Garmin Vívoactive 4 GPS Smartwatch
Features Music, Body Energy Monitoring, Animated workouts, Pulse Ox Sensors and More. See your body’s energy levels throughout the day, so you can find the best times for activity and rest.
- Keeps track of your energy levels, Pulse Ox (this is not a medical device and is not intended for use in the diagnosis or monitoring of any medical condition), respiration, menstrual cycle, stress, sleep, estimated heart, hydration and more
- Easily download songs to your watch, including playlists from Spotify , Amazon music or Deezer (may require a premium subscription With a third party music provider), and connect with headphones (sold separately) for phone free listening
- Record all the ways to move with more than 20 preloaded GPS and indoor sports apps, including yoga, running, swimming and more
- Get easy to follow, animated workouts right on your watch screen, including cardio, strength, yoga and Pilates
- Battery life: Up to 8 days in smartwatch mode; Up to 6 hours in GPS and music mode
Mikey –
I was looking for a smartwatch that could download spotify playlists, connect to bluetooth headphones, GPS tracking during runs / hikes, long battery life, and a fast non-laggy touch screen interface. Been wearing the watch for about a week now, here are my impressions thus far:-Connecting the watch to my phone and wifi to download my spotify playlists was fairly easy and didn’t take much time.-I use a pair of Samsung Galaxy Buds for headphones. Pairing them with the watch was extremely easy.-When playing music from the watch, there are almost no issues with connectivity. Over the course of 1.5hrs, I’ll maybe have a few milliseconds where the music is choppy. Almost not worth mentioning but wanted to in case others are having issues.-GPS tracking so far seems to be great, no issues here.-Battery life when not listening to music is great. Often only uses up 5-8% over a 10-12 hour period.-Battery life when listening to music and connected to bluetooth headphones could be better. Over a 2 hour period of listening to music I saw the battery drain ~30%. Good enough for me, but could be better and is the reason I gave 4 instead of 5 stars.-Touch screen is very responsive and I have not had any issues with lag at all.-The watch has a ton of features and a lot of applications / widgets. It can be a little overwhelming at first trying to navigate but within an hour of first wearing the watch, I felt comfortable with where everything was.
VMM –
I’m a watch dinosaur – I like automatic movements and the occasional quartz watch. Have avoided the “Smart Watch” fad up til now. But I’ve been wearing a Garmin VivoSmart fitness band with a regular watch and was looking for something that could carry off both purposes at the same time . . . without looking like I’m wearing a smartphone on my wrist. I’m also an Android phone guy so . . . adios Apple watch. But that’s OK.Look, if you’re looking for a device like this you have a choice: you can buy a true “smartwatch” with a bright and shiny display, the ability to track your steps (Apple/Samsung), read your emails . . and a crummy battery life. Or you can buy a fitness devise with Smartwatch features . . . like a Garmin.I choose Garmin. I bought the 40mm size because it looks like a regular watch and doesn’t look goofy with dressier styles. No, it doesn’t have the bright AMOLED display like the Apples and Samsungs, but it does have the “always on” display which is easy to read in any light. In dark areas, you can program it to brighten with a wrist snap or a tap. Again, it’s like a regular watch in that way – which for me is a must. And yes, you can customize the face or download others with the Garmin IQ app. Works fine for me.It’s the fitness innards where Garmin really shines, and it tracks damn near every bodily function you have. Steps is just the beginning. Lots of pre-programmed workouts along with heart rate and Pulse Ox monitoring. Garmin just buries the competition in the fitness arena, if that’s important to you.Yes, you can read texts etc but . . . well, I have a phone for that. No, I don’t want to read emails on my watch. The Garmin VA2 looks and acts like a real watch. It’s just smarter and the fitness stuff cannot be beat. And the battery life buries the Apples and the Samsungs. I get 2-3 days with just the basics on.If you don’t care much about the fitness criteria and want a wrist display to parrot your phone . . . get thee to the Apple store. Just make sure you bring your charger everywhere. If you want a solid smart-ish watch that looks classy and is packed with health and fitness utilities . . . get the Garmin.No regrets here.
Electra Small –
I had 2 different versions of the Samsung smart/activity watches, the Samsung activity metrics were always wrong. So I got this Garmin watch, it was cheaper and the focus was more activity tracking over smart features. The Garmin Watch started out great and the health app was better than Samsung’s. The smart features were also surprisingly good(displaying email, text and calls from my phone). The safety features are great allowing my husband to easily track my whereabouts in real time when I am out walking, hiking, or biking. But within weeks the watch started acting up. I went for a published 7 mile hike and my watch showed only 5 miles. I climbed 2 floors but the watch showed 10 floors. I climbed 20 floors and the watch showed 0 floors and needed to be reset and then restarted…. the watch congratulated me on achieving my water goal for the day when I had not logged any water yet for the day. I really love this watch and the app when it works but I am always having to reset the watch to factory defaults or uninstall and reinstall the app. Also the GPS seems weak, the signal takes a long time to connect and disconnects easily in wooded areas. At this point I have had the watch only about 1 month. The watch face scratched on day 1 which never happened in over 1 year on the Samsung watch. I still prefer this Garmin over the Samsung.
Adi –
A great fitness product from Garmin. The controls are very easy to use. I no longer need to carry my phone to the gym to log in my sets and reps as the watch allows me to do it easily, saving me a bunch of time at the gym. Only caveat is that the watch doesn’t recognize the strength workouts correctly and hence I always have to go back and edit the work out name and the weights used in each set. Other than that all the other metrics seem very accurate and integration with myfitnesspal makes it easy to track calories for the day and is helping me in weight management. Overall a great product and would recommend it for anyone looking to buy a fitness tracker to meet their fitness goals.
Danielle –
😍
Techn0 –
I am extremely impressed with the watches capabilities. The customized workouts are amazing and accurate. I have a smaller wrist so I purchased the 4S for the smaller face plate. I only wish the band had a couple more notches. If you are using the features, you will get about two days of battery but other than that, this watch is amazing. I love being able to play music directly from my watch. I now leave my phone at home and makes my runs that much more enjoyable.
CHATELAINE –
This smartwatch us beautiful. But I’ve had it a month now and i need to charge it everyday! I habent even downloaded any music yet. For this price i expect better performance from it because its unreliable and time consuming to charge it every day! This is my 4th Garmin smartwatch and this is the most disappointing! Im returning it.
Alex D. –
It’s my 2nd fitness tracker. Used it for about 10 day now and I can only compare it to a Charge 3 that I’ve had for a little over 2 months.I’m out of shape. I sweat a lot. The charge would lose my heart rate all the time. I’d go from 153 bpm to 100 for 2-3 min and back to 153+.Dual HRM with the Garmin solves that problem.I mostly do treadmill walks. Starting those on the garmin is easy. A button, indoor walk in the favorites, A button, the time starts, Dual HRM reconnects and we’re on!Doing this with the Charge was annoying as most of the time before I could get the treadmill to speed the screen would timeout and hey, no way to change it!Another thing is the Garmin does use normal 22mm band. If you have big wrists you can change them to something bigger than 8.2″So far the battery life isn’t too bad even with using the OX sensor from 10pm to 7am. I’m charging it every 3 days where with the Charge I’d get 4-5days.That’s all I can think of. I’ll update as I go.
Yash –
I loved the watch very much, it looked and felt great. However, the battery ran out in less than 12 hours. Had to sadly return it.
Garmin Guy –
Got it few weeks back. So far enjoying it. The watch looks very nice, elegant. Battery life is also quite good 4-5 days, without problem (even while using GPS for +-1h/day).The only thing, that annoys is that program sometimes gets stuck. I’m hoping it will be fixed with the next update…