Updated 19/1/18: Added my experience of using the Vivoactive 3 with an Android phone. TL;DR messaging notifications don’t work well.
The Vivoactive 3 isn’t Garmin’s most comprehensive tracker, but it is the company’s most user-friendly smartwatch. It sits in-between the company’s Vivomove HR and Fenix 5 smartwatches; and is the only one with a full touchscreen as well as a touch-sensitive side bezel.
The Vivomove HR has a more traditional watch face, and only a part of the face works as a touchscreen. The Fenix 5 has more advanced fitness tracking abilities, but the Vivoactive 3 is more affordable, and is the most fully-featured tracker in the Vivo line-up.
The Vivoactive 3 runs Garmin’s own OS, and it works with both Android and iOS phones for smart notifications and syncing. The Vivoactive 3 is coming up against competitors like the Apple Watch, Fitbit Ionic and Samsung Gear Sport, and after a couple of weeks wearing it, this is how I think it fares.
The Vivoactive 3 is comfortable to wear and enjoys a long battery life
The always-on display lets you see the time, all the time, without having to activate the screen.
I found the Vivoactive 3 comfortable to wear. It’s slim and light enough to not feel cumbersome, and the size is just right for my wrist. The strap is comfortable, and like any proper smartwatch these days, the Vivoactive 3 can swap bands easily. The Vivoactive 3’s round chassis looks more like a regular watch than an electronic gadget, and the always-on display lets you have a quick look at the time without having to activate it.
Compared with the bigger Garmin Fenix 5, the Vivoactive 3 is much easier to use thanks to its touchscreen, and a touch-sensitive side bezel that helps you scroll through the watch UI. The Vivoactive 3 can receive notifications from your smartphone, but there’s no easy way to clear them all — I’ve had to clear them one by one.
Update 19/1/8: I’ve now used the Vivoactive 3 with an Android phone and messaging doesn’t work as well as it does with iOS. With Android, you can’t see multiple missed messages in a thread, but with iOS, you can. This may not entirely be Garmin’s fault, but an issue with non-Android Wear devices pairing with Android phones. The Samsung Gear Sport, which runs its own OS, also has this problem.
The bezel on the side opposite the crown is touch-sensitive, so you can stroke your finger up and down to scroll through a list of widgets, one of which tells you your current stress levels.
The Vivoactive 3 does one thing better than the Fitbit Ionic — it lets you see your calendar, which is a key feature I can’t live without on a smartwatch. On the other hand, Vivoactive 3 can’t store music, while both the Apple Watch and Fitbit Ionic can.
Garmin advertises that the Vivoactive 3 can get up to 7 days in smartwatch mode, 13 hours in GPS. On the morning of the sixth day, my Vivoactive 3 was at 18%, after having logged three non-GPS workouts during the week. I guess I might have made it through to day seven, but I was unwilling to chance it and charged the watch. Six days is no slouch, especially when you consider that the Apple Watch needs to be charged almost daily.
The Garmin Connect app is both good and bad. It’s full of stats but organized like a maze. It is getting better, especially if you opt-in for the ‘My Day’ beta dashboard that gives you a quick overview of your stats, but it still falls behind Fitbit’s excellent app. On the flip side, if you have an iPhone, the Garmin Connect app can read and write data to the central Health app, while Fitbit’s app can’t.
The Garmin Connect app has gotten better with the ‘My Day’ beta dashboard, but still lags behind the Fitbit app in user-friendliness.
Press the crown and you can quickly choose from a selection of workouts. I’ve whittled down the list here, using the Garmin Connect app, so that I don’t have to scroll through workouts I don’t do.
Better for the aerobic folks
The Vivoactive 3 comes with more than 15 preloaded sports apps for easy tracking; it even comes with a yoga preset, which was missing on the Fenix 5. When it comes to everyday heart rate tracking, I found the Vivoactive 3 to be fairly accurate and in line with either the Apple Watch Series 3 or Garmin Fenix 5.
I found that the Vivoactive 3 was also fairly accurate when it came to steady-state exercise; sports like walking or running that ramp up heart rate at a steady pace. When I tested it against the Apple Watch, the Garmin Fenix 5 and the treadmill’s built-in heart rate monitor; the Vivoactive 3 was sometimes the slowest to update my heart rate, but its results mostly matched with the other three.
The heart rate monitor is mostly accurate in everyday tracking and steady state exercises, but can get confused during intervals.
It’s with intervals that the Vivoactive 3 can get confused. I found it slow to update, and once it inexplicably reported my heart rate in the 80s, while I was panting hard and the others reported I was already at 120BPM. It’s odd that the Fenix 5 is usually more accurate than the Vivoactive 3, because they share the same, new Garmin Elevate optical heart rate sensor.
For what it’s worth, all of the trackers had moments when their readings wildly deviated from each other, but at the end of the workout, they tend to report the same minimum, maximum, and average heart rates. When it came to GPS tracking, I found it mostly accurate, although it sometimes thinks I crossed a road or two that I didn’t.
Sleep tracking, like on the Fenix 5, is a disappointment. I like to take off my watch when I come home, and the Vivoactive 3 seems to think that’s when I’ve gone to sleep, so I’ve clocked marathon 12 hours of sleep some nights. Even when I wear it, it’s not terribly accurate, telling me, for example, that I started sleeping one hour or so before I climbed into bed. It’s too bad that sleep tracking is fully automatic, so I couldn’t manually turn it on when I actually went to bed.
A solid fitness-focused smartwatch
The Garmin Vivoactive 3 was a pleasure to wear for the past couple of weeks that I’ve had it. It’s slim and comfortable, plus has a convenient six to seven day battery life. As a fitness tracker it was fine at tracking everyday work and heart rate, tracked heart rates well with steady state exercise, and was not as accurate with interval training. It wasn’t accurate at all with sleep tracking.
Even though the Connect app is byzantine when compared to Fitbit’s excellent smartphone app, I’d still recommend the Vivoactive 3 over the Ionic simply for the more consistent heart rate tracking. If what you’re looking for is a fitness-focused smartwatch that won’t break the bank, then the Garmin Vivoactive 3 is one of the best choices around.
Update 19/1/18: I reached the conclusion above after using the Vivoactive 3 with an iPhone. But I’ve now used it with the Samsung Note8 and I can’t heartily recommend the Vivoactive 3 for use with an Android phone. Everything else works fine, but messaging is broken. You can’t see all the missed messages in a single thread, only the latest one. Messaging works fine with iOS. To be fair, this issue may stem from non-Android Wear devices connecting to Android phones; the Samsung Gear Sport has the same problem. I’ve updated this review and the ratings as a result.
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