Garmin Vivoactive 3 Good For Running
Tom'southward Guide Verdict
The Vivoactive 3 is i of the best fitness-focused smartwatches available, but the Fitbit Ionic has music storage and the Apple Lookout Series three has more apps.
Pros
- +
E'er-on watch face
- +
Round design
- +
Avant-garde workout-tracking
Cons
- -
Garmin Pay supports few cards at launch
- -
Inaccurate sleep-tracking
- -
No onboard music storage
Garmin makes some of the best fettle trackers in varying shapes and sizes for athletes of all stripes. Runners, swimmers, golfers: No matter what form of exercise yous prefer, Garmin probably has a device designed to rail your activity.
Only now the company is diversifying its lineup, with more-versatile smartwatches, such as the Vivoactive 3, which takes aim at both the Apple Watch Series 3 and Fitbit Ionic, with features such as apps, smartphone notifications and the ability to make purchases with the watch.
- Garmin Forerunner 235 vs. Vivoactive 3
There's no dubiety that Garmin handily beats both Apple and Fitbit when it comes to tracking exercise, making it the best smartwatch for fitness-tracking, but the Vivoactive 3 has a few drawbacks when you expect across workouts.
Editor's note: Garmin's adjacent-gen $349 Vivoactive 4 is now on sale. The smartwatch comes in two sizes and offers built-in music storage.
Fitness: Where Garmin shines
The Vivoactive 3 has built-in GPS and a heart charge per unit sensor, which are becoming de rigueur for smartwatches these days. But Garmin has been outfitting its activity trackers with both of those features for years now, and the accuracy of the visitor's sensors is well-proved at this point. That holds true for the Vivoactive 3, although the differences between Garmin's devices and those of its rivals are shrinking.
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I wore the device for three iii-mile runs and institute that the Vivoactive 3 latches onto a GPS signal in less than a minute and accurately tracks heart rate during exercise. Yous launch a workout by pressing the watch's side button and choosing from a litany of activities (seriously, it seems like Garmin can track just about anything). You can also design your ain workouts in the Garmin Connect smartphone app and and then sync them to the lookout man.
The Vivoactive 3's display is superbright and easy to see even when you're running outside. While you run, you lot tin can encounter stats like mileage, pace and eye rate. After syncing your conditioning to the Garmin Connect app, you'll run into a map of your route.
The Vivoactive iii uses its eye rate sensor to measure your V02 max score, or what your fitness age is, and monitor your stress levels throughout the day. The Garmin Connect app stores public information from other Garmin users nearly pop courses and segments, and compares your data against them. I liked being able to run across how quickly other runners conquered a difficult uphill stretch of a course I run regularly (although I'm a little peeved that they were much faster than me).
Pattern: Simple, round, easy to use
The Vivoactive 3 shares many features with its rivals, the Fitbit Ionic and Apple Watch Serial three. The Garmin device's interface relies on a combination of impact-screen controls and a side button or crown. For instance, viewing a smartphone notification requires tapping on the picket face, merely pausing a workout happens with the press of a button. This was all like shooting fish in a barrel enough to figure out.
Unlike the Ionic and Apple Watch, the Vivoactive three has a round watch face up that makes information technology look more than like an analog lookout man than a fitness tracker or smartwatch. You tin can install new lookout man faces in the Garmin Connect app, but the preinstalled i is just fine. It always shows the time, although the brandish dims when yous're not actively using it to conserve battery.
Many smartwatches are bulky or merely fashion too big on my fairly modest wrist. This is true of the Ionic, which loses major points for its gigantic square shape. The Vivoactive 3 is large, besides, at 43 millimeters, merely looks more similar a fashionably oversized analog scout than an obvious Bluetooth device or a fitness tracker.
Pressing on the watch face up reveals a menu; from here, y'all can change your watch face, prepare an alarm, view your stats and change the watch'southward settings. Swipe up from the spotter face to see an overview of your day, check the weather or view your most recent notifications.
I liked that the Vivoactive 3 would show me the entirety of a text message or the full text of an alert. More bones fitness trackers volition tell you if yous accept a text but won't testify you lot the whole matter. Notwithstanding, I wasn't able to respond to messages correct from my wrist, which would be useful.
Downsides: Sleep-tracking and no songs
Design and fitness are where Garmin's Vivoactive 3 excels, but it'due south non a perfect smartwatch. The device gets pretty decent battery life — about three days with GPS and heart rate use — which means you lot tin wear the watch overnight, simply the sleep-tracking leaves a lot to be desired. I night, I forgot to vesture the lookout, leaving it on a tabular array. The next mean solar day, the device reported that I had slept solidly for nine hours. Shouldn't a watch with a heart charge per unit sensor be able to figure out that a human isn't wearing the device, let alone sleeping while doing so?
The lookout man also lacks onboard music storage and has no integration with music apps. You can control song playback from your smartphone using the Vivoactive 3, but if you leave domicile with just your smartwatch, y'all'll accept to piece of work out in silence. Both the Ionic and Apple Watch support local song storage, so you can exercise without a phone nearby.
Garmin Pay: Easy to utilize, if yous can
Like Fitbit and Apple tree, Garmin wants to make its smartwatches capable of doing more on their own. The company introduced a mobile payment system with the Vivoactive 3 called Garmin Pay and then you can pay for items on the go by simply holding your sentinel near a payment terminal. You tin tell whether a store or eatery accepts mobile payments if there's an NFC icon on the checkout stand.
Setting upwardly Garmin Pay in the Garmin Connect smartphone app is fairly easy. You can add together payment details manually or past snapping a photo of your physical card, and so verify your carte with the banking company or credit card issuer. The whole process takes merely a few minutes.
To really use Garmin Pay in a store, long printing the Vivoactive three's side button and tap on the wallet icon. You can store multiple cards in your wallet and choose betwixt them past swiping down. You lot'll see a photograph of your card and its concluding iv digits to make sure you pick the correct one. I was in a hurry when I used the Vivoactive to pay for a pack of gum at Duane Reade, and using the scout to pay was far faster than digging into my handbag to find my wallet and pull out my debit menu, especially given how dull flake card transactions have become.
Merely Garmin Pay doesn't support that many cards at launch, which limits its usefulness. Visa cards from Bank of America, Majuscule Ane and U.Due south. Banking concern and Mastercards from BECU, Banking company of America, Capital 1, First Tech Federal Credit Matrimony, Security Service Federal Credit Union, U.S. Depository financial institution and VACU are currently supported. More than card issuers are being added in the coming months, only the roster is nowhere almost as expansive as Apple Pay, which has a lengthy head start.
App Shop: Limited to (mostly) fitness
Like Fitbit and Apple, Garmin has an app store for its smartwatch. Simply while Garmin says its Connect IQ store has more 1,600 apps, large-time apps unrelated to fitness are few and far betwixt. There are plenty of sentinel faces and conditioning apps that you tin install from the store in the Garmin Connect app, merely they're extremely specific. At that place are apps for hiking, stretching, setting a stopwatch, skiing, biking and running, simply you'll be hard-pressed to find popular smartphone apps that are unrelated to working out. An app that shows your Lyft commuter's ETA and some other that does the same for Uber are useful, only you however need your phone to hail a ride.
Information technology'southward a adept matter that Garmin is so committed to fitness, but a smartwatch should be more versatile. The Vivoactive 3 would be more useful when you're not exercising if it had more than apps that can control smart domicile devices, deliver news headlines to your wrist and offering more insights into your wellness using the scout'southward sensors. It has a few, merely not enough. When it comes to fitness, though, Garmin's store has everything you could want — and then some.
Bottom Line
Garmin'due south Vivoactive 3 is an extremely fettle-focused smartwatch, much more and then than the Fitbit Ionic or Apple Sentinel Series 3. That makes this device perfect for extremely fettle-focused people. The watch besides looks better on the wrist than the Fitbit Ionic does.
The Apple tree Watch Series 3 without LTE is the all-time smartwatch that most iPhone users — those who aren't serious athletes — can purchase. If yous don't care and then much nearly way (and don't have an iPhone), you might like the Fitbit Ionic, which also offers powerful fettle-tracking, and is building out an app store with more pop apps that yous will recognize. The Ionic also has room for music, which the Vivoactive iii does non.
Only there's no denying that Garmin makes the best fitness trackers you can buy. If the company made the Vivoactive 3 a more well-rounded smartwatch with more pop apps, support for more than cards in Garmin Pay and music storage, then the device would be worth every bit of its $300 cost tag.
Credit: Tom's Guide
Source: https://www.tomsguide.com/us/garmin-vivoactive-3,review-4973.html
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