Garmin Vivosmart 3 Review

While Garmin appears to be excelling at creating fitness trackers for more outdoorsy and extreme use, the Vivosmart 3 is their answer for a more day-to-day, work-friendly wearable. It's not a bad model, but it falls more in the “Master of None” camp than “Jack-of-All-Trades”.

Fitness Impact

The Vivosmart 3 is actually very accurate when it comes to counting steps, only averaging about a 12-step discrepancy from our manual count with a tally counter over a mile walk. This works out to being approximately 0.56% off of the true step count in our tests.

However, we found that it overestimated the distance by a bit, stating that we had traveled 1.07 miles on our 1-mile course marked out by a surveyor's wheel.

This fitness tracker is about average for tracking a cycling workout, monitoring the duration and your heart rate throughout. It doesn't have a cycling option in the regular menu, but you can change it later in the app. It's similar for a generic cardio workout, with an identical set of stats as the Vivoactive HR and the Vivosmart HR+, minus the data derived from a built-in GPS module, as the Vivosmart 3 lacks one. This fitness tracker has a relatively limited set of activities — walking, running, weights, cardio workout, pilates, and cycling — but it does count the flights of stairs climbed in a day.

The online community is quite good, but pales in comparison to the Fitbit community. You can look at your previous stats and challenge friends in the Garmin Connect app, but it has substantially fewer features than the Fitbit one.

Health Impact

This model has a vibration alarm clock, but it felt a little on the weaker side — something to note if you are a heavy sleeper. This product will track your sleep, but it was a little finicky — failing to work on the first try for our testers.

The Vivosmart 3 is helpful in reminding you to get up and move, having a movement bar like the other Garmin models that will build up the longer you have been sedentary. It will also buzz to alert you when you should get up and move.

There isn't really a method in the Garmin app to track your caloric intake, instead requiring you to use a third-party app, MyFitnessPal. The heart rate sensor was very accurate in our tests, being spot on with the chest band heart rate monitor acting as a control for a resting heart rate and about 8 bpm off for an active one.

Ease of Use

The battery life of the Vivosmart 3 is somewhat mediocre, only claimed to last for up to 5 days. This model also utilizes a proprietary charging cable. It was also about average when it came to the time required to sync a day's worth of data, taking between 5-15 seconds to successfully complete the data transfer.

This model is one of the more water-resistant wearables we tested, rated for up to 5 ATM of depth. It's quite easy to put on this fitness tracker with its watch-style band and clasp, though the band lacked a little stiffness.

The Vivosmart 3 doesn't make it particularly easy to navigate around its menus, with a distinction existing between a double-tap and a hold on the touchscreen, making it quite easy to end up on a menu inadvertently. We also weren't the biggest fans of the Garmin Connect app. We found it to be somewhat mundane and significantly less intuitive to use than the Fitbit one or the Misfit one.

Ergonomics

This model is quite bland in terms of design — essentially the most generic fitness tracker you could make: a flat, black rectangle. However, this model is reasonably comfortable to wear and maintains a very low profile on your wrist.

Display

The Vivosmart clearly displays the time and date, but the screen is overall one of the hardest to read, whether in bright light or low light conditions. The touch screen also isn't terribly responsive, causing us a decent amount of frustration. It does receive text, call, email, and app notifications and will display your fitness stats, but it is hard to get past its lack of visibility and finicky touchscreen interface.

Value

The Vivosmart 3 isn't really a value option, being more of a mediocre product at a slightly above average price.

Conclusion

The Vivosmart 3 fell decently short in our testing process overall, with there being many other options that are much better and less expensive for typical, day-to-day fitness tracking. This might be an alright pick if you absolutely have to have a Garmin model that is waterproof, but that's about it.