Some people enjoy wearing standard watches and can even be found with a regular watch on one wrist and a fitness tracker on the other. The Garmin Vivomove Sport hybrid watch offers the best of both and provides more health functions than you might think at first glance.
I tried out my first hybrid watch, the Withings ScanWatch, a couple of months ago and loved the experience due to the high quality, classic watch face, and month-long battery life. For the past couple of weeks, I have been testing the Garmin Vivomove Sport and am very pleased to see a hybrid watch with the ecosystem support of Garmin. The Garmin Vivomove Sport doesn’t have a 30-day battery life, but charging it once a week is fine with me. It’s a rather small watch with a diameter of 40 mm, and there are no buttons to press. People with smaller wrists and those who like light watches will love the Vivomove Sport. It’s also quite affordable at just $179.99. Surprisingly, the small touchscreen OLED display is more useful and capable than I anticipated, and it is essential to supporting the Garmin ecosystem. It features many health and fitness functions, including Body Battery, stress monitoring, sleep tracking, hydration logging,24/7 heart rate monitoring, women’s health features, and more. I was struck at first by the light weight of the watch and the standard two hands rotating around the watch face. It’s hard to tell it is a Garmin watch at first because it looks like many standard analog watches you might find in a department or jewelry store. But rotate the watch or tap on the lower half to see the OLED display, and that is where all of the Garmin goodies appear. A „watch face“ appears when you make the „checking-my-watch“ gesture with your wrist. When you swipe left or right across the display, however you will see the two analog hands shift to 3 and 9 so that they appear as a flat line above the OLED screen. With this movement you can then interact with the display without interference from the two watch hands. It’s a brilliant feature that works seamlessly. As soon as you are done interacting with the display, the watch hands go back to their correct location for the indicated time. The smooth glass display transitions into the durable polymer bezel and watch casing. The numbers, minute indicators, and watch hands are glossy silver on a black watch face (for the color watch I was sent to test) and look classy. There are no buttons, speakers, or microphones on the sides. Standard quick-release 20mm bands are supported with a default silicone band and lever included with the watch. The heart rate sensor is centered on the back, and the standard Garmin four-pin charging connector is also used to charge the watch. Unlike most Garmin sports watches, there is no GPS receiver in the Vivomove Sport. It supports connected GPS with your smartphone, and, even without GPS tracking the details of your outdoor activity, I found the key stats to be quite accurate when running with the watch and no connected phone.
