New: Garmin Vivosmart 3

Next up on the Garmin leaks is the Vivosmart 3. This leaked news has been out for over a week. I’m waiting for my dinner to cook and have 4 and a half minutes to kill. So here we go:

Is it the vivosmart or the vivomove or the vivoactive or the vivojunior. What does “vivo” mean anyway? Confused? I am.

Image Source: Clicks through to source, not hosted on this site.

I’m still not quite sure I know the difference between them all and I’m not too sure that if I compared the Vivosmart 3 to the Vivosmart 2 that there would be much difference either.

Was there even a Vivosmart 2? Bet you can’t answer that without looking it up unless you own/bought one; I couldn’t either!!. There wasn’t. Vivosmart HR+. But that then begs the question “Was there a plain old Vivosmart HR…with no ‘+’ ?”

It looks nice enough in a highly uninspired kind of way. I’m mellowing in my general condemnation of these things. I’m sure it will calculate my steps and nocturnal tosses & turns correctly to 3 significant places. It might even get my heart rate mostly correct. I’m pretty sure its battery won’t last for a week with full GPS and optical HR. It’ll still have the cleverish auto-activity detect thingy and the Intensity Minutes calculations that MIO (PAI) have finally cottoned on is the correct way to monitor activity in the future (ie the correct way is Garmin’s Way…Polar do it too).

Actually it doesn’t sound that bad, I suppose, if you want a band.

Seriously though, these devices are now maturing from the major players. This WILL be a very competent device and good at doing what it does. Also this flavour of device is most likely to be where the ‘corporate wellness’ programs will be heading ie a decent optical HR unit to (near-) PROPERLY measure your overall levels of activity rather than relying on steps – we saw this recently with PulseOn heading specifically for that market AND, probably, with a more accurate oHRM than Garmin being able to deliver HRV (at rest). This sort of overnight analysis of your HR WILL start to deliver some quite cleaver new insights even to the point where medical-grade devices might start to alert the doctor TO CALL YOU in for an appointment. clever.

But it will probably be coming in at $170/GBP£190. You can buy a great pair of running shoes and several nice bottles of wine for that price.

This page has had a lot of hits. Maybe everyone thought it was a new Vivoactive HR…that WOULD BE nice and a bit more interesting. Sorry…it was Garmin’s names that are confusing/misleading not me!