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2 annoying things on Vivoactive 4s

We bought my wife a VA4s. (I am the techy husband so I am setting stuff up and testing things out)

I have already found 2 things that annoy me: (even though we've had the watch for like 24 hours only)

1. When you pause an activity, you can save or discard it. So far OK. But if you do not react, it will be autosaved after about 5 minutes. This sucks. What if you do a bike daytrip, stop to eat? Recording will be stopped. Boom. (Maybe autopause will help this but sometimes that can be annoying too)
Also related to this, other watches have the Save for later option - not happy to see the VA4 does not have it

2. No HIKE by default. Furthermore, if you create a new sport (let's say by copying one of the existing ones) you can call it RUN(2) or Trail run BUT you cannot rename it to whatever you want. 
How crazy is this? If I copy walk it offers to call the copy Dog Walk LOL. How come they could not fit Hike as one of the default sports?

Other than that (and some battery drain I read about) this is a great watch right between the hardcore sport watch and daily wear. 


  • Wait does manual pausing (not autopause) cause GPS to be turned off, or does GPS still stay on since the activity hasn't actually been "stopped"? I would like to know since I've been pausing activities manually recently, and I don't want my GPS data to be messed up cause of me pausing it.

  • Well, pausing will keep GPS on but will definitely mess up your date, pace and time.
    Analysis will show moving time and total time. But that is fair enough and makes sense. (same applies for manual or auto pause, the difference is in auto pause when you move a bit - like you're eating or having a break autopause will often continue and pause again)

  • Please was the autosave issue resolved by a software update? I'm considering Vivoactive 4 and this would be a major issue for me.

  • I just tested the pause / autosave on my VA4 in the Other activity. I pressed the top button to pause.  Left it in the pause screen for a while. After about 5 min the watch vibrated and said "auto save" and started counting down from 30. I pressed no and now its still paused. So I can go back and resume by tapping the lower button. 

  • That seems to be an improvement and sounds fair. Previously it just said activity saved without asking. THAT was annoying. Now you have a choice.

  • Parece que funciona !!!, pero hay que hacer lo mismo cada 10 minutos , que es el tiempo que tarda en provocar el autoguardado

  • One advice: don't buy it. It's not up to modern standards. Consider a Fitbit instead.

  • Thank for the advice. If you've read the post, we already have the watch and loving it. We came from a Fitbit. 

  • It has been over three years and they still haven't addressed this issue properly!


    They added the vibration alert after 5 min of pause, but if you miss that, the activity will still terminate and auto save.
    Many other Garmin watches don't have this issue (e.g. Forerunner series), so I really don't understand what's stopping them from fixing it!!

  • I suspect Garmin considers this as a multisport feature, which they don't want the Vivoactive series to have. There are lots of features they could easily include in software in the watch without making it more expensive to produce, but they want to differentiate between series to make you buy a more expensive watch.