The Garmin Vivoactive 4 puts the tech smarts of the watches used by the ultra-marathon-running elite into a more accessible wearable. You may not get all the pro-style advice of a Forerunner, but you do get the rest. I have had the Garmin Vivoactive 3 which I seemed to get 3 bad ones in a row and Garmin was good enough to upgrade from the Garmin Vivoactive 3 to the Garmin Vivoactive 4.
Good
Great exercise tracking, with full GPS
On-watch music streaming
Stacks of stats
Bad
ANT+ HR broadcast mode does not work well yet
No Performance Condition/training load monitoring
Spotify/Deezer integration should be more friendly
The Garmin Vivoactive 4 is part of Garmin’s range of touchscreen running watches. The Vivoactive 3 was a great slimmer, smaller alternative to the Forerunner and Fenix watches.
But Garmin has made its watches made for real runners a lot more accessible in recent years. The Forerunner 645 Music is small and good-looking, the Fenix 6S is not a wrist-dominator like the bigger Fenix models.
The Vivoactive 4 is still significantly cheaper than most Fenix and Forerunner alternatives, and smart changes to the controls mean you are much less likely to accidentally pause and stop exercise tracking with touchscreen swipes and prods.
It’s a great fitness tracker, as long as you are happy to miss out on some of the month-to-month monitoring stats offered by the Fenix and Forerunner watches.
The Garmin Vivoactive 4 is around $349.99 (£259.99, AU$499.99) for one. That’s a little lower than the cost of the Garmin Forerunner 645 Music, and loads less than either a Forerunner 945 or Fenix 6.
This is a good route to Garmin-grade tracking without blowing a huge hole in your finances. However, in early 2020 at least, you may want to consider the older Vivoactive 3 too. It has older hardware, which has real effects but is currently a bargain.
Dimensions of 45.1 x 45.1 x 12.8 mm
5ATM water resistance
Gorilla Glass 3 screen protectio
The Garmin Vivoactive 4 looks fairly similar to the Vivoactive 3 and Foreunner 645. A band of silver, but not chrome-bright, metal sits around the edge of the watch. Its screen is protected by Gorilla Glass 3 tech, but it’s not recessed like the Fenix 6’s, making it slightly more vulnerable. Every bit of such protection adds to a watch’s dimensions, though.
There’s plenty of smartwatch features here too, including viewing notifications and responding to notifications when paired with an Android phone.
Garmin Pay appears on both models, access to the Connect IQ store and the ability to make your own watch faces.
And the Vivoactive 4 has a built-in music player to transfer over your own tunes or ones from music streaming services like Spotify and Deezer.
The Vivoactive watches have fewer buttons than those in the Fenix and Forerunner series, because they are a touchscreen trackers. Garmin has put two buttons on the Garmin Vivoactive 4, rather than the one on the Vivoactive 3, though.
This is likely a response to complaints it is far too easy to accidentally pause or end a workout with the Vivoactive 3. However I have found this less the case if anything it happened more on the Garmin Vivoactive 3.
As for battery life, we never quite got up to the eight days of use as a smartwatch. More than likely because we also used it four times a week for working out/running. In reality, we got something closer to six days between charges.
The Vivoactive 4 takes a lot of what’s great about the more expensive Fenix and Forerunner devices and compresses that into a compact and far more affordable device.
Criticisms are only small: the display isn’t great, but does encourage longer battery life than some rivals while the heart-rate monitoring isn’t spot on for all activities.
Overall, however, the Vivoactive 4 is an excellent fitness watch that won’t cost the earth. It’ll be a perfect companion for many.
