Garmin Vivosmart Activity Tracker with Smart Notification
Garmin Vivosmart Activity Tracker with Smart Notification and Wrist Based Heart Rate Monito
Intensity Minutes
Whether you’re going for a swim or trying out a new gym class, vívosmart HR measures your activity intensity with intensity minutes. This feature lets you monitor your progress against activity goals recommended by health organisations.
Floors Climbed
In addition to measuring steps, calories and distance, vívosmart HR measures floors climbed. Walking up and down stairs is tough; get credit for the extra work thanks to the integrated barometric altimeter.
Garmin Connect and My Fitness Pal
Garmin vívosmart HR activity tracker automatically syncs with your smartphone throughout the day to save your stats to Garmin’s free on-line community. At Garmin Connect, you can save, plan and share your activity and beat yesterday in your daily step count. Connect with other users to challenge and compete.
For detailed calorie tracking, you can create an account at MyFitnessPal and link it to your Garmin Connect account. This allows you to compare calories consumed to total calories burned, which vívosmart HR records throughout the day.
Other connected features allow you to control music and your VIRB action camera (sold separately) or find your misplaced phone.
 |  |  |  |  |  | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Tracks Steps, Distance, Calories, Time and Sleep | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Personalised Daily Step Goal and Move bar | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Sunlight Readable Display | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | |
| Colour Display | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ||
| Activity Timer | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Smart Notifications | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | |
| GPS-Enabled and Built-In Sports Apps | ✓ | ✓ | ||||
| Wrist Based Heart Rate Monitor | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | |
| Stairs Climbed and Intensity Minutes | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | |
| Battery Life | Up to 5 days | 1 Year+ | Up to 5 days | Up to 7 days | Up to 5 days | GPS mode: Up to 13 hours; Smart mode: Up to 7 days |
| Weight: | 32 Grams |
| Size: | X-Large |
| Dimensions: | 7.37 x 2.11 x 1.22 cm; 31.75 Grams |
| Brand: | Garmin |
| Model: | 010-01955-09 |
| Colour: | Black |
| Pack Quantity: | 1 |
| Batteries Included: | 1 Lithium Polymer batteries required. (included) |
| Manufacture: | Garmin |
| Age: | Youth |
| Dimensions: | 7.37 x 2.11 x 1.22 cm; 31.75 Grams |
| Quantity: | 1 |
| Size: | X-Large |
Pairs up with my garmin cycle gps and monitors heart rate while I ride. Exactly what I bought it for and it works just great. Also has spurred me on to walk more as it counts how many steps are taken during the day. Does loads more than I need and garmin connect software provides and stores loads of stats regarding my daily activities and stores stats for future reference. Love the vivosmart, fantastic accessory to garmin edge bike gps and great as a stand alone fitness monitor. Brilliant for the casual user but be aware garmin and others will sell you more feature rich products for much much more cost. VFM sits with this wrist tracker. Better features for the keener fitness chasers are on other far more expensive devices.
I love using this device, it is so comfortable on the wrist and fairly accurate.I have found that when starting a particular exercise this device is not accurate but after a couple of minutes it is as accurate as my heart strap monitor. I also like wearing this in bed and it lets me get a measurement of how well I am sleeping and how much movement is happening, how restless etc I am.
I would like to get the newer model which also includes GPS but get this function on my polar V800.
I’ve now owned one of these for 3 months. It help me stay focused, train and keep to sensible goals.
I’ve owned some other fitness trackers, fitbit for one, but the vivosmart and the connect app are better and more user friendly by far. I’ve been recovering from and injury and being a formally very fit guy my confidence was rocked massively and I put on a tonne of weight.
With the aid of the vivosmart, the Garmin connect app and the food diary from a third party I’ve dropped 17kg in the 3 months I’ve owned one and still going strong.
Now for the cons. I’ve had to send it back for a broken screen, caught it when standing up on the the edge of a table at work and it cracked. Now just as the Amazon 30 day returns policy expires the back light has stopped working all together. I can use it without it but… Also the stair counter is just useless.
I live in a multi floor house, to go from the kitchen to the living room, to the bedrooms I have to climb 3 flights of stairs. It has never once registered these stairs. However I was on a bus the other day and in the 30 min journey I somehow managed to climb 80 flights of stairs.
All in all its a great bit of kit for this price range as wearable go. The constant HRM it great and seems very accurate. I tested it against a top of the range Polar HRM with a chest strap and it was bang on for the whole 10km run.
The tech can’t be faulted, it just loses a star from me because of the faults I’ve had with the hardware. Shame really because I really wanted to give it 5 stars.
I have had issues with the Garmin Vivosmart bands in the past and have had 4 replacements with the other type. The problem is always the same that the rechargeable battery does not re-charge and it is impossible to do anything with it even when connected to a USB port on a computer. It remains to be seen whether this one will go the same. It appears better as it can be switched on and off plus it can be rebooted. The strap is better and the sceen is much clearer. I have also found that so far it manages to stay synced to a smart phone on Bluetooth for much longer. The HR monitor that works through the wrist and does not require a HR chest band is good, but I suspect that the readings are not as accurate. This has been remarked on in other reviews on this product. It is early days but so far I am content with this item and appears to be more in line with what I purchased from Garmin before the last Vivosmart Band.
Only had it for 2 days, but have taken it for a cycle and run. Works very well! Nice fit and comfortable, though I don’t sleep with a watch, so can’t speak to that. Controls are reasonably intuitive, and through the downloaded smartphone app, very configurable.
Sync’d to my phone easily (Samsung Galaxy) and I’m already being entertained and motivated by the stats. The main reason for me buying this product was to have a heart rate monitor without a chest strap. This works at least as well as more old chest strap monitor, but in a lighter, sleeker package with loads more features! Awesome!
You can rotate the display so that you can read the time more easily from the wrist, but some menus don’t rotate, which is a minor niggle.
I run and cycle several times a week, so if the battery life lives up to expectation, this is a fantastic product, and perfect for my needs!
I wanted something with a display which narrowed it down a lot and I wanted it to be waterproof. Friends have the Fitbit Charge but the display is too small for me and not always on. That doesn’t make it much good as a watch. The deal breaker was that the Fitbit is not waterproof. I really don’t understand why anyone would produce a fitness tracker that you have to take off in the shower let alone the pool.
I’ve been using the Vivosmart HR for around a week now. I have not paired it with a smartphone as I’m still using an old iPhone 4 which uses an older version of bluetooth. Instead I just connect it to my Macbook for charging, synching and reviewing my activity in Garmin Connect, which works just fine for me. It is very comfortable to wear 24/7 – I’ve never been able to wear a watch in bed but this is fine.
I do really like the display. It’s big (much easier to read than the fitbit), it’s always on, the touchscreen works well to swipe between the various figures and the backlight is good.
I’ve been out on a few runs and so far I’m finding that the Vivosmart overestimates distance when compared to Runkeeper on my phone. This is probably because my route has some steep uphill sections which shorten my stride length. On the flat it seems pretty accurate. It’s easy to override the default stride length and measure your own if you really want to though.
The step counting seems pretty accurate and I don’t seem to get false positives whilst showering or washing the dishes etc. I really like that it doesn’t give you a fixed 10,000 steps a day as a target but varies the target depending on your previous activity levels. It makes targets much more achievable and motivational if you are not that active.
I’ve not checked the accuracy of the HR monitor and I don’t know how accurate the calories burned figure is (but is seems to be close to the online calorie calculators for someone of my age/weight/activity levels). The number of floors climbed is based on barometric pressure so will go up as you walk up a hill, but this is fine because you are still climbing up which is increasing your effort.
The sleep function seems to do a good job of tracking my sleep and seeing how much time I spend in deep sleep but I don’t really have enough data to do anything meaningful with it. It might be useful to show how my sleep pattern varies over time but a week is not enough.
I like the vibration alerts and display that tell you when you have reached a goal or give you a reminder when you have been inactive for too long. I haven’t used the notification functions as it’s not paired with a phone.
The battery life seems good. Around 4 or 5 days for me. The charge time is also quick.
I want to sign up for myfitnesspal and monitor my calorie intake for a while but I haven’t tried that yet.
I think all fitness trackers without GPS are inaccurate to an extent ,but they are consistently inaccurate so you always know if your activity levels are going up or down. Most of us are not serious runners. We don’t need to know if we have run 5.1 or 5.2 miles. We won’t be training in heart rate zones and it doesn’t matter if we have done 10,000 or 10,200 steps in a day. What a tracker like this will do is give us an idea of our activity levels and our general levels of fitness from resting HR over time. I’ve also read one review that stated the reviewer could tell if he was about to be ill as his resting HR always increased prior to the illness.
I really don’t think the Fitbit Charge HR is any better then the Garmin and if you want a big, always on display that you can also use as a watch plus something you can wear in the shower or pool then buy the Vivosmart HR.
I’ve already become inseparable from my tracker. I may be slim and fit but I’m finding it to be a really good motivational tool and I don’t hesitate to recommend it. It’s actually just told me to move so it’s time to go.
A wee bit complex to set up initially, but once I’d managed to get my IT-savvy son to sort it out, I was suitably impressed by its many excellent features – not least of which is the activity buzzer, which shocks you back into activity if you should laze for more than around 60 mins.(No rest for the wicked, then!)
Feature – packed AND – for me – important that it’s waterproof, as cycling in all weathers would surely render any such device inoperable if it wasn’t suitably protected.
So impressed that I also bought my son one of these for his birthday too, so you could rightfully say that it has hit the mark with our family!