Garmin hits the ground running with smartwatch for athletes

THIS new smartwatch can help athletes, serious and not so, keep track of activity - and it is not made by Apple.

WATCH out, Garmin is coming. Its first smartwatch, Vivoactive, will shake the market.

The Vivoactive has something for everyone. Its exercise monitoring and full-on analytics will appeal to those who train seriously. If you’re into casual activity tracking, it monitors steps, calories burned, and tracks your sleep.

Then there’s smartphone integration. It displays phone call, text, calendar entries, emails and smartphone notifications on its clear, colourful yet relatively small 205x148 pixel touchscreen. It has in-built GPS (this is Garmin after all) and unlike much of the competition, is bullishly waterproof to 50 metres. Its arsenal of software includes a swimming app. And at $339, it’s good value.

You pay $60 more for a companion ANT+ heart rate monitor that straps around your chest, but that’s the price of accuracy. Optical heart rate monitors on many smart watches don’t deliver the bpm accuracy sought by those on finetuned coaching schedules.

I found using a strap annoying and uncomfortable. You have to replace its separate built-in battery over time. But that’s the price you pay for accuracy.

I took the Vivoactive for a decent test drive, mainly walking and swimming. Of all the smartwatches I’ve tested, it is the first I have swum with. All I had to do was select the “swimming” app, press the “action key” on the right to start, and again to stop. Touch save to archive the data. Done.

Afterwards it offered a wall of statistics: distance, time, calories, strokes, stroke rate, and SWOLF — an efficiency metric you aim to get as low as possible.

On terra firma, I did some short walks, mainly to test the Vivoactive’s in-built GPS without taking a handset. One was a walk through Newtown in inner Sydney, and I did several laps around the block near work. By pressing the back button after each lap, I could ­collect stats for each lap as well as the overall walk.

To my surprise, I could read back the detailed stats on the watch face itself, despite its compact size. The display is readable in sunlight and there’s a backlight button for night viewing.

Stats are kept in a history folder in full for up to two weeks. Activity tracking is stored for up to two months. But it’s better to view these details, which include maps using the Garmin Connect App, on a smartphone, or better still, though a linked Garmin Connect account on a web browser. Apart from walking and swimming, there are in-built apps for cycling, running and golf. For the latter, download course details, and the watch will say how far you are from the front, middle and back of a green and offer dogleg distances.

The watch also can control music playback on the phone. But unlike watches by LG and Sony, the Vivoactive doesn’t store music itself, which is a pity. I’d then need just the watch and a Bluetooth headset for pounding the pavement.

You can set a vibration alarm to wake you up, and you can start and stop video recording, and capture stills if you own a Garmin VIRB action camera.

When stuck behind a desk at work, Vivoactive started drawing a little red line across the screen that progressively lengthens. I couldn’t cheat and clear it by standing up and sitting down quickly. You really have to move around to make that irritating red line disappear.

As with most smartwatches, Vivoactive is paired with a phone using Bluetooth. It’s managed through the Garmin Connect app, available for iOS and Android devices, and proved straightforward.

Many of the watch’s system settings are managed from the smartphone app, and pairing is needed for updating the watch’s firmware, uploading exercise data, for displaying the phone’s notifications and calendar on the watch, and for making use of Garmin’s new Connect IQ app store.

The Connect IQ store offering for Vivoactive currently is small. It does include 79 alternative watch faces, many by third-party developers. There are apps to manage your way through 10km runs, half marathons and marathons. They continually calculate the finishing time. There are score trackers for soccer, basketball and tennis, a timer app, a stopwatch and an HRV app which measures variation in the time between heartbeats.

You can add “data fields” to fitness monitoring through apps. There are 51 such apps so far, and some are tongue in cheek like “beers earned” — what you’re ­entitled to scoff down with impunity after exercise. You can choose to show this progressively during exercise.

The Vivoactive monitors sleep, but not as well as the competition. It shows only sleeping movement rather than light and deep sleep, and you trigger sleeping mode manually, or type in a preordained sleeping period. It’s not automatic.

And it lacks a barometric altimeter useful to hikers found on some Garmin models.

The piece de resistance is the rich statistics of all your activities, often shown graphically. It’s ­almost overwhelming. Garmin Connect also will build training plans and you can compete against others in groups.

One curious feature lets you share your activity in real time with friends and a coach. They can watch you strut your stuff on a map and read progressive exercise metrics.

Vivoactive comes with a very strong magnetic charger linked to a USB cable. The charger was strong enough to mount itself on a metal fixture by my desk.

The Vivoactive is an excellent smartwatch, too. Sure, you can’t take calls on it, it doesn’t do dictation, but notifications received from your phone can be displayed clearly with strong haptic feedback.

Battery life was good. After a busy day’s activity, which included three walks with GPS running and a swim, battery capacity had dropped only to 71 per cent. Garmin claims three weeks of battery life without GPS, but I got three days using GPS intermittently. If you don’t use GPS, you probably don’t need this watch.

This is one impressive activity-focused smartwatch. Currently you can get it online. Selected retailers will carry it soon.

Rating: 8.5/10

Price: $339 or $399 with HRM strap