Review: Garmin Vivosmart 4

Picnicking with toddlers always seems like a better idea conceptually, rather than in practice. In my mind's eye, I see my little family on a blanket, laughing, talking, and munching on cheese while the three-year-old draws with crayons and the one-year-old rolls a ball around.

In reality, the minute we set them down on some grass, one kid makes a beeline for oncoming traffic, and the other flings herself into the river. My spouse and I scarf grapes and cookies for sustenance, exchanging a few terse words as we sprint back and forth under a burning sun.

I had just begun to think longingly of nap time when my wrist suddenly buzzed. It was the Garmin Vivosmart 4, and it was warning me that my body battery was dipping dangerously low. I needed to get some rest! Urgently!

It was nothing that I didn’t already know, but that warning was the final nail in the coffin for our expedition. It took another twenty minutes, but I finally rounded up our circus and got us all home and into bed.

While you can find many affordable fitness trackers that will collect data like your heart rate and step count, it’s a little harder to translate that data into healthier habits. For many people, it’s not as simple as taking a walk around the block every hour.

Garmin does a great job of collecting and analyzing fitness data for dedicated athletes, counseling them on when to take rests or whether to do an anaerobic or aerobic workout next. The Vivosmart 4 attempts to do the same for more casual users.

When you log into the Garmin Connect app, the first fitness metric you’ll see is your body battery. Garmin’s proprietary metric measures your body’s energy reserves on a scale of 0 to 100. It calculates how much gas you have left in the tank by taking into account your heart rate variability (HRV), stress levels, sleep amount and quality, and activity.

It can’t measure your food intake, and you can’t input your caloric intake (although if you chug a bunch of coffee, it will definitely be able to tell from your heart rate). As I discovered, the body battery tracker was otherwise eerily accurate.

If you’re a fan of gamified fitness, the body battery measurement can be counterintuitive and frustrating at first. Physical exertion drains your body battery and rest adds to it. If your body battery measurement is low (and as a full-time working mom with two toddlers under four, mine almost always is), it can be tempting to slump in your office chair and watch that number climb up.

However, as Garmin tells you, regular exercise leads to long-term energy and endurance gains in your body battery. Trying to find ways to get mine high required some tinkering. For example, I noticed that if I drank anything alcoholic before going to bed, my body battery was lower in the morning. Better to keep it to the weekends, then.

Garmin packs the usual array of fitness sensors into a slim, waterproof band that’s only 10.5 millimeters wide. The device comes in two different sizes and an array of colors. The small/medium that I tried weighed only 16.5 grams. I found the Vivosmart 4 to be unobtrusive on my small wrist. I didn’t even take it off to shower.

When companies “shrink and pink” their products to target women, I’m usually not a fan. Thankfully the Vivosmart 4, even in its rose gold colorways, should be approachable to anyone.

You navigate the tracker through its very small and very bright OLED touchscreen, which takes some patience to learn how to work. To start an activity, you touch the small button on the bottom (a haptic click tells you you’ve done it right). You scroll up and down to select from an activity menu and double-tap to stop and start.

The watch vibrates with a move alert every hour, and can automatically detect activities, like biking. You can also log activities to track statistics like your mileage, pace, and heart rate during activities.

Like most runners and walkers, I have a few set routes where I have the mileage dialed. Since the Vivosmart 4 has no GPS, nor connected GPS, it does make the mileage tracker a little wonky. When walking, my mileage was reasonably accurate to within 0.1 miles, but when running, my mileage could be off by almost a mile. You can set a custom stride length in the Connect app to refine the results, but it didn't help that much.

The sleep tracker was pretty accurate. Unhappily, as the parent of toddlers I can often pinpoint when, exactly, I was awake (as in, “Ah yes, that was the night that she woke me up at 4 am to ask if robots have birthdays”). I can see these incidents on my sleep timeline, and the Vivosmart 4 did me the big favor of showing me that I was actually awake for much less time than I thought I was.

Like many other fitness trackers that are slowly making their way into the medical space, the Vivosmart 4 also measures several different other health markers, like your VO2 max and your SpO2, or your level of blood oxygenation, via a small pulse oximeter. In two weeks, I checked once and never again thereafter. But if you have conditions like high cholesterol or sleep apnea, you might be more interested in this data than I am.

You can also set a timer, an alarm, or a stopwatch. And finally, the battery life was excellent. An hour or so plugged in was enough to keep the battery going for four or five days, with a tracked, hour-long activity each day.

Given its small size, there are some significant limitations when it comes to using the Vivosmart 4. For instance: its tiny touch screen is a tricky to navigate, and even more so if it’s wet or dirty. It can’t even display a full word, and it can be infuriating to scroll through the menu, waiting to find out what “Set Do…” means.

The onboard accelerometer also doesn’t always catch when I roll my wrist up to my face to check the time. As someone who uses a fitness tracker as my watch, this is also exasperating.

And while you can set the screen’s brightness manually, the auto setting uses an ambient light sensor to adjust the level of brightness. This means that sometimes, you’ll be wearing your watch in the dead of night, roll over, and hear your spouse’s muffled voice moan, “Please turn off your watch!” as your wrist-mounted spotlight illuminates the entire room.

With that being said, I really liked the Vivosmart 4. Aggregating fitness data isn’t hard, but interpreting it is difficult. If you’re not an athlete, you’re probably not used to tracking variables like your heart rate, let alone plotting your lifestyle changes based on that data.

This nerdy arena is where Garmin excels. Their body battery metric has gotten me to do what no fitness tracker has done before: It’s made me change my sleeping and eating habits, in addition to my exercise ones. After two weeks of wearing the Vivosmart 4, I was popping into bed by 10:30 pm every night, and limiting my alcohol consumption to one night a week. I only had to take it off to charge it, and never noticed it when it was on.

The price is right, too. At $130, it is more affordable than equivalent products, like the Fitbit Alta HR or upcoming Charge 3.

If you run outside, you’ll probably find the Vivosmart 4 to be a letdown. Not having any kind of GPS can distort your outdoor workout results, and it's frustrating to not be able to map routes. That puts it behind other casual fitness trackers, like Fitbit’s Versa.

But otherwise, the Vivosmart 4 is small, it looks great, and can actually help you improve your routine. if you’re a casual user who is trying to find easy ways to up your general fitness level, the Vivosmart 4 is a great way to start. I don’t mind admitting that I need all the help I can get.