Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

<Update 11/27/2016: My wife and I have now had the VivoActive HR for 5 months. We still love the watch. I wanted to complement Garmin on their customer service. My watch bricked after jumping into a mountain lake over the summer. It went completely black screen and wouldn't power up. I called Garmin Customer Service and they replaced it for free since it obviously failed to be water proof. It only took a week to send mine in and get a new one back.> I did not order these from Amazon. My wife and I each got a Vivoactive HR, we ordered directly from Garmin. We have now had them for a week and I will update this review if need be. I use mine to track steps, biking and snowboarding next season. The built in altimeter was a big selling point. I have the previous Vivoactive. It does not have an altimeter. So you can use it to track ski/snowboard runs but it uses GPS flat speed and not your actual 3d speed. The new one can now do that. My wife uses hers for running. I read a few reviews were people had issues with going out of range of their phone and then coming back in range and the watch not automatically re-connecting via Bluetooth to their phone. My wife and I spent some time testing that and we could not reproduce the same results. Our watches re-connected every time we came back in range of our phone. Initial Setup: We did not have any issues out of the box or connecting to the Garmin Connect App on our iPhones. Like the instructions state, pair the device directly through the Connect App. We both also used the Garmin Express desktop app during the initial charge to customize what apps and widgets are installed and in what order they appear as you swipe through the interface. I deleted all the apps I wouldn’t use, like indoor biking, rowing, Stand Up Paddle Boarding etc to make the screens easier to navigate. Like any Garmin device it is important to take the time to go through all the settings to tweak and customize it to what you want. Screen: Let’s address the elephant in the room. The screen, which seems to be the cause of many of the 1 star reviews. I can understand how this can happen. All the marketing material show the screen bright and very readable. However this screen is designed for battery life and to be read out doors. When in direct light it is super bright and easy to read. However in low light without the backlight on it is hard to read. Straight out of the box the backlight is set to level 3, which is hard to see. My Vivoactive HR came out of the box with the new 2.4 update installed. So I was immediately able to navigate the settings menu to turn the backlight from level 3 to level 6 and it was plenty bright. It does go up to 9 and is VERY bright. My wife’s did not have the update. But during the first sync with her phone the update installed. Once you can adjust the backlight the screen is fine. We did not have any backlight bleed like some have mentioned. I think many of other reviewer’s issues are just their expectations were not met. This watch is purpose built to be an activity tracker with some Smartwatch functions built in. It isn’t an Apple Watch, but then again it has standalone GPS, altimeter, compass, heart rate and other sensors built in, and does not have to be charged every night. Step and Activity Tracking: Step tracking has been flawless for both of us. It is accurate, including counting floors. I tested in my house going from the first floor to the second floor and it seems to track just fine. Sometimes there was a delay between showing the floor counted, but it would show up. As for activity tracking, it has been outstanding. It is easy to start, stop and view data while tracking the activity. It also uploads to the Garmin Connect really fast. I can say the sync / upload on this Vivoactive is faster than the first gen. I have used it to track mountain biking and walking so far. My wife has used it to track running with no issues. Heart Rate: Here I feel is another elephant, sitting in the room eating peanuts. Let’s remember that this is optical HR. It shines a light on your wrist. It isn’t going to be 100% accurate. There are many factors. Placement, hair on your arm, heck even a mole where your band sits could cause issues. It isn’t going to work for strength training, weightlifting etc. My personal experience has been it is mostly accurate while not exercising. There were a few times where I could tell it wasn’t right, like saying my HR was at 85 when sitting. My RHR is about 58. But it only lasted for a min or too, and knowing what my HR should be I could call it what it was, an outlier. I wasn’t too worried about it. During activity tracking I had no issue and it seemed to stay accurate the whole time while on my mountain bike. It was great to be able see the correlation between steep technical climbs and the increase in my HR. There was a point on my ride where HR didn’t work so well, but that is because the watch moved a bit. That was my fault, I didn’t tighten it enough. Look / Fit / Comfort: I love the look of this one. My old Vivoactive looked clunky, unsophisticated and would not fit in well with business attire. The new one looks fine from the morning jog, to the afternoon meeting with clients. The new band is also an improvement. This one is more comfortable than the old one for sure. I can wear it all day just fine. Battery Life: The battery lasted 6 days, with 3 GPS tracked activities. I have now turned off the heart rate monitor to save battery life. I don’t really care about 24 hour HR monitoring. I turn it on when I am going to track an activity, and turn it off after. That will probably improve battery life even more. Final thoughts My wife and I love this watch and I gave it 5 stars. If I had to pick a flaw it would be that it has the same amount of screen real-estate as the old one but with more resolution and flipped into landscape. From the pictures I thought the screen would be bigger than the previous generation. I do like the new orientation and higher resolution. I would recommend this to anyone who lives an active lifestyle.