There’s also no automatic synchronisation, so if you want to let the fitness band tell your phone just what it’s been doing, you’ll have to tell the band to send its information accordingly.
Making this work is pretty easy: load the app and then hold down the button on the VivoFit until it shows “sync” on the display, starting the process and making sure the phone and the wearable shake hands and send information to the phone.
It’s not hard, but it’s not automatic, and reminds us of the physical process the first iteration of the Jawbone Up had, only that it’s wireless and doesn’t need to be plugged into your phone.
Even when it does sync, there’s limited information about some of your activities, such as sleeping which appears as a graph with times, but that’s about it. There’s no separation between light or deep sleep, and no way of breaking it up. In fact, you can even edit it manually, making for a potentially interesting way of editing your results.
And that’s when it syncs, which it doesn’t always do reliably.
Most of the time, we could get the wearable and our Android phone (Sony Xperia Z2) talking to each, but there would also be times where that wouldn’t happen, and holding down the “sync” button won’t generally start the transmission unless you’re in the app itself.
Activity steps are also calculated, but there isn’t a lot of split showing you how you were doing throughout the course of the day.
Some things can be added manually, mind you, such as sessions of running, swimming, but these seem limited to working properly unless you own other Garmin devices that are part of this ecosystem.
For instance, we wouldn’t take the VivoFit for a swim, but if we wanted to add a swimming session to the Garmin Connect app, we didn’t have any choices to make this session more complete.
And really, that’s what you want: a complete picture of your health, which the VivoFit doesn’t seem particularly well suited to offer, unless of course you’re investing quite heavily in Garmin connected gadgets.
It doesn’t help that Garmin wants you to work only in imperial measurements, rather than metric.
You can set your VivoFit band to work in kilometres on the gadget itself, tracking your movements in this way, but the application will almost always log weight in pounds (lb), distance in miles (mi), and height in feet and inches. We tried changing it, but there doesn’t seem to be an option available, so if you don’t know what you are, convert your numbers in Google.
Accuracy also seems to be other problem we had, as the VivoFit seems to operate at a difference of 1.3 compared to other fitness monitors we were testing. While we had no problem with it telling us we were easily besting our goals, our other testing devices seemed to be more reserved in how footsteps were accumulated, providing a different of a third when the tally was finally counted.
As an example, at the end of one day, Sony’s Smartband calculated 9843 steps compared to Garmin’s 12332. That’s a pretty significant difference, and one we started noticing when footsteps were accumulated while we washed our hands or put on our shoes, while other competing bands acknowledged these movements with far less step increments.
Yesterday’s Garmin footstep difference still doesn’t give me confidence. pic.twitter.com/Q9F0NOnXec
— Leigh 🙂 Stark (@Leighlo) June 4, 2014
Essentially, our tests seemed to indicate that accuracy wasn’t necessarily what the Garmin was going for, and while one can argue that reporting any steps is a positive step (no pun intended) for a band designed to monitor your activity and fitness, this increase on the total size does give us pause, as it also suggests you’re doing more than you actually are.
Conclusion
Garmin’s entry into the ever-growing fitness band arena is an interesting one, but it presents more issues than it solves. We are huge fans of the no-charge concept, because that takes away one of the things that bothers people about devices they have to wear, but the lack of a backlight, missing information, and this
Basically, if you have a Garmin watch already, it’s worth looking into the VivoFit, because you have other gadgets that will map activities for you.
Without another Garmin gadget, your reports on fitness won’t be as comprehensively looked at, and if you’re just thinking of playing with a fitness wearable, we’d start with one of those first .
