Garmin Vívoactive 5: Health & Fitness Smartwatch

The best fitness tracker I’ve used
I’m coming from an Apple Watch Series 5. I had gotten frustrated with the battery life and sleep tracking and wanted to see if a more fitness-focused watch would be a better fit. I’m not a big runner or someone who does a lot of intense exercise, but I do like to track my exercise and sleep and get nudges to move when I’ve been sitting down for too long. I also like to get notifications on my wrist without needing to pull out my phone.Compared to the Apple Watch, the first major thing I noticed was this is nowhere close in terms of smarts. I had gotten used to Apple’s smooth interface, built in microphone and speaker for voice commands, and often useful apps that can be used without needing to get my phone out. That being said, after a few days I can confidently say that I don’t need them. I would argue that Garmin knows what this is and what it is not – it’s a fitness device first and foremost, and everything else comes second. And on that basis they nailed it – the fitness tracking has been excellent and noticeably better than the Apple Watch especially in sleep tracking. I also much prefer their approach to goals, which tracks exercise over the course of a week rather than focusing specifically on individual days. Whenever I was sick or had a down day I would feel guilty if I didn’t close all of my rings on my Apple Watch, but I don’t feel that same pressure with the Garmin. I do miss being able to use voice commands with my watch, but I could have gotten a more expensive Garmin if I really wanted that, and I don’t think it’s worth it for me.The second thing I noticed: not having to charge your watch every day is a game changer. This was easily my biggest frustration with the Apple Watch since it’s marketed as a device you wear 24×7 and yet needs to be charged every day. And considering how long it took to charge my Series 5, this was a major annoyance. I couldn’t charge it overnight, because I wanted sleep tracking. I couldn’t charge it in the morning, because I like to start off my day with exercise and it doesn’t charge fast enough to do it after a workout and before work. And if I charged it in the evening, I would often forget to put it on before bed and miss out on the sleep tracking. The Garmin is a breath of fresh air by comparison – I charge it about once a week, and with my relatively light usage it can probably go close to two. I took a multi day trip recently and I didn’t once have to worry about charging my watch, which was a pleasant change.Overall I think this watch is a great fit for a more casual user who isn’t running marathons but wants to track fitness and sleep and get some extras like smartphone notifications and see the weather at a glance. If you want something with more smart features and better build quality (i.e. more metal and less plastic), then the Venu might be a better fit. Or they have the Forerunner if you do run marathons. Or a bunch of other models for more specific use cases. But I would highly recommend giving this watch a try if you’re looking for the same things that I am.

Amazing!
I’ve had it for about a week and so far I love it. I upgraded from an Apple Watch cause I wanted something more health and fitness oriented and this is just that. I like all the features and it still looks very cute and easier to style since it looks closer to a watch. It’s pretty comfortable also. I really love the sleep feature and the cycle tracking as a women. I’d recommend this to anyone! It was easy to set up and I find my sleep score pretty accurate and mostly everything else. I mean it’s not 100% right but it’s definitely a good indicator

I love this thing. Not the least expensive, but probably the best bang for the buck.
I’m someone who really really did not want a watch of any sort, especially not an Apple Watch or anything else that is bloated with unnecessary hardware that needs to be charged every single day. Charging a phone every day is enough of a pain without needing to add any other junk, so no thanks to the useless gimmick-loaded “smart” watches.But I really needed to do fitness tracking because without some sort of gadget I just have zero idea how lazy or not lazy I’ve been lately and whether or not I need to get at least some minimal exercise.And my #1 must have feature is week-long battery charge life. This watch is good enough, even though the battery life might be more like 5 days in some cases if you’re using it for activities a lot where the gps is turned on. But for those not running with the gps every day or constantly tinkering with it a full battery charge seems to last a week. That is, charge it for an hour on Sunday and no need to charge it again until the same time next Sunday. You could get the battery to last longer if you’re willing to shut off absolutely everything that might use more power.I started out with a Garmin vivosmart 5 because I didn’t think I needed anything beyond that, but I have sleep problems and decided I needed better sleep tracking. So I ended up with this one even though I don’t really care about random silly “apps” on a watch.Overall this watch has been excellent. It has a very good UI and the fitness tracking features a quite good. The sleep tracking is decent, but still has its issues that hopefully Garmin will fix with software updates. In particular the “nap tracking” doesn’t seem fully baked yet, and things like laying back in a recliner reading a book or watching TV can get falsely detected as a “nap”. Then there’s no way to delete a false nap on the watch or in the Garmin Connect app.There are still a few minor bugs that some people will run into but they seem to be things that can be fixed with firmware updates and I haven’t run into anything completely feature-breaking.If you feel like messing with it you can also install some “apps” like custom watch face designs or sunset/sunrise times, more detailed weather and such. But even without installing anything the watch does everything needed for health and fitness stuff.Almost all of the apps that come with the device can be uninstalled, so if you don’t need “women’s health tracking” for example then you can just remove that to free up space.Their mobile app is pretty well designed and only awkward in some parts of the configuration.The watch reliably synchronizes as long as you leave the phone app running in the background and I’ve never had any Bluetooth connection failures, lag, or lost pairings.Things that the watch is not good for are things that you’d typically use a phone for like communication, turn by turn navigation, maps, games, and such. But I don’t want a watch to do any of that stuff and I’d rather have it save its battery charge so I don’t have to charge it constantly.So overall, this is “the” watch you want if you want as little nonsense as possible and don’t want to worry about battery charge all the time but still need full health and fitness tracking stuff beyond what the $75-150 models offer. And there are also no subscriptions required.

Montre abordable et bien utile. Elle a les fonctions de base. Et surtout elle reçoit les notifications. Très facile a installer avec l’application. Seul bémol l’application Garmin pour changer les écrans…C’est l’horreur et tout est payant

Todo bien