The Vivomove Sport is a minimalistic beauty and comes with the classic, physical watch hands in a round dial. However, it also has a hidden OLED screen that comes alive when you tap on it. The OLED screen is what you will be using to track your activities, heart rate, sleep and more. The watch hands are bright and easy to see and the watch itself comes in a choice of “happy” colours including Cool Mint, Ivory, Black and Cocoa.
The straps are interchangeable, as Garmin’s recent few collections have been, and can be removed with the press of a retracting pin on the strap. It is a lightweight watch with an extremely comfortable strap—a month of wearing it almost throughout the day, and there has been no irritation or sweat or discomfort even while sleeping. But the best bit is that it is elegant and fashionable and never tells others that you are wearing an activity tracker of sorts. I mean, you wouldn’t want that while just hanging out with friends or going out for dinner (even if you are counting your calories and steps at the end of that day).
During activity mode, the watch hands rest on 9:15 and at first this might seem a bit of a bother. It did to me at least. The display (for the data) itself is good enough, but in bright sunlight it can be difficult to read without shielding the watch screen. Same for when you are in the pool. You can choose between 14 activities and that is more than enough for most people—unless you are spending all your waking hours trying during sporting activities.
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What might be a deterrent for many, however, is the watch’s dependence on your phone for accurately tracking activities. The Vivomove Sport does not have its own GPS, which means every time I went out for a run, I had to carry my phone with Bluetooth on in the pocket. In my opinion, this defeats the purpose of having a smart watch. It made the run a little cumbersome (given that it was raining on at least two of these weekends), but also sapped the watch of its battery life. That said, the watch still gave me enough data even if I used it without the GPS mode for exercising in the gym and a casual run or two. In this regard, the watch makes more sense for recreational runners and gym goers who might be looking at exercising as a daily to-do, but not so much interested in racing or chasing a target time.
Coming to other features that the watch has, it includes most of the features that even high-end watches now offer. The blood oxygen saturation has been something I have used to check y stats after every difficult run (ever since the pandemic started), and heart rate monitor is a staple in training even off-season. It also has menstrual tracker (with extra data available on the app) and a stress monitor which tracks your daily stress levels and body battery. A bit of this data might be dependent on your sleep, and this is also tracked by the Vivomove Sport. Though not unique to this model, but the hydration tracker is something I personally found useful since it let me reach my daily target even on days when I was not extremely active (and therefore, not thirsty or would forget to drink water).
The best part of the watch however remains how elegant it looks and how seamlessly it can go from the watch you wear at the gym to the watch you wear for an evening out with friends. Depending on your mood, you can choose the watch face from the app. It also tracks your fitness age which might be fun to look at if you are active. With about four to five days of battery life on GPS mode, this is user friendly and easy on the pocket. Buy it if you enjoy working out (at the gym or outdoors, doesn’t matter) but are not too particular about having lots of data to crunch.
