Garmin * LEAK * New Product – Vivosmart HR and **GPS**

I was perhaps a little unfair when I ‘berated’ the vivosmart HR a while back. Mostly I focussed on my personal aversion towards its looks and also a lack of GPS.

Well Garmin are about to announce a GPS version (kudos; circe, ty for the leaked info!) and also several people did write to say that they actually quite liked the looks of it.

So what do I know?

Anyway I do know that the image on the right has been removed from the offending site’s shop and I can only guess that the description is NOT a typo as the Vivosmart HR (with no GPS) is on sale there for £119. So it’s unlikely that the £169 (with GPS) is a typo as well as the description being a type.

You can also see in the Product Summary that the word GPS is used a couple of times.

Actually this device is useful in one respect. You can use it as a wrist based optical HRM to send your HR to an ANT+ device on your other wrist or to a bike computer. Of course you’d have to wear a long sleeved shirt as it is still pretty ugly and the hot weather has arrived so that will be a sweaty option. Alternatively, for the purpose of wrist based heart rate, you could buy the pretty, functional, accurate, best-selling and cheaper MIO Link.

On reflection this is now a bit like the Microsoft Band 1 from 2 years ago.

Normally I’d put a link here so you could buy the Vivosmart but I wouldn’t want to encourage that activity too much 🙂

source: circe – thank you

If you’ve just bought the non-GPS version then click on the links below to return it while you still can!