taken me a bit longer than intended to get around to it, but finally, here it is:

This review is for the Vivosmart HR (rather than my wife's arm). It is a very fine arm, attached to a very good person, but I am not sure she would appreciate a review.

To start, as with a lot of my reviews, I will preface this one with a caveat. This is not a full in depth technical review. This device is a bit of technology so I will obviously discuss some of the technical side, however, in the end DC Rainmaker already does in depth technical reviews and he does a very good job of it. If you want to read his review and learn absolutely everything about the Vivosmart HR have a look here:

DC Rainmaker Review of Vivosmart HR

My review will, however, cover our experiences of the device, what we think it does well, what it doesn't do so well, who it is useful for etc. I say we because the Vivosmart belongs to my wife and so a lot of this review is based on her experiences.

So with that said, on with the show.

So what is the Vivosmart HR. Well the Vivosmart is part of Garmin's activity tracking product range and it is what most of the industry refers to as a fitness band. Fitness bands come in all shapes and sizes but the idea of them is that they are a tool to help a person be more active and get fitter. They do this by tracking how active a person is and encouraging them to do more.

Of course technology being what it is, with the constant demand for bigger and better, fitness bands do a lot more than simply tracking your activity now. Fitness bands tell the time, track how much sleep you get, connect to your phone for notifications, the list goes on. They can be clever little things.

To look at the Vivosmart is a fairly simple band with a clean, easy to read, touchscreen interface. The touchscreen works well and seems suitable sensitive. The interface is straight forward, navigation done through a combination of screen swipes and taps. I must admit that I haven't spent a lot of time navigating through it, but my wife doesn't have many complaints.

As you can see from the picture of my wife's wrist it is reasonably subtle. Here it is compared to my Garmin 920XT.

As you can see, much smaller than the 920XT but about the same thickness. This thickness is quite impressive when you take into account the fact that the Vivosmart HR has an optical HR monitor built into the back.

Those familiar with the original Vivosmart will notice that the HR looks broader. It certainly is. I was actually a big fan of the original Vivosmart's shape, it was nice and subtle. However, one benefit of this new shape is that the screen is bigger and clearer. I suspect the new shape was probably also necessary for the optical heart rate monitor.

One things about the new shape that my wife is a very big fan of is the fact that it includes a proper watch buckle.

The original Vivosmart had a clasp sort of arrangement which looked nice, but really didn't work all that well. In fact it had a bad habit of accidentally coming open. Not long after release Garmin bought out a 'keeper' which you could get for free. The purpose of the keeper was to try and keep the clasp closed. A job it seemed to achieve reasonably well. However, the fact that the keeper was necessary speaks to the weakness of the original design. A watch buckle may not look as slick, but it is simple and it works. Big tick.

So that is a bit about how the Vivosmart HR looks and what it is, so now I will quickly mention one thing it isn't. It isn't is a GPS. That is not unusual for fitness bands, most of them don't include a GPS. Instead any fitness tracking they do is by using an accelerometer to count your steps and from that estimate how far you have walked, how quickly you have done it, how many calories you have burnt etc. The Vivosmart is no different here. If you are wanting more advanced metrics, like accurate running pace, distance etc, look elsewhere.

So if it doesn't have GPS, what does the Vivosmart have? Well it has the usual suite of features that you would expect for an activity tracker. It tells the time, it connects to your phone and feeds you notifications, counts your steps, tracks your sleep, can control the music on your phone, give you estimated running metrics, prompts you to move after too much sitting etc. All these features can be found on a lot of other fitness trackers, including the original Vivosmart. However, it is probably worth spending a bit of time talking about these standard features since they are an important part of the device.

Of the 'standard' features the thing my wife and I have enjoyed the most about the Garmin fitness tracking devices is the personal daily goal. When you first get the Vivosmart it starts with a default number of steps as your daily goal (7500 steps normally). If you hit this goal it increases for the next day. Hit it again and up goals the goes again. Consistently hit your goal and it starts to increase faster. It does this until you don't meet your goal, on that day the goal comes down a little. In this way the device learns your habits and customises the goal to suit you. The nice thing is that it is always urging you to do a little bit more. When you consider the target audience of the Vivosmart, this is a great approach. The old Vivosmart had this and the HR version has it too, very nifty and a strong core for the device to be built around.


In terms of step accuracy the Vivosmart seems fine. My wife has certainly never found any issues with the consistency of how the Vivosmart counts steps. It is quite easy to trick the device, cleaning your teeth is a good way to get extra steps for example, however, the important thing to remember here is that you are only comparing steps from day to day with yourself. So it doesn't really matter if the Vivosmart is counting extra steps as long as it counts them every day. As long it is counting steps consistently then it will provide a useful comparision to help drive your improvement. This will be the case no matter what fitness tracker you are using. It is worth mentioning at this point though that between the Vivosmart and the Vivosmart HR Garmin seems to have tweaked the software so that the newer device is harder to fool.

As well as tracking your steps the Vivosmart HR gives you prompts if you have been sitting still too long. It does this by filling a move bar along the bottom of the screen. The longer you sit the more segments of the bar that fill in. If you move then some segments of the bar disappear again. The first segment fills after an hour and at that point it will also buzz at you. Another segment of the move bar fills every 15 minutes until you reach two hours. After two hours the watch buzzes at you again to tell you that you really do need to move now. It is a handy tool and a good reminder to keep being active, however, unless you are particularly motivated it is very easy to ignore. I certainly find my move bar filled all the way up on my 920XT when I am having a busy day.

Connectivity of the Vivosmart HR to your phone works well and my wife has had less issues with the connectivity than she did with her original Vivosmart. When we first got the original Vivosmart it took us ages to connect it to her phone (Android) and she would regularly have to reconnect it. Those issues seem to be long gone. However, I suspect that is mainly due to the maturing of the technology/software and us getting more comfortable with it rather than a significant improvement in the device. To be fair to the original Vivosmart, my wife hadn't had connectivity issues with that for quite some time either.

Being connected to her phone means she can use her Vivosmart to receive text messages, get prompts about incoming calls etc. This is no different to the original Vivosmart and a range of other devices, however, it is worth mentioning because we have always been surprised by how useful we find it. When we got her original Vivosmart we had thought that the notifications were going to be a real gimmick. However, once we started using it we found it very useful. No more missed calls or missed texts etc. After her first Vivosmart broke we found ourselves really missing the notifications. To me that speaks volumes about how much you actually use something. How useful you find this feature is probably a bit personal though.

On top of tracking steps etc, you can also use the Vivosmart to track a training session. There is a mode that allows you to start a timer and it will estimate distance, pace etc for your run. DC Rainmaker delves into the accuracy of this mode quite a bit, but basically he found that the accuracy can vary quite a bit, from being very close to a GPS measurement to being out by 20 to 30%. For more information have have look at the link above to his review. Basically this mode is fine for estimating a session, but if you are after accurate training metrics then you may want for a different type of device. Once again, more on that later. Worth mentioning that on the original Vivosmart you were able to use this mode for cycling too, however, that has been removed on the HR version. I suspect Garmin found not many people were using it. In the first Vivosmart you could also connect the fitness monitor to a heart rate strap to measure your heart rate. That duty is now taken up by an optical heart rate monitor but more on that later.

The other standard activity tracker feature that is included on the Vivosmart HR is sleep tracking. A while after release of the original Vivosmart they removed the need for you to turn sleep mode on when you went to bed. Instead the Vivosmart started to figure out when you went to sleep and track it from that point. My wife never felt like the original Vivosmart did the autosleep mode well. In fact she continued to manually turn on sleep mode long after the auto sleep mode was enabled. This seems to have improved with the Vivosmart HR with the automatic sleep tracking occuring more reliablly.

In terms of what the sleep tracking gives you it will tell you how long you have slept each night and also divide you sleep up into sections of deep sleep and light sleep depending on how much you have moved. I consider the sleep tracking feature of  most activity trackers as a nice to have, but not an essential. I rarely look at mine, however, it nice to be able to look back sometimes when you are particularly tired and realise that you are perhaps not getting as much sleep as you thought you were or know you should.

Like the previous Vivosmart, the Vivosmart HR is waterproof to 50m (5 atmospheres). This means it is fine for showering and swimming. This is good since the intention of the device is that you wear it all the time. My wife only really takes hers off to charge it. She regularly swims and showers in it and has never had a problem.

Finally, battery life. The Vivosmart is rated for around 4 to 5 days and that is about what we have found. Charging is done easily and quickly through a USB charger. We find the battery life to be fine. The battery lasts long enough that charging is no great hassle which is about all you can ask for from this sort of device.



So that is some of the standard fitness tracker features, but the Vivosmart HR has a couple of other tricks. The main one is to do with the HR in its name, which stands for Heart Rate. This is the Vivosmart HR's main party trick and it refers to an optical Heart rate monitor built into the back of the device, the third or fourth Garmin product to do so.

From what we have seen the accuracy of the optical heart rate monitor is good, both during day to day activities or during exercise. When it is on it seems to measure heart rate reliability and accurately. Big win there.

Now you may note above that I said that the HR monitor works well when it is on. I say this because when you start an activity the heart rate monitor turns itself on and measures heart rate for your session. This measurement is accurate and everything is good in the world. However, for normal wear during the day the HR monitor only turns itself on intermediately, DC Rainmaker estimated the sample rate to be around every four hours. The infrequent sample rate is done to conserve battery life which makes sense. However, it also means that estimates of things like resting heart rate really are just that, estimates. Good for general information, but perhaps not good enough if you are after super accurate trending, which I can imagine a lot of athletes would be interested in (I certainly would be). This unfortunately reduces the usefulness of the day to day heart rate measuring.

Another thing the optical HR monitor can be used for is as an external HR monitor for a stand alone Garmin device, such as a bike computer. You do this in the same was as you would pair any heart rate monitor to your Garmin device. This works well, but I can imagine it is a feature that may not get used that often. It should also be noted that this can't be done for swimming, so no sneaky swimming heart rate tracking hacks here I am afraid.

There are a couple of other new features and these have more to do with software. For the Vivosmart HR Garmin has introduced metric called active minutes. This is another goal a bit like your steps. In this case it is based around the recommended level of daily exercise, which is 5 x 30 minutes. Therefore, the active minutes goal is set by default to 150 minutes/week. The goal can be changed manually, but it doesn't automatically adjust like the steps goal does. Basically with this mode, when you are doing an activity and your heart rate is above a set level for at least 10 minutes it starts counting down the active minutes. This goal is giving recognition to the fact that if you are after fitness improvements, walking and generally being active is important, but for significant gains you also need to be spending some time at higher intensities.

Given the intentions of the active minutes mode, I think it is a great addition and one that could be really beneficial to the Vivosmart HR's target audience. However, despite my wife having her Vivosmart for quite some time she still hasn't got the metric entirely figured out. She is still not clear if you need to start a session or not (I suspect you do) and she doesn't know what the cut off heart rate is for it to count as being active. She is also not sure what rules it is using to count your 10 minutes, ie if you drop out of your target zone for 10 seconds or 30 seconds or 1 second, does it mean you have to start again? These uncertainties mean she has struggled to get her 150 minutes a week and she has been finding the metric a bit frustrating. This is unfortunate since I think it could be a really powerful fitness tool. I am hopeful it will still become that.

The other new software feature concerns flights of stairs. The Vivosmart HR has a built in barometer, which is a new feature over the original Vivosmart. This means it can measure elevation changes. The way the Garmin has elected to display these elevation changes is by estimating the flights of stairs you have climbed in a day. The default goal is 10. Once again this goal seems like a fine idea. However, of the various metrics available on the Vivosmart, this is the one most fraught with issues. The simple fact is that we have never found this to be consistently accurate. My wife's daily walk is quite hilly and so no doubt this would count as some flights of stairs, which is fine. However, it doesn't always count them. Other days she will find that she will have somehow accumulated 8 flights despite going nowhere near a hill of stairs all day. Barometers can certainly be fooled by weather changes and we have definitely found this on the Vivosmart. In short this is one of those things that is a nice idea but falls down on execution.

So that is about it I think from the feature and review perspective. To finish this review of I will spend a little bit of time discussing who I think this device is for.

Basically, who it isn't for is an athlete. After seeing my wife's Vivosmart HR I briefly considered getting one as my normal day to day watch. The idea of having a constant HR monitor on a simple device appealed strongly to the Type A Triathlete in me. However, for my purposes the accuracy of the HR monitor in day to day tracking just isn't good enough. It doesn't have enough resolution to necessarily warn me if I am getting sick/overtrained and if it can't do that, then that would defeat much of the point for me. On top of that the accuracy of the distance/pace measurement for things like running will not suit an athlete. Basically if you are in serious training for a triathlon or a run or something like that you would be much better served by a GPS watch. Something like the Vivoactive, new Vivoactive HR, Forerunner 920XT or Fenix 3 to name a few. This would hold true for any activity tracker on the market.

So if it isn't for an athlete, who is it aimed at. In short it is aimed at my wife (and probably a couple of other people). It is for people who perhaps don't do much exercise but would like help to do more. People who don't need to know necessarily how far or how quickly they run, but would like a record of how long they did it for. People who perhaps don't need to know exactly what their resting heart rate is, but for whom an estimated long term trend is very useful. For people like that the Vivosmart HR is perfect. Some of the 'extra features' like the stairs might have a few quirks, but the basics of the device work very well. The steps counting is faultless and the sliding goal one of my wife's favourite features. The active minutes goal is taking some figuring out but I have hopes that it will be just as useful as steps one day. The active minutes combined with target steps are a great motivator to get you doing just that little bit more. The other usual activity tracker features, the notifications, the battery life, the sleep tracking all work well. All backed up with the certainty that comes with buying from a massive and reputable brand. Lots of things to like there.

When we got my wife her first activity tracker we weren't sure what to expect. Would it be useful, would it help, would it be a motivation? We found out long ago that the answer to those questions is yes. The Vivosmart HR is the latest generation in a series of devices that my wife has found to be beneficial. It has taken the good features of the original Vivofit and Vivosmart and built on them. I certainly consider it one of the leading options in the activity tracker market.