Choosing the best fitness tracker for your next gym run? Try Garmin Vivoactive

Traditional fitness trackers are terrible for actual sport, and they”re almost useless for people who take their fitness activity seriously and for active people the perfect fitness device did not exist. But let’s say you like the idea of getting notifications on a smart watch like your important emails, calendar reminders, text message, and at the same time your sports activity.

That’s where the Garmin Vivoactive fitness tracker smart watch comes in. It’s as though Garmin took all of the pain points that fitness addicts might have with “smart” watches.

Garmin Vivoactive: Features

The Garmin combines all-day activity and sleep tracking along with more detailed exercise monitoring with built-in GPS, has a bright, responsive touchscreen, and is waterproof for swimmin,g and provides some of the functions of smart watches, minus a wide variety of third-party apps or the ability to respond to stuff from your smart watch with a battery life of up to three weeks and also can sync any of activity data to the Garmin Connect mobile app.

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In addition, the design of this hybrid device is strictly useful. Being incredibly light and thin, it comes with hard plastic edges and a somewhat-pliable plastic that can be interchangeable for a nicer, leather one. Its multicolored touchscreen defaults to time of day, with a back icon at the bottom of the display.

There are two physical buttons on either side of the watch face: one is a power button that also activates as a backlight button, and the other functions as both a quick-access button to activities and also as a start or stop button. The Vivoactive home screen will also take you through the recent notifications you received on your smartphone and a Bluetooth music control.

Fitness and Sporty Activity

So, what about fitness and sporty activity? The Garmin records outdoor activities like walking, biking, running, hiking, swimming, and golf, as well as indoor activities. GPS is built into the watch for accurate distances during the first batch of activities, and golf-course. It doesn’t have optical heart-rate sensors, but it can read heart rate if wearing with compatible chest strap, like many other Garmin watches do and its really easy to navigate.

The Garmin Vivoactive is compatible with both IOS and Android mobile devices, that syncs data wirelessly via Bluetooth and the good thing with Garmin, it has API partnerships with the makers of other popular fitness apps, like Strava and Runkeeper, so that workouts logged in Garmin can be shared to those apps and the Garmin’s Connect IQ store lets you download new watch faces, a variety of fitness related apps and advance data fields from both Garmin and outside app developers.

If you’re still hard-pressed with choosing the right one for you, then you may choose the best fitness watch for you at Harvey Norman. They boast a collection of fitness watches for every sport lover’s need. Check them out!

Consumers who are interested in this product might wonder how this compares to something like the Fitbit Durge, which also tracks a variety of workouts and has GPS for any outdoor stuff or activities. The Fitbit Surge gets points for recording activities like yoga classes and weight lifting, which Vivoactive doesn’t do, but the Surge isn’t waterproof that can’t be worn while swimming. So whether the Fitbit Surge or the Vivoactive is better, it will still depend on what the user does for workouts.