Garmin’s Vivosmart HR reviewed: Don’t buy a Fitbit before considering this band

Garmin is serious. The most dedicated outdoorsmen and athletes look to its rugged products for tracking everything from laps in the pool to dangerous hikes in remote places. Now the company is getting more serious about heart rate with the $150 Vivosmart HR, its first wristband activity tracker with a builtin optical heart rate monitor that the company developed itself. It sports many of the features Garmin put into its other all-purpose trackers, including step, distance, calorie, and sleep tracking, smartphone notifications, and music and action cam controls. It all connects to the newly redesigned Garmin Connect app.

Other than the heart rate monitor, there’s nothing outstandingly new about it. However, the Vivosmart HR is a necessary product for Garmin. Not only will it compete with the forthcoming Polar A360, but, more importantly, it’s going after Fitbit’s $150 Charge HR with a comprehensive set of features that both novices and hardcore athletes will appreciate.

Design: Don’t fix what isn’t broken

The Vivosmart HR looks like a marriage of the Vivosmart band and the Vivofit 2. It has a module with a 1.00 x 0.42-inch,160 x 68-pixel touchscreen that sits atop the wrist, with a single physical button on the right side of it. It’s embedded into a flexible, silicone band that mimics a regular watch strap, but this has rectangular notches rather than tiny holes. That subtle change makes it super easy to adjust and fasten, so you can make it as loose or as tight as you want depending on when you’re wearing it (you’ll want to have it on pretty tight when you plan on using the heart rate monitor heavily).

On the underside of the device is the optical heart rate monitor and the four tiny nodes for charging. The charging cable has an odd fastener on it that you have to fit the band into in order for it to power up via USB. The nodes are not magnetic either, so I often had to fiddle with the charging cable before I finally snapped it into place correctly.

The 160 x 68-pixel touchscreen is bold and has a backlight that turns on when you tap it.

Valentina Palladino

The 160 x 68-pixel touchscreen is bold and has a backlight that turns on when you tap it. Valentina Palladino

The band is silicone and comfortable with an adjustable closure.

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The band is silicone and comfortable with an adjustable closure. Valentina Palladino

The Vivosmart HR comes in black, blue, and purple.

Valentina Palladino

The Vivosmart HR comes in black, blue, and purple. Valentina Palladino

The band is silicone and comfortable with an adjustable closure. Valentina Palladino

The Vivosmart HR comes in black, blue, and purple. Valentina Palladino

Swiping to the left on the display shows you steps taken, calories burned, and more.

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The heart rate screen shows you your real-time pulse and your average heart rate over time.

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Music controls for when you go on a run and don’t want to whip out your phone.

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The settings menu, accessible by tapping the side button, lets you do things including start a run, enter do not disturb mode, and find your phone.

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The center icon initiates a sync with the Garmin Connect app.

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The nodes for charging, which surprisingly are not magnetic.

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The bottom of the module holds the optical heart rate monitor.

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The entire band isn’t curved, but the module lays comfortably flat to your wrist.

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The charging cable for the Vivosmart HR acts like an awkward cradle for one side of the device.

It’s super annoying to snap into place, especially since the nodes are not magnetic.

The display is also very easy to read in direct sunlight.

Valentina Palladino

Despite the display’s basic, monochrome style, I really liked it. The numbers that show the time digitally are big and easy to read, and the entire display is super clear in direct sunlight as well. In the Garmin Connect app, you can choose if you want its blueish backlight on always, never, or only during activity and when tapped. I found myself wishing the backlight was brighter, but that’s an issue most Garmin devices have had for ages. It also times out pretty quickly if you have it set to only turn on when woken by a tap or activity tracking, so I would suggest keeping it always on if you have eye troubles.

The Vivosmart HR is water-resistant up to 5 ATM, or about 50 meters. That’s better than the comparable Fitbit Charge HR, which is only splash-resistant. The band is supposed to last up to five days on a single charge, and my band was down to about 20 percent battery during my fourth day of use.

Setting up the device is simple enough: just download the Garmin Connect app and follow the pairing instructions after you sign in or create an account. The Vivosmart HR pairs via Bluetooth to your Android or iOS device, and it does so during setup from within Garmin’s app rather than in the Bluetooth settings on your smartphone. I didn’t have an issue setting up the device, but it did have occasional syncing issues. You can initiate a sync by opening up the app or by tapping the sync icon on the band; sometimes the band wouldn’t automatically sync when I opened the app.

A Garmin representative told me to update the Vivosmart HR’s software to see if that would fix the problem. To do so, you must connect the device to your computer via its USB charger and sync it with Garmin Express, which you can download from Garmin’s website. It’s basically a device management system that is mostly good for software and firmware updates. Sure enough, my Vivosmart HR needed to be updated to the most recent software, and after I did so, it synced to the app quickly and easily. (I should also mention that Garmin was doing maintenance on its Connect app while I reviewed the Vivosmart HR. This slowed me down as it disrupted syncing, but after the maintenance was finished, things went back to normal.)

Features: The usual suspects, with an accurate heart rate monitor

Garmin is certainly trying to take Fitbit’s Charge HR head-on with the Vivosmart HR. It tracks steps, calories, distance, floors climbed, and sleep, which is exactly what the Charge HR does. A note on sleep tracking: the Vivosmart HR monitors deep and light sleep, as well as the number of times you wake up each night. During setup, one of the things you have to tell the device is the time you typically go to bed each night and the time you wake up each morning. The tracker uses those times as guidelines. It automatically assumes you’re asleep when it senses no movement in that window of time, and it also silences the vibration alerts on the band so any phone activity won’t wake you up.

One of the new metrics tracked is “intensity minutes,” which piggybacks on the recommendation of organizations including the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the American Heart Association that you should get at least 150 minutes per week of intense activity. According to Garmin’s Vivosmart HR manual, you can gain intensity minutes by participating in “10 consecutive minutes of moderate to vigorous intensity activities.”

The biggest new feature is Garmin’s Elevate optical heart rate monitor embedded in the wristband. It continuously monitors your pulse, learning your average heart rate over time. I like being able to check my heart rate at any time by swiping to the appropriate page on the display, and seeing my average heart rate puts the real-time number into perspective. I checked my pulse multiple times a day this way and tested the monitor’s accuracy the old-fashioned way: taking my pulse with my finger over the artery in my throat. Each time the monitor was within 5 bpm of my reading.

The heart rate monitor is on when you work out as well, and the readings will show up when you swipe the display while tracking a workout. With runs, you can swipe through time, distance, calories, heart rate, and clock screens, and if you just want to be able to glance down at a specific metric while you’re training, you can just swipe to that page and leave it there. Heart rate and distance are what I like to focus on when I jog, so I often kept the display showing those. I also like that when you stop tracking an activity, you can choose to save it or discard it—this makes it super easy to filter out any activities that may have been interrupted for some reason or just ones you’re not particularly happy with.

There’s also broadcasting mode for the heart rate monitor, which shares your pulse with a connected Garmin ANT+ compatible device such as an Edge cycling tracker, the VIRB action cam (which you can also control via the Vivosmart HR), or even a Vivoactive smartwatch which can track swimming. Polar’s upcoming A360 wristband can do the same thing, sharing your heart rate information with other Polar products that don’t have monitors already in them.

While the Charge HR shows you call and text alerts, the Vivosmart HR displays all the notifications your smartphone gets including texts, calls, emails, calendar events, Facebook, Twitter, and more. It’s one of those bands that just floods your wrist with notifications, even if your smartphone doesn’t light up with them. I don’t disable any notifications on my iPhone 6, but some do not wake up the display because they aren’t important enough for me to want to see immediately. Even those alerts come through on the Vivosmart HR, so often I would look down at my wrist and see just a random notification that a friend had checked-in at Shake Shack on Swarm. If you want to disable any notifications from coming through on the band, you’ll have to go into the settings on your smartphone and disable them for your device as well.

In the drawer of miscellaneous features, the Vivosmart HR has music controls on its display, letting you pause and skip back and forth between songs while you work out. The only app I was able to use it in was iTunes, though, so Spotify and Google Music users are out of luck with this. If you’ve been slumming it on the couch or at your desk for over an hour, the band will vibrate to tell you to move a little. But the feature I used more than I’d like to admit is the find-my-phone feature: tap the phone icon in settings, and the band will send a jingle to your smartphone in case you’ve lost it.

Garmin Connect: bold redesign, but a little confusing

Garmin recently redesigned its app, Garmin Connect, which is the mobile companion for nearly all of its wearables. It used to have a bland, card-like format (which the Web version still has), but now it sports a darker, chic look with an electric edge. The homepage is self-explanatory: two circles dominate the top of the screen, showing you your activity goal progress so far and how much sleep you got last night. Below that are small tiles that show active calories (or the calories you’ve expended), activities recorded for the day, remaining calories you have to burn, intensity minutes, floors climbed, and, if you’ve paired MyFitnessPal to the app, calories consumed.

When pairing the band via Bluetooth, you’ll be asked to put in a verification code.

When pairing the band via Bluetooth, you’ll be asked to put in a verification code.

If you have another device paired, you’ll have to disconnect it.

If you have another device paired, you’ll have to disconnect it.

You can customize Snapshots, or shortcuts, to data points that appear on the homepage of the app.

You can customize Snapshots, or shortcuts, to data points that appear on the homepage of the app.

If you have another device paired, you’ll have to disconnect it.

You can customize Snapshots, or shortcuts, to data points that appear on the homepage of the app.

The homepage shows steps and sleep, along with other stats beneath their circles.

Tapping on the circles or other stats brings up more detailed graphs of your data.

Swipe to the left on the homepage to view all your Snapshots.

You’ll find a lot of useful tools in device settings.

You can turn the band’s alarm on and set it to a certain time and change the display view.

Depending on how you like to view the Vivosmart HR, you can make the display have horizontal or vertical alignment.

Change data fields to customize what you see while tracking a run and customize daily activity goals.

Connect the Garmin app to your MyFitnessPal account so you can keep track of your diet.

You’ll need to authorize the two apps to speak to each other.

Tapping on either circle will give you more information about your activity and sleep, including things like distance traveled, floors climbed and descended, and deep and light sleep durations. From the homepage, swiping to the left will show you pages devoted to each Snapshot you selected when you first set up the device. These are just quick-access pages that you can use to look at the stats that are most important to you. If you’re not a cyclist but you’re an avid swimmer, you can get rid of the cycling Snapshot and make the swimming recap page the first page you swipe to from the homepage.

Things get confusing when you want to change user or device settings. Most options are found under the “More” tile at the bottom right corner of the homepage. To change any device setting, go to Garmin Devices and tap on the Vivosmart HR in the list of devices that you have linked to your account (you can have multiple trackers linked at once). There, you can tap Device Settings to do things like set the alarm (bummer, you only get one on the band), change the display’s orientation, turn on and off the inactivity alert, and more. Under User Settings, you can change your daily goals for steps, floors climbed, and intensity minutes, as well as basic information including your height and weight. Once you know where these settings are, it’s easy to change them and sync them to your device. However they just feel buried in the app’s new design, making it harder than it should be to initially find them.

One of the customizable features I really liked was the auto-creation of a new step goal based on your current activity level. Over time, the Vivosmart HR learns how many steps you take each day and can suggest a slightly higher goal that changes randomly. While you can choose to set your own that never changes, that’s also an easier way to become complacent with your normal routine. If one of your goals is to move more, the auto-goal feature is great to enable because you’ll get a new challenge almost every day.

A strong challenger to the tracker king

Fitbit should take notice of Garmin’s Vivosmart HR. The company managed to pack many features, including robust smartphone notifications, water-resistance, and intense customization, into the new $150 device. While public perception may not pit the hardcore athlete’s company (Garmin) against the everyday fitness tracker company (Fitbit), the Vivosmart HR will be a big competitor for the $150 Fitbit Charge HR.

If you want a comprehensive tracker, the Vivosmart HR is the way to go. It tracks daily activity well and easily switches into beast mode to track workouts and give you many metrics to analyze after you’re done. Smartphone notifications aren’t limited to calls and texts, and its heart rate monitor can conveniently be used with other Garmin devices.

The main thing holding the Vivosmart HR back is its design—it is pragmatic and utilitarian, but it doesn’t have the slight chic factor you could get in a Fitbit. It’s far from ugly, but it’s not the prettiest device either. Also, compared to Fitbit’s app, Garmin Connect is more confusing—partly because key settings aren’t intuitive to find and partly because there are so many things you can customize that it can get overwhelming fast. Overall, the Vivosmart HR shows that Garmin is working to make trackers that are more mainstream, allowing anyone to go from regular daily tracking to more intense sport monitoring with just one device.