Track your daily activity in style with the new Garmin Vivomove
While I personally like sporting my big Garmin Fenix 3 HR in the office, there is a market for those looking for a more subtle approach to daily activity tracking. Garmin just announced the new Vivomove that looks more like a traditional watch, while also providing all the great Garmin Connect 24/7 activity tracking features found on Garmin's other bands.
The Garmin Vivomove starts at $149.99 for the sport model with silicone bands with options for leather bands ($199.99) and stainless steel watch construction ($299.99). The Vivomove has a traditional round watch look and will likely be mistaken for a regular watch when you wear it with your business attire in the office.
The Vivomove is powered by a CR2025 coin cell battery to give you an estimated one year battery life. Over all of my years of testing wearables, this kind of battery life is key to keeping the device on your wrist and out of your drawer.
This new device is not designed to capture all the data of a GPS sport watch, but will track steps and sleep automatically. The watch face has a subtle step counter bar and the signature Garmin red move bar on either side of the face, under the watch arms. It is water resistant to 5 ATM, but this obviously doesn't apply to the leather bands.
You can sync to the excellent Garmin Connect smartphone application through Bluetooth where progress, goals, insights, and more are provided. Through Garmin Connect you can challenge your friends and keep an eye on the leaderboard as well.
As Ray Maker notes in his detailed hands-on article, if you use the Vivomove for your activity tracking and a Garmin GPS watch for run tracking you can only have the steps from one of the devices count towards your daily progress. Garmin needs to fix this issue. Fitbit does support using multiple devices at different times to consolidate the data so we know it can be done.
CNET had the chance to spend some time with the new watch.