Turns out that, while the Garmin vivoactive line of watches are provably waterproof, they are not entirely sauna proof. The discovery of this interesting fact about 6 months ago forced me to upgrade my somewhat venerable vivoactive 3, to the newer version 5.
Here are some thoughts on how that process has gone. Both watches were the version with optional onboard storage for music/podcasts.
In no Specific Order…
Hardware
- The screen on the 5 is much better.
- The screen on the 3 felt a bit dated/budget with a surprisingly poor image quality.
- The vivoactive 5 has received a beefy upgraded AMOLED display, with menus/faces being much sharper and with more vivid colours.
- Sadly still has the annoying bezel on the touchscreen, so you have to accept either you watch face will inevitably scratch, or you will never ever get rid of every air bubble under your screen protector (if you have somehow managed this - please teach me your magic!)
- Day to day battery life is pretty good, I rarely have to charge more than once a week. Frequent music/GPS use will obviously require more frequent charging.
- Complete eyeball estimate, I find I lose about 10-15% charge for a run lasting around 45 mins with GPS & music.
- Still uses Garmin’s weird proprietary connector, so need to keep track of another USB cable when travelling.
- The lower button is a back button sometimes, and a lap/split button when in a workout
- This can be brutally frustrating during a workout where it irreversibly skips to the next stage of the workout, when all you wanted to do was pause the timer
- Not entirely sure what the better layout would be, but ruining a whole plan because I pressed the wrong button without any form of undo feels bad.
Data & Apps
- The watch provides a lot of data, and has a lot of preloaded activities. Your mileage may vary on how accurate or even useful that data is, but it’s there.
- I primarily use my watch for running and occasionally cycling (I have never, ever felt the need to wear it doing weights or yoga), so difficult to comment on how good the other activity options are.
- Overall does the job, with decent estimate of distance/speed and map of travel. GPS functions do eat into the battery life, so for day-trips on the bike, make sure you’re starting fully charged (and pause activity when not on the move).
- The Garmin Connect app is by and large fine. It’s pretty easy to setup, and displays data in a nice, digestible format. Still feels a bit clunky at time, but overall gets the job done for the most part.
The state of the Garmin app ecosystem still leaves a lot to be desired.Scratch that… the Garmin app ecosystem is straight up garbage.- Installing (or even just configuring) apps is a complete pain, requiring a 2nd app ‘store’ which refuses to work without notification permissions( why???), and it doesn’t even do a good job at that.
- App choice once you get there is pretty sparse too, mostly consisting of paid for clock faces and a small handful of utility apps of varying quality. From what I can gather, developer experience is pretty rough too, with plenty of weird limitations on the watch/installed apps (I’m sure there’s a good reason for these, but 25 song limit on a playlist basically makes this one unusable).
- By far the weakest part of the whole Garmin Watch user experience.
- That all being said, the built in running workout plans were a pleasant surprise for me! Normally something I’d regard as safe to ignore, they provide a reasonably adjustable goal based workout plan, that integrates pretty well with the whole experience.
- Decent range of distance/time goals
- Easy rescheduling/organising of workout days.
- Exercises are clearly explained and well presented on the watch
- Adds workouts to an ICS calendar you can subscribe to
- Hindered somewhat by the seemingly standard levels of Garmin jank, where most actions just aren’t quite intuitive enough to be called simple.
- Some of the workouts felt like they simply missed the mark (some below difficulty curve, some wayyy above), which really hurt my motivation to continue my plan in the long run (no pun intended… honest!)
- Pretty good as a freebie, this kind of thing normally shows up like a paid addition (full disclosure - I wouldn’t pay extra for it)
Connectivity
- TL;DR Adding music files manually is still possible.
- The model 3 was cool because you could plug the watch into a PC and it would happily show up as a mass storage device where you could just drag & drop music files onto it for usage in the built in music app.
- I was worried this feature may have been fixed, but can happily report that the same trick works with the model 5 (see, it’s really not that hard apple…).
- This is doubly useful given the fact that ‘online’ providers of music are borderline usable at best (see above), providing a robust way to just get what I want to listen to on the device with minimal hassle (I truly miss the days of mp3 players sometimes)
- Connects to Bluetooth headphones and my 3rd party hear rate monitor seamlessly. Have never had an issue with this.
- Overall WiFi connectivity on the model 3 was bad, and it never reliably connected to my home network. This seems to have been improved on the model 5 significantly. where the watch connected straight away without issue.
- I still haven’t really grokked how exactly the watch interacts with the network (unclear when it’s talking to the phone via Bluetooth, or actually connecting externally to the network), but it seems to sort itself out for the most part, so I tend to leave it be.
- Unfortunately the watch does still seem to spontaneously unpair from the connect app at times, and then spam the phone with bluetooth connection requests until you go through and set the whole thing up again.
- I’ve not managed/cared enough to track down whether this unpairing is caused at the phone end or the watch end yet, but it is quite annoying when it happens.
- Not an overly regular occurrence, but frequent enough to be a ‘recurring issue’.
- As it’s fairly obvious when it happens, and the watch will store any workouts that happen in the meantime to sync when connection re-establishes, it’s kinda just annoying rather than deal-breaking for me. That being said, is a bit of a buzzkill on the magical ‘just works’ benchmark we intrinsically expect from flashy smart tech these days.
Summary
Overall I feel like the vivoactiv 5 is (somewhat unsurprisingly) just a straight up improvement on the 3. It may say something about my trust in tech these days that this isn’t an obvious conclusion given the namesake, but it’s still nice to see an iteration on a product that doesn’t obviously back step on some features as an “improvement”.
While the Garmin app/app store is a far cry from perfect, I’m still pretty happy with the watch itself, and still content with the choice of sticking with Garmin for now.