Garmin’s New Fitness Tracker Looks Simple, But It Acts Like a Smartwatch

The Garmin Vivosmart comes in five different shades. Garmin

Fitness trackers like the Jawbone Up, Nike Fuelband, and Garmin Vivofit are typically smaller, more minimalist than their smartwatch cousins, but their features are limited too. Garmin’s latest wearable, the Vivosmart, combines these two worlds with a fitness tracker design and robust smartwatch-like features.

Garmin introduced its first general purpose wearable, the Vivofit activity tracker, last year. It could track your steps, heartrate (with a separate heartrate monitor), calories burned, and share the time and date. It also gave you subtle visual reminders to get off your butt and get moving after more than an hour of sitting. The Vivosmart can do all of these things too, but it also delivers vibration alerts for calls, texts, emails, and calendar events when paired with a smartphone. It’ll even preview of the notifications on its display.

Unlike the Vivofit’s always on display, Vivosmart has a hidden OLED display that you wake up with a double tap. A finger swipe on the display rotates through various customizable display pages, like the fitness-focused ones mentioned above.

The Vivosmart is waterproof up to about 50 meters and is specced to get up to 7 days of battery life. It also tracks your sleep based on movement and offers up daily reports on how much time you spent moving vs being still. In fact, through the Garmin Connect app, all your activity data gets translated into easier-to-understand charts and graphs. And if you’ve got one of Garmin’s VIRB action cameras, you can also use the Vivosmart as a remote.

After a short demo of its capabilities, it was clear the Vivosmart could be a great solution for anyone who wants smartphone notifications and fitness tracking on their wrist, but not a big, clunky screen. For someone with a small wrist, like myself, the small form factor and display is a big plus over larger smartwatches and wearables. Still, that small screen also means that navigation isn’t as intuitive as a full color touchscreen display with tappable icons.

Vivosmart will be available in five different colors (black, slate, purple, berry, and blue) in mid-September. It’ll cost $170 for the band alone, or $200 for the band bundled with a heartrate monitor.