Garmin vivosmart 4, Activity and Fitness Tracker w/ Pulse Ox and Heart Rate Monitor

I upgraded from the Vivosmart 3 and I am excited about most of the upgrades made in the 4. I love that we now have a button to get into the second level menu or go back to the home screen. It has a nice sleek look. It is a little narrower than the Garmin three. At first, I disliked reading the scrolling text but after a week I adjusted and it no longer bothers me. So I think the new narrow design is a plus.I had hoped I could use the Garmin 3 charging cable but the charging connection now sports an extra prong making it incompatible with the Garmin 3 charging cable. But it holds a charge much better than the 3 ever did. I only have to charge it once a week now instead of the begging and end of the week. And I use the nighttime SPo2 feature.I love the pulse ox. I’ve seen a lot of reviewers complain about it. Unfortunately, all of the reviews I watched or read about only used the Garmin for two or three days and at most, a few, used it for a week. This is not enough time. First, I tested the pulse ox feature against a finger pulse ox monitor. The Garmin is typically read 2% below the finger pulse ox. On a separate occasion when I was cold, it read 4% below the finger pulse ox. It shouldn’t be a surprise that a wrist-based pulse Ox doesn’t match the doctor’s office device. However, it’s within an acceptable range for me to use it. Especially, when I see I dropped down to 73 a couple of times during the night. One of the things to note is that you do need to wear this snug to the wrist for the HR and the Pulse Ox to work ideally. Many of the reviewers when they showed it, they were not wearing it snug. I can still fit my index finger between my band and wrist so it isn’t tight.Another sore point in most reviews is the overnight SPo2 monitoring. This frustrated me for the first week as it has many reviewers. But after that, it worked consistently. I learned that it only runs for about the middle 4 hours of your sleep time. Now, if you are a restless sleeper and move around a lot or get up, it will stop reading. In order for it to take your Pulse Ox your wrist needs to be straight. If you bend it, it will stop reading. If you make a fast move, it will stop, if you get up, it will stop. But, once you settle again, the Vivosmart will start back up again. If your band is loose enough to slide around, you will not get a consistent pulse ox at night Especially if you move around.I also tested the Heart rate feature at the doctor’s office and it was always dead on. Not once has it strayed from the doctor’s reading. I tested both the pulse ox and the HR at five different doctor’s offices. So I am fairly confident in the Garmin Pulse Ox and Heart Rate readings. But again, it needs to be snug to your wrist in order to achieve an accurate reading. When it is loose, it can be off.I did have to work a little to get my custom step size just right before it would take an accurate read of the distance I traveled and the number of steps I’ve taken during the day. For those who want to put it on and not worry about, you may or may not have an accurate measure of how far you’ve walked/run or the number of steps you’ve taken. I do feel my Vivosmart 3 was a little better there. Not sure if it’s specific to my band or why it is. But I did get it to work perfectly through the custom step and matching it to a handheld GPS to confirm distance.The Body Battery is an interesting and unique feature. This one really needed time to learn me. It took a couple of weeks for this one to mesh with my life and activities. Once it did, I’ve found that it has been useful to make decisions on working out or not. At one point I couldn’t figure out why my reading was 44 because I felt great. Well, the next day I was sick. If I had looked at the hrv and pulse ox during the day (you have to manually ask it to take the pulse ox), I would have realized I was getting sick and could have adapted my activities for the day. I certainly don’t use the body battery a lot but I do find it useful.For those who like to auto-count workouts, I’ve enjoyed that feature quite a bit. I don’t run, but I love to walk and I swim, which is why I decided on the Garmin Vivosmart 3, it was waterproof. It misses a stroke or a rep here or there but it hasn’t been very often. And if you do find it missed something, you can certainly add it in the App.Yes, it really is waterproof. I use it in the pool all the time and don’t worry about it in the shower. Garmin says the Vivosmart is waterproof up to 50 meters. And yes, it is! I don’t normally scuba dive with it on. During the last trip, I forgot to take it off before climning into my gear. My husband was about to head below deck so I handed it to tuck it away in our bags. He dropped in his shorts pocket and well, yes, he forgot. So, this wonderful little band survived a thirty minute, 40-meter dive. It’s not a dive computer and I probably won’t wear it diving again because I can only handle so many wrist-based devices but I certainly won’t be worried if I forget it again.So, whether you want it for the gym, running/walking, swimming, snorkeling, take it scuba diving, tracking sleep, this little wearable is an excellent choice.

I have had this for nearly a year and have been waiting to give a review as I have been using it during a unique time and wanted to give my input.I bought this tracker while pregnant because I wanted to encourage myself with what I was doing rather than thinking I wasn’t being active at all. For starters, the activity tracker made me feel justified in taking it easy, haha. It’s “body battery” feature was rarely above 50% during my pregnancy even after getting 10+ hours of sleep. Yeah, pregnancy is tiring. And it usually felt pretty accurate. Days it said my “battery” was low, even if I felt ok to start, once my day got going, I would feel drained. Days it said it was high (like 75% – wow!), I really did feel it. In comparison, after baby was born and I was getting way less sleep, the sleep was more refreshing, so I regularly started seeing 80-100% “battery” even though I was only getting 4-7 hours of sleep. I don’t know what magic it uses, but it’s good!Now speaking of sleep, that may be it’s largest failure. It wants to know between what hours you normally sleep (maybe 10pm-7am) and it only tracks sleep in those hours. If you take a nap, no record. If you stay up for a couple hours in the middle of the night to feed a baby, it either says you totally woke up then or that you were in a light sleep at that time. So highly inaccurate, I wish you could treat it like an exercise where you tell it you’re about to go to sleep or it does better at recognizing sleep.One feature that I thought I would like but was actually super annoying during pregnancy was it’s high stress detection. Pregnancy is weird, and with that the body does not function normally. Now the app has a menstrual cycle setting that I set to pregnancy and it had its own little information thing each week. but it clearly doesn’t apply that information to other things. I could be sitting doing nothing and my watch would inform me that I was highly stressed and needed to take some deep breaths. I have seen that a lot less since baby was born.It’s heart rate feature is pretty cool, and I imagine what they base the stress levels off of. I don’t know if it takes a couple weeks to learn your normal heart rate or not.I haven’t used the exercise tracking all that much, so I can’t say much on that, lol.I learned that if you want to get notifications on your watch that option only comes up once and it’s in the initial setup. I opted out at first and then tried to find the setting again later to change it. I think the music control settings only work if notifications are allowed. I had to reset up my watch with the app to change it.Their customer service is pretty good. My original watch stopped vibrating for notifications or alarms or anything. They confirmed that I had tried everything to get it to work, and then I had to mail mine back in and I got another one. I think my first one had some other defects as the alarms were kinda iffy on the first one, but they are pretty reliable on my second one.Overall I am very pleased with it. I researched a lot of activity trackers before settling on this one and I believe I made the right choice for me!

I used to have an apple watch, but it broke a while back. I was fine with nothing until I decided to focus on health/fitness more and decided to look into something. I’m very much a minimalist when it comes to watches (my preference is none) so the sleek viviosmart was perfect. Can just quickly see the time if i need to, and i like how it shows me when i get notifications on my phone, even though I cant read them. Lets me still feel “disconnected” when I don’t want to feel I need to respond to stuff, but if something important comes across Ill know. So far only negative is sleep tracker is a bit wonky, but not sure if thats a universal problem with all sleep trackers or just this one (ill wake up in the middle of the night to use bathroom, feed baby, etc. and it will say I was sleeping the whole time and just count that as “light sleep”).

I was looking for something small just to track my steps and walks, this does the trick connects to your phone and works really well.

Comfortable.Has just the info I need to track my activities and workouts.I reccomend.